Did you like Life is Strange?

Playing along as the episodes got released it was kinda up and down for me:

Cautiously Interested after ep1, hooked after ep2, unsure after ep3, hooked again after ep4 and well...after having finished it I replayed the whole damned thing twice, got all the achievements and I still go back to some scenes from time to time.

Sure, that game has so many obvious flaws, but at this point I really don't mind any of that. No bad lip syncing, questionable teen lingo and out of place puzzles can destroy the big fucking heart and soul this games has.

There are big chunks of LiS that I love. At it's best it's extraordinary and unique. Man, that last episode though. I still love it overall, but man.

Man, if the slang in the script were just passable, the only flaws in the game would be sorta minor stuff, like the lip syncing isn't great and the faces aren't super expressive. I feel like running the script by like, a handful of 20-somethings who grew up anywhere in the West Coast would've fixed the really glaring misuses of slang. Or frankly some of the voice actors that I know to be young and vaguely aware of youth slang (Ashly Burch) seem like they could've fixed some of that stuff in the recording booth, so they must've had a pretty short leash with the voice director.

Anyway, yeah, it's a great game, and you're right, it's earnest in a way that suits its teenage characters and you don't get to see that out of video games very often.

It is quite literally one of my favorite games this year. Absolutely fantastic. (If you can ignore its flaws)

And, for my money, they completely stick the landing. Which, can be a tough thing to pull off for adventure games in a lot of cases.

I must be like one of the only people that loves the dialog. It can be silly sometimes, but I think the game sells it and is better for it. It just wouldn't be the same if it was more "realistic." It doesn't have to be realistic; I think that's a choice, not some concept to strive for. What matters to me is whether it fits the fiction they crafted, and I certainly think it does.

Also, I see this all the time. Why do people have to preface their compliments with "but it's still flawed" or some equivalent? Yeah, everything's flawed. Nothing is perfect and we shouldn't strive for perfection. We should strive for excellence. If we're specifically talking about the flaws or how the game could be better or whatever other more appropriate context, sure. But there's just some aspect of society where we always have to tip toe around like "oh no, don't get too excited because it's not perfect" and that just really, really bums me out.

@razzuel: It's just a way of discussing what we did or didn't like, from what I see here everyone is explaining themselves pretty well, not just using the term "flawed" to knock the game. I love the game and constantly recommend it to people, but that doesn't mean I can't point out certain things I think could've been different because it makes me some sort of apologist.

edit: I do see what you mean though, when people use it without explaining why they think so, it comes off as pretty lazy.

Top 5 game of the year. Enjoyed it immensely. And I'm crazy disappointed GBeast stopped playing it.

@sterling: They put up a new part today!

What a shitty ending... It's almost soured me on the entire game. Was loving it until it just said "Hey, remember all your choices? We don't!"

@terminallychill: Nice!

@terminallychill:I meant it just feels like everyone has to apologize for liking a thing. And I didn't mean just in this thread. I meant like in all places across the internet that Life Is Strange is being discussed.

"This meal was really tasty, only if you ignore that it needed more sauce."

"I love my new car, but it's still not a Tesla."

These aren't critical analyses. They're not offering anything constructive. I'm not saying don't talk about the flaws. Talk about the flaws. Just don't use the flaws as a means to downplay an experience you already enjoyed. If it's great, do we always have to lament that it could be better? I feel like as a society we do this all the time for everything.

It sounds like this, "Dude, you should play Life Is Strange. It's so damn good. Oh, but wait. I need to warn you. The lip synching has some issues, the faces don't emote nearly enough, and the dialog can be really weird sometimes."

@viciousbearmauling: Try approaching it from a different perspective. They didn't throw away your choices. Your choices are still your choices and define your experience as Max. There is one last choice at the end, but it's just that — another choice. It just also happens to be the end of the game. It is not an algorithmic culmination of every single choice you made in the game. Either that would be a lame slideshow covering each choice, or the story would have to actually be multiple, distinct stories in one, but that's just not feasible — writing a single story is hard enough.

Short answer: No

Long Answer: The game actually has a fun premise that it does nothing interesting with the character are so archetypical as to almost come out of a Stephen King novel the playable character is just beyond unlikable and it plays like a somehow worse Telltale game. No I'm not a fan.

