With nine days left in The Good Life's second crowdfunding campaign, developer White Owls Inc, helmed by Deadly Premonition creator Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro, released a free demo earlier today, which you can download here. Just extract it to a folder and run the topmost application. You'll need a gamepad to play it—ideally an Xbox controller, because let me tell you it does not play nice with PS4 controllers.
The demo drops you in Rainy Woods, a surprisingly sunny city, as Naomi, a photographer with a massive debt to repay. I didn't run into any bugs in my time with the demo, but it is an incredibly early build with no menus or instructions to speak of. Here's a quick rundown: aim your camera with the X button, zoom with the d-pad, snap photos with the right bumper, and interact with items and people with A.
I can't say for sure whether the game's much-vaunted animal transformations are in the demo. At the very least, I couldn't find a way to activate them. The best I could do was photograph a red utility truck after blockading it with a garden gnome. Nevertheless, as previously reported, everyone in Rainy Woods turns into cats and dogs once a month. Once Naomi discovers this, she can "turn into a cat and climb up to high places, scratch walls, and steal fish and chips from kitchens" or become a dog and "dig holes, follow scents, and swim in rivers and lakes." It's one of The Good Life's many quirks, not the least of which is that it turns into a murder mystery as Naomi becomes more involved with Rainy Woods.
The trouble is, at the time of writing The Good Life's Kickstarter has only raised $330,300 of its $623,759 goal, and again, has just nine days left. So unless we see one heck of a second act twist, it likely won't reach its funding target. However, as Swery told Eurogamer, White Owls says that "even then, [we] have no intention to stop the project."
