SANTA MONICA, California—It took a few years, but We Happy Few is finally shaping up to play as well as it originally looked.

The 3D adventure game has thus far taken a strange publicity route, as its splashy 2016 reveal was followed by a bizarre early-access game launch. Gamers were sold on something that looked like a trippy, story-filled fusion of Bioshock and Brave New World, but the paid, playable version was instead a procedurally generated sneak-and-fight sandbox.

“The problem was, you don’t want to play half-baked story after half-baked story in the early-access process,” Compulsion Games creative director Guillaume Provost explained at a pre-E3 preview event. Rather than string early-access players along with unfinished plot morsels, the studio chose to give eager players a look at the game’s mechanics first.