But if anyone else likes it I'm happy for you I can just tell a game about a high school girl no matter how well written will not be for me so whatever.

Did you save the people in town when you were on your way to fetch the photo from Warren in the diner?

I'm really not sure why people are so hung up on the ending. First off on an actual realistic standpoint they didn't have the time or money to let the story splinter out into more options. Secondly, your choices do matter. The fact that they don't have an overall bearing on your final destination doesn't matter. Its not where you're going its how you get there. And that's always been more important to me.

Guys, careful on the ending discussion. There are multiple threads for discussing the ending/last episode. There are already some un-spoilered bits here that are way too suggestive as to what might be involved in later episodes. Like the game or not, we should respect the rights of others to play a game minus foreknowledge of what is going to happen and allow them to draw their own conclusions.

As for the thread, right now Life is Strange would be my Game of the Year. For $20, it's one of the easiest recommendations I've been able to make to people all year. At minimum, there are things the game does that video games just don't tend to do that make it a great play.

This.

The choices matter because they inform your decision. All the relationships you can build and all the people you can help or not, sometimes something as simple as listening to them and comforting them when they need it, doing everything you can and succeeding or failing in saving Kate and plenty of other things like that throughout the game makes a huge difference in how you approach that final decision.

It's unrealistic to expect every or even just the major choices to all create alternate endings. And even if it was possible it would only dilute the story and i'd be worst for it. Choices in games like these are all about the thought process of making that last choice. If i went through the entire game without ever talking to anyone, never helping anyone that i didn't need to to progress the story, didn't take the time to go through more dialogue options with the main cast and so on, letting the town get destroyed would have been an easy choice because who fucking cares. That's not what happened when i faced that choice though.

Haven't seen it through, but I love everything I've seen

I just completed ep 5 yesterday and I absolutely loved it. That being said, fuck that game for how devastated it's left me.

@hadoken101: I think Life is Strange can be succinctly summed up by at least a significant percentage of players as:

Fuck this game. Also: fuck, this game!

Loved it, without a doubt it is GOTY material for me. Even without having everything out, I would say it remain in my "Top 3" for Games of the Year. I'm actually rather shocked at the love this games gets. It is seeing accolades from all over the industry, which just shows it not some crazy niche that liked this game.

Ye, along with respectable sales (especially considering it didn't exactly get a $50m PR push behind it and episodic is somewhat risky as a distribution schedule for large scale 3D titles), I think LiS is going to lead to a lot more devs and publishers financing them who realise you don't have to make games about dudes and you don't have to make games that involve the protagonist using violence.

I'm feeling nostalgic for a place that doesn't exist, and a life I've never lived.

And I feel it's gonna stay with me for a long time.

And that's probably good. Life changing art is rare, at least to me.

And the lessons you take from it, and bring it into yourself, are worth the pain of letting go.

Love those around you. And enjoy the moments. Because you can never go back.

Overall I really enjoyed the game, though I'm not happy with what Dontnod did in the final episode. The whole middle sequence seemed like they had a few interesting ideas but didn't quite know how to include them into the story. On the other hand, I didn't mind the ending that much. I chose the longer one and I wasn't dissapointed. Sure, for some people it didn't feel very ,,gamey'' to just let an important character die, but Chloe's sacrifice changed the way I see the story. If I were to replay the game, I'd think of it as Max saying goodbye to an old friend during a week that never happened. I much prefer this ending over the second one that doesn't really explain much.

To sum up, for me Life is Strange was certainly an interesting experience, and one of the best games of 2015 for me along with Undertale. It made me care about virtual people!

Dontnod's next game. Intense

Just want to give a good shout out to Square Enix for giving this developer a chance. Their previous title was "Remember Me" which neither sold well nor reviewed too well. It was, well, unmemorable.

As for Life is Strange...well, the voice acting, characters, and dialogue wasn't always too great and....actually my complaints pretty much end there. I've become somewhat bored of Telltale's recent outings despite loving the first season of The Walking Dead, but Life is Strange revitalized my interest in this style of game. The story was very tight. The choices mattered. It had a good consistency of heavy hitting drama beats in the right places. The ending was absolutely fantastic and satisfying.

