If I ever feel that life is bad, I’m going to return to Family Man. That’ll give me perspective. Because while life might hand me lemons, it hasn’t quite given me lemons like killing my best friend, putting me in the debt of gangsters, and forcing me to live hand-to-mouth every day. I’ve not woken up with the threat of starvation, concrete boots and my family packing their bags and leaving without saying goodbye. Touch wood.
Family Man is dark. In the first five minutes, you’ve met your wife, got married, had a kid and then murdered your best friend. Oh yeah, and you’ve lost your job, which is where the Mafia comes in. You owe them, and that’s in the form of a financial plan (gangsters have credit, it seems). You need to pay them an increasing amount every day, or you’re sleeping with the fishes.
Family Man is split into day-long sessions, from waking up to going to bed. The critical thing to resolve each day is that Mafia backhander. You’re going to need to make an amount of moolah and then stick it into a safe near your house. That will determine if you have a shot at making it to the next day and the next.
Making money is not easy. There will be points in the day where you wonder where the next cash windfall is going to come from. The most obvious is ‘quests’ for the lack of a better name for them. You have a full town to explore – and more, once the paths out of the town open up – and in that town are folk who need stuff done. They might have innocuous jobs that need doing, like parcels to deliver, burgers to flip or billboards to put up. Or they might be on the seedy side, requiring you to steal from, intimidate or even kill someone.
Completing their quests costs you time – sometimes real-time, other times a fade-out and a chunk of the day is gone – but generates you cash. In Family Man’s finest touches, those quests lead to further quests. You’ll find that the tracker wants you to find increasingly outlandish animals, or the local cop wants more elaborate snacks. You’ll also get a sense that things are branching, and a second playthrough reveals that yep, they very much are. Choose to back one person over another, and the town will change accordingly. This is a game that benefits from multiple runthroughs.
There are other ways to generate cash, as there are activities like finding collectibles and selling junk to top up the coffers. But, you soon learn that cash and time aren’t the only things you will want to keep an eye on.
HUD bars dictate the physical and mental state of you and your family. You need to keep them healthy, full and happy, which means spending time with them (costing you time, natch), and filling the fridge with food and medicine (costing you cash, natch). But that’s not all, either, as there is a karmic balance at play. Do the more lucrative but socially unacceptable tasks and the swingometer will move into darkness, and this will have a knock-on effect on your town. Muggers will attack you on the streets. An oppressive cloud hangs over the city.
On the one hand, Family Man is a sandbox we just want to dick about in. It’s a brilliant system of divergent paths and stacking quests that make you eager to step out and see what’s new. The town flexes with your choices and karmic balance, and you have to admire the ambitions of this little indie life sim.
But we can’t stop staring at that other hand. There are just so many spinning plates, so many ways to fail, that it takes the luster off. You can never really explore, find the collectibles, and see what’s happening on the fringes of the map. There’s always something tugging on your sleeve, and death – in its multivarious forms – is always moments away. This is an open world where playing around always has a cost, which robs it of some of its joy.
That’s true of multiple playthroughs, too. Family Man is keen to get you playing over and over again (an opening title screen reassures that things will go bad, but that’s okay: that’s what a second playthrough is for). But the days are simultaneously too short to do what you want to do, and also too long to play twice. Going through it all again is unattractive because you would have to spend hours getting back to where you were. We reached a point where nothing was going to save us – we were in too big a hole – but the prospect of replaying the whole game made us sad to our bones.
There is also a rather large, glitching elephant in the periphery of our vision. Family Man is so ambitious, so generous in the number of things that you can do, that its tech can’t keep up. Items consistently disappear into the floor, and they’re often mission-critical. The UI often gives up, not letting you move the cursor, which is frustrating while the time ticks down – and that’s when you can read the miniscule text. Doors won’t let us in. We found ourselves waiting until the next day with certain quests, hoping that a glitch would magically disappear, and to be fair to it, it often did. But when you’re so close to dying at all times, it’s far from helpful.
Thankfully, life isn’t anything like Family Man. At least, ours isn’t. This is an incredibly ambitious life sim where everyone wants something from you, and there’s not enough time in the day to satisfy them all. For some, Family Man will feel like a delicious challenge. For us, it made for a dark, relentless struggle that impressed with its scale, but was a few postcodes away from fun. Often, that was because bugs and glitches were waiting for us with baseball bats.
