Hey, so Square Enix announced that a physical edition of Life is Strange will release January 22.

Might have been a cool gift for the holidays, but for a fan like me, still awesome.

It will include cool things like the soundtrack (hella awesome), art book and developer commentary (!).

I don't usually get hyped for things like this, but I feel like for this game I can't resist.

I just saw this, and I'm actually so lazy that I would not look for the songs in the game otherwise. So, that soundtrack might just be what gets me, I'll give the game code to my niece or nephew.

@dudeglove: Yup! Kinda excited, always nice to hear what developers can say about their game, although it might not jive with my own thoughts... Still a cool extra.

Those console editions are hella expensive (Note that current UK SRP is £45-55 for a retail console release so £30 is not full price but not cheap) but I'm up for paying for an artbook, soundtrack and dev commentary. Guess I'll own it twice on PC. The soundtrack would probably go for about £12 if they released it as a CD so the PC price isn't unreasonable for a ltd edition run.

Ah, here is the US/non-PAL announcement: $40 on consoles and no PC version. I guess Europe being a really healthy market for the PC has helped (the Steam copy is £16 so a £20 ltd ed is actually really cheap for the extras included). Not sure how expensive an import would be but I'm guessing not great value.

Here's hoping they patch the commentary into the PC version.

Man, the soundtrack doesn't even have the best song in the game on it.

£30's the budget price tag for this generation, to be fair. I'd rather just grab the whole thing now for half the price. The soundtrack is wank. Living in a world where Brothers, Ether One and many other downloadables are on physical shelves freaks me out.

Which song is that? Because I see both Obstacles and Crosses and we all know those were the best songs in the game. We all know.

I would have really liked it if this came out this year since I want to play it for GOTY reasons simply for the convenience of a physical version, but I'll probably end up just downloading it now.

No Spirits Within dvd included?

@glottery: I don't care what anyone says, it's the best sci-fi movie ever made!

I would be super tempted to get this but Vinny and the guys played so much of it already that it would cheapen the experience for me as I'd be rushing through early game content that I already saw them play in order to get to the new stuff. This in a way is an argument that Let's Plays do affect game sales.

I like to call it Victoria's Theme

@humanity: I will tell you one thing, playing it through yourself is a different experience. If you take it slowly, experience the atmosphere, get yourself into it, this game can be truly magical.

That early stuff is kinda cheezy, but I'm playing through the second time in small chunks, and it's getting me good.

Agreed. There are some LPs that play the game exhaustively, which is a style to consider when playing at home, but the GBEast game is very much not doing that. What makes this game different to a ttg title or any other RPG is the imported mechanics from Remember Me (also worth playing, even if the combat is possibly not worth playing on anything but Easy to jump though it - the combo system is more interesting than many gave it credit for, it's just the enemies and combat doesn't force you to really play with it that much) where every scene is something to be explored and each potential path walked down. What chains of things can happen is something to be mulled over, the point is that even knowing every way each scene can be resolved doesn't provide Max with the ability to know everything and become a God.

If you're only watching the GBEast streams then you're missing a load of notes and optional conversations and paths down which many of those conversations they do explore can go. There's a lot more there than you've currently seen.

Square Enix has announced that the PC version of the Life is Strange Limited Edition is actually coming to North America exclusively on the Square Enix store. Source/store link: https://store.na.square-enix.com/product/294053/life-is-strange-limited-edition-pc

I hella preordered the PC limited edition. Hopefully it comes with a Steam key, but if it doesn't, that's okay. I already have this digitally on PS4, but I definitely need a limited edition of one of my favorite games.

Still strikes me as weird how big this thing got, seemed to come out of nowhere and i just thought itd fade in semi obscurity like remember me. Guess you can never really predict how these things will catch.

I can't get enough of this game. Of course that will eventually subside, but until then - I'll keep looking at the subreddit, for cool fanart, and wait for my Limited Edition.

I really hope the soundtrack comes to steam... having to buy a console version to get it sucks.... I would actually buy the boxed edition if it were on PC here though... Blah, that sucks.

They should have made a physical version of Max's journal, even though it's like 100 pages by the end.

Life Is Strange made me realize that there is a lot of mellow 2000s indie rock that I'm pretty OK with, and also have NEVER heard of. Bright Eyes was literally the only artist on the soundtrack that I had heard of before. I guess when I knew people who were into indie rock, it was all Dashboard Confessional and Death Cab For Cutie, which aren't really what this game is going for. It's been weird watching the Choose Our Own Adventure/Playdate and having Alex (and often Austin, and later several people in the comments) immediately recognize the band or singer.