I don't know if it'll make my top ten list at the end of the year (which is just a testament to how great this year has been,) but this was a story I was glad to have been apart of throughout 2015. I was a bit iffy early on, but was gladly brought around. Good work, Dontnod. Good damn work.

My favorite game of the year by far.

The devs claim every other publisher they went to wanted the protagonist to be a man. If true, that's something I can respect Square for as well.

I loved Life is Strange. The story wasn't exactly amazing (though I didn't have as much issue with the ending as others have had), and the gameplay isn't revolutionary but the characters, the music, the overall atmosphere of the game were just fantastic. By far the most memorable game I've played all year, if not necessarily the best.

There's one particular major decision early on that seems so badly written if you follow the path that I did in regards to Kate (I'll save the spoilers) that sort of ruined the following three episodes for me and felt like the ultimate cop-out for what felt like doing the right thing.

This badly written decision materialized itself in episode 5 during the lead-up to the lighthouse, almost as a slap to the face of the player character. "Hey, remember this super intense, pivotal, emotional monent in this game? Congratulations, it doesn't fucking matter!" Which pretty much led to me writing the game off as a GOTY contender.

It's alright for what it is, and had a lot of high notes, but the lows were so low in my eyes that it killed it for me personally.

Characters made heel turns at times when choosing a certain option and the writing had some rough spots but it's my game of the year. Really had a great time with it.

I loved it and eagerly awaited each new episode once it got going after episode 2. The lip sync is pretty awful but that’s the only major complaint I have about the game. I hope Dontnod gets to make another season if they want to.

BIG NEWS:

One of the "Script Doctors" (lol) of LIS may have accidentally announced a second season for it:

http://alchimy.info/alain-damasio-et-la-puissance-immersive-du-jeu-video-partie-1/

^ According to Google translate, the last line says:

We had to do it but it hangs with 2 CapCom , the publisher of the game. I worked as a Script Doctor Strange on Life is developed by Studio DONTNOD and I will participate in later Life is Strange 2 .

It's not very rational to expect all of your little decisions throughout the game to ultimately culminate and matter at the very end.

What mattered were those individual moments in which you made them. Besides, the last choice you make is huge.

I played the first episode back in February, and just finished the fifth one on Thursday. Afterwards, I spent a decent amount time reading the final spoiler thread and kept thinking about it intensely for the next couple of days. I choose the left ending; the endings made me feel like they forced a false dichotomy. I planned on going back and playing some Halo 5 MP or more AC Syndicate on Thursday, but after finishing I didn't feel like jumping right back into another game. The last game that really did that to me was The Last of Us, (I'm not saying this is as good as The Last of Us), but it left me with a similar feeling of needing to take a break from games for a while. The Last of Us, had me take a two-week break, because of the story and worldbuilding, and by the depressing fact that I knew most games weren't going to be as good.

I thought is was pretty well executed, it had some stumbles but nothing completely off-putting. The music and dialogue never really bothered me too much, I'm white 29-year-old from the Midwest, everything for the most part seemed to fit in place.

I just think it was great that Dontnod could make a game like this with assets and resources that if they aren't AAA are at least pretty darn close to it. A game about two teenage girls in rural Oregon seems crazy in a video game land space where publisher's are so damn risk aversive and every darn game seemingly needs the outline of a 20 - 40-year-old male holding a gun to sell.

I didn't see it posted on the Life is Strange board, but I guess season two is a go.

http://www.pcgamer.com/life-is-strange-2-confirmed-by-dontnod/

@wallee321: Sadly that was unintentional. The original french article that said there will be a Season 2 has been edited with a warning that there's no certainty for a second game. I guess he misspoke and it spread as news.

Finished the season last night and man, what a game. Not from a gameplay or technical perspective (the gameplay isn't that bad since most of the annoying stuff can be done easily with the time rewinding, but the graphics swing from average to poor quite often and, and this is me having a moan, the achievements are broken on Xbox One as most of the picture related ones are still locked for me despite getting them), but on a narrative and world building level. Personally, the game managed to create a very relatable and grounded environment despite the sci-fi elements that really helped me get invested in story of the game. On top of that Episode 4 might have some of the most harrowing moments I've ever played through, so it's not too surprising that I ended up crying though parts of it. Also, I thought that the journal was well done in giving more context to the story and really helped with my enjoyment of the game.

