Life isn't that strange after all.
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EDIT: This blog is spoiler free.
The third episode of Life Is Strange drops today (yesterday?) and I find myself uncharacteristically looking forward to it. The first two episodes filled the continuing void created by Kentucky Route Zero - There are chapters still being written, and I can't think of anything else I'd rather Cardboard Computer were doing, but at the same time come on already. I'm in consistent terror that my anticipation may eclipse my enjoyment of their abstract little adventure.
What was I talking about? Life Is Strange? Alright, cool.
Sometimes I wake up on a Saturday morning and my brain is still.... y'know. Fuzzy. That's what I like to call the "Hohokum window", a brief few hours where I'm mentally limited to ambient electro-lounge music and optimistic colour palettes. I don't want direction, I just want to float around and absorb, and in turn be absorbed. I want a distraction that doesn't require cognitive arithmetic, where questions like "Why am I flying my rainbow snake around a water park?" aren't really important. There is no succeed and there is no fail. It's just Hohokum, man. Enjoy it.
But sometimes I find myself home earlier than I was expecting on a Friday night, and the lights are out, and I'm in a weird place. Well, obviously my home is not the weird place. I meant more existentially. That's usually the time I turn to the games that I wouldn't normally play, where I look for something different that can keep me distracted, and that I can feel invested in playing.
Life Is Strange is about teenage girls at a school in rural America.
As someone who grew up and lives in London in the south of England, my understanding of school in America is gleamed almost entirely from the first 20 minutes of The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift. Needless to say, I had a lot to learn.
I like the goofy awkwardness of Life Is Strange.
I was a geek in school and I'm a geek now, and I can relate to a lot of it's incestuous social hierarchies you're prompted to navigate, despite the foreign setting. It's almost disappointing that there's a rewind-time function, as the game does a pretty great job of establishing atmosphere and continuity around the sleepy town of [I can't remember what it was called but you get the gist] and the sci-fi esque superpowers can't help but feel both distracting and, if anything, detract from the otherwise naturalistic environment they've managed to conjure. Walking around Max's dorm I couldn't help but cringe at the decor, her choice of books and music, her enthusiasm for selfies and social media. But then I think, fuck, ten years ago I was a complete twat. I had a lava lamp for fucks sake. Who am I to throw stones?
And in this, I think, is where I find my enjoyment for Life Is Strange. It's successful at being just the right amount of uncool. It nails the bitchy high-school drama, which most of us would rather forget, in a way that's quite insightful for a medium that's predominantly written by and for adults. If teels neither condescending, nor out of touch. It is, essentially, convincingly pretentious, full of naive arrogance and half formed social graces. And that's weirdly pleasant and nostalgic to observe, not to mention incredible difficult to accurately represent. I don't think any other game has managed to successfully do so to this extent. It's impressive.
Maybe I'm alone in feeling this way, or it's a direct result of me being a inebriated 20-something, but it ticked all the right boxes. I'm a fan. Keep it coming.
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