On the other hand, I don't know if I can get into buying/pirating the soundtrack, because pulling up a couple of those songs, I can't even appreciate them separately as songs because due to the way I was introduced to the songs, they're intrinsically tied to story moments. So uhhh, big props to the person who curated the music for the game (either Syd Matters, or just the frontman of Syd Matters, I'm unclear), because some of those songs have stopped being songs and instead are those moments from the game to me. Having them randomly show up on shuffle in my music library would mess with me.

Spoilered in case people who haven't played the game don't want...music spoilers?

I'm bummed that GB East may or may not finish this game before the end of the year. As much as episode 2 and 3 are strong episodes, boy, episode 4 has two really powerful moments followed by a solid cliffhanger, and then episode 5 closes things up in a pretty satisfying way while also being the most experimental episode. Still, glad that GB East is giving it a playthrough, because it has been delightful watching them go through it.

The dream is that when Vinny, Alex, and Austin come back from SF that they have one marathon session where they do all of Episode 4, and then another marathon session where they do all of Episode 5. Episode 4 is tricky, because the chat convinced them that it's a longer episode and that it might take a couple Playdates, but it's really not that much longer, and I don't think there are a lot of obvious "put it down, take a break" moments in the episode except after a certain emotional moment maybe like 30% into the episode, but that would only be like 45 minutes into the stream. I guess you could cut it at the start of the section where they're about to uncover the "dark room", but I feel like the episode is really getting some momentum once you're finally there. Then Episode 5 is actually pretty straightforward because it doesn't have areas with 8000 things to investigate like the dorms or Chloe's house. Here's hoping GB East makes it happen!

Just thought i would share, they changed there minds and you can now get the PC version on squares store in NA. I canceled my PS4 preorder and got the PC one instead. Wish it was on amazon too though, not sure why the PC version is only on there store right now for pre-order.

@ripelivejam: I was reading your post just as the YouTube video @donchipotle ended and it showed related videos. One of them was "Life is strange ep 4 by Pewdiepie".

I think you have your answer.

@hassun: And he really seemed to love the game. It's good it got praise from someone with such a large audience.

From the latest Square Enix blog, they've announced that the PC version of the limited edition will include a disk, but also will require to be registered with Steam via a code (they've said that even if you use the disk to install the game, you might still have to download updates). Also mentioned is that the soundtrack will be a physical CD and the developer commentary is not interactive. Instead, it will be a video of key points the developers wanted to talk about with the commentary track over it.

Source: http://eu.square-enix.com/en/blog/update-life-strange-limited-edition

Woo hoo, Steam key confirmed!

Shit, that would be fucking rad. I'd pay money for that.

@drx25: Yeah, video game developer's commentary is still a weird thing for people to figure out. Video games are such a variable length format that you can't easily add it as an extra audio track like you can in TV or film.

Some Valve games have commentary, but it's actually a pretty extensive production. They have specific things to say about certain areas in each level, and they record everything in bits that range from like 30 seconds to 2 minutes, storing them in little "commentary" in-world icons. In some cases, they've removed all enemies from the level, and it's more about you walking around the game levels and them occasionally loading in effects or models to illustrate the point they're talking about.

I remember one of the Rogue Squadron games on Gamecube also did in-level commentary, where you could just pause the game and turn it on under the audio settings, and it literally just played on top of the game music and game sound effects. I found it impossible to pay attention to the commentary, so I had to start playing it, then just pause the game for like 5 minutes while the devs just chatted about everything they could remember about that particular level. Structurally, it was much more like a movie or TV show commentary, where they just sat some people in the room and had them just remember what they could about the level as they watched it.

I think I'll wait for this actually, rather than grabbing it on sale for PC.

Really happy to see the game's been received well. Remember Me is a goddamn treasure, and I'm excited to see DONTNOD continuing to make games.

So my copy of this arrived (yay for competitive EU pricing, about $18 excluding sales tax when converted to USian) and it's a really nicely done box. They bothered to glue in a cardboard insert so the box holds the differently sized bits all tightly (it's the little details).

The soundtrack CD is good (not everything in the game but totally fills the single CD) and has some perfect cover art.

The art book shows some cool stuff from development (eg stuff from cut scenes, full plans for the Price house so those rooms you could never go into: now you can see what they contained).

The disc game is the ~8GB Steam download and a cd key.

I'm not sure it's good value for anyone who looked at the console prices but considering the PC edition over here is the same price as the digital copy, that's great value. Stuff like the dev commentary being given out to everyone who purchased the game does slightly lessen the value of the boxed edition but I'm not unhappy that they decided to share it with everyone (just as the Gone Home devs did) once they'd collected enough preorders to get this physical copy printed and justify doing that extra work.

@shivoa: I ordered it to support the devs and was hoping it would come today but alas it did not. I really enjoyed a lot of Remember Me although the combat did tend to get a bit repetitive and despite the flaws in the writing I thought Life is Strange was a touching story. I hope they keep innovating and stick around.