Still, since this game relies so heavily on the story and characters affecting the player, I completely understand people who left feeling unsatisfied or disappointed with the game for those reasons.

But for me, Life is Strange is going to be stuck in my mind for a while and I'm certainly going to go back and play though the game again to see those small details I missed the first time and the other ending and this is absolutely going in the top slots of my GOTY list.

No kidding. What a game.

Life is Strange GBeast Playdate this Friday! Excited!

Well now that we're in the eye of Steam sale I imagine some more people are playing this. That's what made me finally pick this up.

I just finished it and I really love it. I was impressed by how much detail has been put into the environments to tell you more about the characters. The characters are memorable and distinctive. The voice acting I thought was really great throughout too. I enjoyed the story in this the most out of any game I've played this year. (Actually I need to finish Contradiction so that could change). The pacing of the story and the cliff hangers were also pretty great. They do a good job of weaving in the decisions you make throughout the game into what you see, even if it isn't having a big effect on the world.

It also has the best video-game dancing since that club in GTA: Vice City.

Anyone else picked this up during this holiday?

Boy where we all you "journey matters not the destination" people during all that Mass Effect 3 nonsense.

Very interesting game, that last episode was a bit odd but still a powerful experience.

Yes, with the exception of Episode 1. That episode 1 was wasn't great.

@l4wd0g: episode 1 made me think it would just be a high school sim with some rewind. Where it went was certainly different, and better. One of my top games ever. I just wanted to live in that would forever.

I really liked it up until the last five minutes. The endings were terrible and I can't believe the game was originally intended to wrap up either way.

Its my Game Of The Year.

Bought episodes 2-5 during sale and went through the game from start to finish in 3-4 days. I'm glad I did not buy the individual episodes when they came out because that would have soured the experience. I don't recall many games that have really had emotional impact and I kinda started to like the characters in a way you like some of the cast in your favorite tv-show, to a point where I was feeling little guilty for using the rewind mechanism to manipulate them. I agree that second half of ep5 didn't feel very natural and it was kinda like the writers were trying too hard.

It's definitely in top3 game of the year for me, but certainly not a light-hearted or easy game to play if you get invested in the story and characters.

I liked it, the writing is all over the place, and you can see it strain under budget constraints in a lot of areas.

With that said, I still liked it and think its a very sincere and memorable experience.

I think the twist is absolute junk though, and the ending (at least one) feels a bit rushed. The journey is really nice though, my favorite moments were some of the ones that let you just sit there and don't end until you do it yourself. Like laying on the bed with Chloe, I was there for a while.

I quite liked it.

Though, END GAME SPOILERS SPOILER SPOILER

You were putting clues together, getting to the bottom of stuff, figuring everything out, and then you solve the murder, what, 3 times? It kept bouncing back and forth and in and out and around everywhere and I, I dunno. I didn't like that aspect. I mean the entire game up to Episode 5 was trying to figure out whodunnit. But then you do and the game is all "Okay, on to other stuff!"

The final episode started out really violent. Really, really tense. It was actually quite frightening. I was afraid to let it go forward during the chair scenes because I was afraid of what would happen. I thought it was awesome how that turned out though. But then it just.. stopped doing that.

Then you go into this weird torment dimension and you'd think "Things are going to get figured out!" but... they don't. They just never bring them up again.

As for the final decision, well, I made mine and I stand by it. But it just seems strange that out of everything having to do with Max's powers and how she eventually jumps in and out of time, rewinding for the optimal experience, etc, etc, you never could have warned anyone about the tornado. The argument could be made "No one would even believe her!" But, the alternative is even worse. I also don't understand why you get to go through the tornado, helping people there, only to go back in time and have the option to condemn them.

I have to also say I'm disappointed you never even find out what Max's powers are. I figured she got them to save everyone from the tornado, and I guess that's also true. But after the ending, are they just gone? Will this keep happening? It alludes to there being spirits and powers that be, a good and evil in Arcadia Bay. But it never expands on it the way I was hoping it would. I guess, ultimately, it doesn't matter.

