Jesus fucking Christ Life is Strange. Like holy shit folks. I'm still a little bit in awe of it.
It's sad and it's sweet and it's poignant and I was so totally in love with it by the time it wrapped up. The games I love, the games I really love, are the games that I still dwell on and think about long after they've finished. Well, I finished this about two months ago and it still bubbles into my thoughts at least twice a day.
I will cop to its flaws - some of the puzzles fall flat (although, conceptually, most of them I really like), the controls feel clunky and the dialogue is really hit or miss for the first couple of episodes. I think it's testament to the strength of the rest of the game that I could not give less of a shit about any of these flaws.
At it's core, to me this game was a love story between two characters who were amazingly well characterised and relatable in a way that video game characters rarely are. Max <3 Chloe 4ever y'all. I was rooting for them so hard the whole time.
And that made the game's emotional gut punches genuinely awful. The first act of episode 4 stands as one of the most genuinely harrowing things I've ever played. At the same time, the game isn't sadistic and there are parts of it (the first half of episode 3, for example) that exude such sweetness and warmth I felt guilty continuing - for ruining Max and Chloe's few moments of peace in the name of progress.
I wanna talk about the ending. I am going to do so in very vague terms, and I'm going to keep it confined to one paragraph. So if you want to avoid spoilers, just skip the rest of this paragraph. OK? OK. So, anyway, Bae > Bay, any day. That was the ending that felt right to the story as I'd interpreted it, to how I'd been playing it. The other option has such a sense of profound wrongness to it for me. You know that secret ending in the Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut where you refuse to make a choice and the Reapers win? It feels like that. The whole game, to me, was about Max and Chloe, their relationship was more important to the story and to me as a player than anything else in the game. I know people have been critical of this ending for being vague, but I liked it as it was - it conveyed all it needed to with Obstacles and the way Max and Chloe interact. The really interesting thing though is that people will argue the exact opposite of this point of view vociferously. I think that's to the game's credit, even if I am personally totally baffled that anybody could possibly like the other ending.
There's also a bunch of stuff I like about that game that's really personal. Situations that remind me of things that happened to people I know. That in itself is interesting to me - I'm not saying it's the only game capable of this, but still, it was cool to be drawn in on that level.
Playing through it a second time, there is a stunning attention to detail on display. There’s very obviously an incredible amount of effort that went into Max's journal. The developers clearly obsessed about Max and Chloe's animations; the way they constantly find excuses to touch, the way they stand closer to each other than the other characters, conveys so, so much.
Life is Strange is important to me, and that's a hard thing to quantify, but it's true. This game is the best and I look forward to years of emotional devastation every time I hear Obstacles.
