Life Is Strange

[FatherJack]

Life Is Strange - PC, PS3, PS4, 360, XBone

What is it?
Life Is Strange is a graphic adventure game with an interesting twist. There is a demo on the consoles (though not Steam for some reason) in which you play the first few scenes of the game: You are shy 12th grade* photography student Maxine Caulfield who during a trip to the girl's toilets discovers she has the power to rewind time. At this point I decided to buy the game. I love going in girl's toilets!
*(year 13/upper sixth)

Instead of just having to press buttons or choose responses, the mechanic of being able to rewind makes the game a whole lot more engaging. You start out learning about your powers and their extent, all the while making little decisions that you just know are going to bite you in the arse at some point. There's some very nice Groundhog Day-style iterative learning involved.

How does it work?
You can rewind time a few minutes, basically allowing you to do-over any things that happen or that you say until you get the desired result. You retain all memories of all outcomes and remain physically where you were before you rewound. So can can answer those tough questions in class, say the right things to people and if a tree falls on you while out for a stroll, you rewind, take a couple of steps forward and the tree now falls behind you. Apart from being every teenager's wish, making yourself appear in the best light, it also very much appeals to a casual player of graphic adventures in that they get to see all the outcomes without playing through the game multiple ways. Additionally it's a neat puzzle-solving device.

Later you discover new ways to use your power and end up making bigger changes and choices, but like the Butterfly Effect which clearly influenced it you begin to feel as if your meddling just ends up breaking everything in the end. The mechanics work really well most of the time, except for the final episode where they mix it up a bit, with...mixed results. It veers widly from Stanley Parable to Dishonored to Metal Gear Sneaky and even parodies itself but overall it's the best episode just because of how far it takes you out of the comfort zone.

What about the story?
Well it's kind of teen-fiction style, but not so much in a bad way. The characters use somewhat jarring slang and goodies turn out to baddies and vice-versa, but it seems to be aware of this and is deliberately written in a style that would appeal to its protagonists. I guess it doesn't hurt that this also makes it appeal to people like the protagonists, such as teenagers.

It's entertaining enough though. It builds pretty well with nice cliffhanger endings to each episode up until the fifth, final episode. Then it gets a bit too clever for itself, becomes confusing and sort of loses track of all your choices before tying up the whole thing with a ribbon and saying choose ending A or B. It has some genuinely creepy moments, particularly in the final episode and some actual laughs but a lot of what seems to hold a lot of meaning at the time gets forgotten later on.

What's broken?
There are what seem arbitrary limits on your power which manifest as transparent plot devices. The big scenes at the end of Episode 2 cannot be rewound, yet during them you demonstrate a new way of using your power that you are not able to do at any other point in the game (and which would be really fucking handy at some points)

The pick-an-ending feels a bit tacked-on, especially given promises during the game's development that choices the real-world players made in earlier episodes were directly influencing the story of the as-yet-unwritten later episodes. The fifth episode was the one we waited the longest for, yet it still felt rushed in parts.

So?
To say that your choices have no consequences at all would not be true, it's just that not everything turns out to matter, but then I guess that is a truism for life. I enjoyed the game, even spread out, as I waited for the new episodes for more than half a year and would like to play something similar again. Play the demo if you can, but if you like the Telltale games like Walking Dead yet yearn for a little more interaction and a little less QTEs then your search is over.

[Grimmie]

I've just played through Episode 4, hopefully gonna finish Ep 5 this weekend!

I really enjoy it, it's the kinda game I reach for when I just want to relax for a while, it's slow and you can take your time playing. Kinda cathartic to view the world through Max's inquisitive eyes.

[Grimmie]

Just finished! God, bit of an emotional ending.
I enjoyed it. Hope the studio do something similar again.

[Joose]

I finished this not too long back. I started ages ago, got a bit bored quickly and was distracted by other things. Glad I went back to give it another chance, its really rather excellent.

Just finished! God, bit of an emotional ending.

This is true! I do like the fact that it manages to hit more of the range of human emotion overall through the game though. Too many games seem to think that there are only 3 emotions: Excited, Scared or Sad. There were bits of that game that made me feel a strange, nice, calm feeling. Google leads me to believe that real humans call this "happiness". It was intriguing.

Spoiler:

The bit i'm mostly referring to here is the moment when you wake up after having a sleepover with your bud, put some music on and chill. There's no game reason to stay in bed and listen to the music, but I did for ages because it was just a nice moment.

[Grimmie]

Yeah, I like chillin' all Maxin' relaxin' all Chloe.

Thenplayingsomeb-balloutsideoftheschool.