Life is Strange(ly pretty good)
Life is Strange is an episodic puzzle adventure game from DONTNOD entertainment. Life is Strange is my first venture into the style of adventure games that TellTale have popularised over the last 7 years.
You play as Max Caulfield, a photography student attending the prestigious fictional high school Blackwell Academy in Arcadia Bay, Oregon. The game starts off with Max in class, snapping out of a daydream after witnessing a giant cyclone wreaking havoc on the area and making it way towards town from its namesake’s bay.
You play through the rest of your class and briefly explore the school to the sounds of the game’s indie-ass indie soundtrack, before witnessing someone getting shot for trying to extort money from their killer. Max is hidden throughout the altercation but after the gunshot rings out she goes to confront them. Suddenly, you are back in the class at the exact point where Max snapped out of her daydream. Weird, right???
What ensues after this is a repeat of the earlier sequence with the newfound ability to rewind time, letting you now give the right answers to questions in class and then arm yourself with just the right John Lennon quote to get your pretentious photography teacher off your case, all while trying to get to the scene of the shooting to try and stop it from happening. Once there you get a quick overview of the time rewind mechanics: your powers are constrained to the scene you are in, any items you pick up remain at your disposal even after you rewind and if you move within a scene and rewind, you remain in that position, allowing you to overcome obstacles that would block areas over the passage of time.
After saving a girl with blue hair from the second leading cause of death among American high school students, you’re faced with your first real decision of the game, and from there the game starts to open up. You are presented with a cast of characters, all of whom give you the ability to showcase the game’s primary use of the rewind mechanic: have a conversation, rewind, have the same conversation armed with some new piece of information that there is ZERO way that Max could have known before, so that you can have a better interaction, which might result in a better outcome.
The core of the gameplay is enjoyable, and though it’s small in scope it doesn’t get stale. It revolves around you either choosing different reactions to a decision and rewinding or conversing with NPCs and rewinding to allow you to get in better standings with them or peruse their dialog trees to find what you deem to be the optimal conversation. You do get to use your powers for good and help out your fellow students from being hit with footballs and so on, though all along I felt that it would eventually prove detrimental to them. It always seems to layer on different elements as you play through scenes multiple times: character interactions, objects in the environment. Therein lies the real meat of the puzzle aspect of the game: some scenes are a little more frantic, where you might have only a couple of seconds to react, react, and react again, each time trying to see what objects can be used this time that you’ve discovered since the last time. The game is a little spotty in communicating these to you, sometimes leaving you rewinding a scene 10+ times, just trying to get the timing right, only to discover that game has “shown” you a new object you can interact with. Some of the game’s scenes are unrewindable and just play out, often with a number of dialog choices, and the only way to circumvent the hard locks on the choices you make is to replay those scenes, which I did in a few cases. It felt less like the game arbitrarily forcing me to stick with my decisions and more like they wanted me to stick with them : but it wasn’t going to stop me changing them if I wanted, it just wouldn’t be as easy as rewinding time.
Throughout the story, there are shots that Max can capture with her camera. Some of these stem from story decisions, some are story decisions, and the rest are just reliant on timing and scene interaction. These can be viewed in your Journal along with an expanding amount of writing for each episode. Here is where you get a lot of Max’s perspective on the story and her thoughts on the characters you meet.
The game really tried to set itself apart aesthetically. All of the game’s textures have a painterly quality to them. The characters’ hair and clothes, the set dressing and the world around them have a paintbrush look and feel to them. The lighting is modeled to give everything a warm, soft orange hue and shadows that look both natural and fitting with the artistic style.The outskirts of the screen blur and elements seem to be torn and distorted. This effect is subtle, but is actually trying to replicate an aspect of photography called lens aberration, where cheaper lens construction and components incorrectly refract light at the outskirts of a lens's field of view, due to poor quality lens components/construction the light, starts to get refracted incorrectly, which is a VERY nice touch for a game whose story is based on photography. The game is set to the backdrop of American teenage life at some fancy “Academy” and has a story-tempoed indie soundtrack that feels well at home throughout if a bit pretentious -- but this is a story about an art student and I’ve been there. I get it.
The game’s cast of characters include a diverse bunch of teenagers, some adults that are ok to talk to, and some dudes in their 40’s who seem pretty angry most of the time. During Max’s interactions with them, the characters come across as well written, with some depth to their motivations and emotions The interactions Max has with the adults seems to build on the game’s sense of conspiracy and apathy; how it’s bad place with bad people and there is nothing we can really do about it, while the interactions Max has with her classmates serve to give more life to the school and world around her. The back and forth feels real but can sometimes get bogged down in patchy delivery and some painful slang choices.
The real diamond in the rough is Chloe Price, who is brought to live by Hey Ash Whatcha Playing’s Ashly Burch. Chloe is our blue-haired best friend from before Max moved away and is at Max’s side throughout the game, serving as the game’s major character and our protagonist’s possible Gal Pal™. The scenes where Chloe is involved felt more enjoyable as she brought more life to them than any of the other characters. Their interactions feel really dynamic. Their dialog is much richer and feels like these two have been friends for years, like they really care about one another.
The story feels well-paced with each episode reliably making reference to small interactions and decisions from previous episodes and massive parts of the story being different depending on choices you’ve made, all the while building up and crescendoing into their credits and the 5th episode giving the player an ending of their choice.
I really enjoyed Life is Strange. It was a polite reminder that I’m not a teenager anymore, but the characters and the story got their hooks in me from the start. I was a little disappointed with the endings, as they weren’t how I’d have had played it out in my head, but they wrapped the story up well.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use my time rewind powers and go play it again.