I don't know. I still contend that the entire game is great, but I didn't like the swerve, reswerve, and subsequent one-mo-gen swerve. Also I think that the storylines and alternate realities and whatnot made the game way more complex to just boil it down to "Decision 1, Decision 2. Credits". Maybe I'm just overthinking it and should just accept the ending for what it was, but I have more questions than I have answers. And that's not what I imagined the ending would be like.

I love this game to death. Every episode left me devastated in one way or another. After starting it, all I could think about was playing more of it. At every turn, I knew in my mind that there was no way the game would top its last moment, whether it be due to design or because I'd become sensitized to it, but boy was I wrong. Almost everything about this game has been a positive experience with me and I think Jeff was very hyperbolic about the last two episodes. Only the 5th was kind of off-the-rails and even then, I kinda saw the game going there. To be honest, I did not find it bad. You can look at my spoilers if you want to see a closer look at my feelings towards the ending.

This game made me absolutely want to shut down my second monitor and just focus. It's difficult for a game to do that to me but... I just love this game so much. Also, the curated soundtrack is just amazing and really resonated with me; very powerful.

Not sure how I feel about a 2nd season. This was a full story all wrapped up and self-contained. I hope they go with a completely different universe and story for the second season.

Yes, the game made me tear up... heavily...

Also... holy crap, Ashly Burch voiced Chloe? Whaaaa

@n7: I absolutely loved the jumping back and forth between timelines. The game progresses its mechanics rather than only doing the same thing over again. It shows not just how far Max's control of her powers have progressed, but how that control/power made her overzealous to find the most optimal solution to everything around her.

Man, did I love the progression of the game's story and mechanics. It did so much in the story and things just kept getting worse and worse. Everything kept turning out to be much bigger than initially expected, even the game acknowledges this in the apocalyptic thread with Max's powers.

I find the ending very effective. Episode 5 in general was... something, in my opinion. It wasn't my favorite part of Life is Strange but the ending ending was not disappointing to me at all. It was actually very powerful for me. Not really sure what more could have been expected.

@hypnotoadbrwowrowrow: On the subject of Ashly Burch, I listened to the Hey Ash podcast enough that listening to Chloe, enough of the inflection seemed familiar that I recognized her voice somewhere near the end of the first episode. What I didn't catch until I saw a full breakdown of the cast is that she puts on a slightly different voice for some of the more minor female roles (I think she is Stella, and a few other minor teen characters).

@bisonhero: She did an amazing job. I would say my biggest gripe with the game was the voice acting some of the female characters (Dayeanne Hutton as Kate Marsh / Alyssa Anderson / Juliet Watson). It was so blatant that it was one voice actress trying her darned best to change it up for different characters. But good lord, Alyssa's voice was just about one of the most horrid voice acting I've heard in a long while.

@hypnotoadbrwowrowrow: I agree that some of the voice actors got stretched a little thin. In Hutton's case, it seems like Kate Marsh is probably her more practiced "teen girl voice", and then for Juliet they're like "do a high energy no-nonsense girl" and she was like "uhhhhhhh" and then for Alyssa they're like "I dunno, do a fat goth girl" and she was like "uhhhhhhh". Those characters definitely felt a bit more like somebody "putting on a voice" than like an actual character, which is never something a good vocal performance should feel like.

Not to throw shade on some DONTNOD employee I've never met, but I wonder if the VO director maybe wasn't actually that great or had a pretty low bar for which recordings they just went with instead of doing another take. And maybe Burch's performance came out so well because she just put a lot more into her performance in spite of middling vocal direction. Granted, some of the script is just awkward and unnatural teen dialogue, though who knows whether some of the adult voice actors would even be put off by that, but I also wonder if the VO director maybe just wasn't amazing, because boy, one of the biggest weaknesses of the game is some wooden line reads, and there's no way that all of the voice actors were inexperienced amateurs.

Also, once you start listening for Daniel Bonjour (who did the voice of Frank Bowers), he voices like every unnamed male NPC in that game. They all sound like they're just Frank Bowers wearing somebody else's face.