Life Is Strange (2015)

Life is Strange has a lot of heart poured into it. The main characters we're meant to empathize with are well realized and a few of the antagonists end up having more depth to them than initially meets the eye, making them feel tragically human. This isn't the case across the board, but given the amount of dialogue, characters and choices you can make it's easy to overlook this. The game does an effective job of making choices feel punchy, even if they ultimately have a low impact on the overall gameplay and plot of the game. The difficulty of this game is non-existent, which I'm not stating as any sort of criticism. Games don't need to be challenging to be worth experiencing or enjoyable. A good example of this is with the contemporary rise of the cozy game genre. Challenge isn't the point, instead you are meant to just vibe. Life is Strange is a great case of a "just vibe" game. It succeeds at this.

Something I found enjoyable were all the film references made by Warren (Primer btw is a great indy lo-fi sci-fi movie to check out especially if you liked this, though be warned, you need a very complicated chart to even begin to grasp fully what the hell actually happens in it. And you certainly need to rewatch it multiple times) . It all feels like something the directors clearly were into and experienced when they were in High School/Under grad. Which makes the game feel personal and full of soul. I feel like everyone in undergrad had that one friend in the dorm with a flash drive that had a bunch of obscure movies and tv shows on it. While this takes place in a private school and everyone is meant to be seniors in high school, it had freshmen under grad vibes to it as well given the dorm rooms. Where a lot of the drama and interactions felt like the experience of being a freshman in college. It really nails this, making it feel nostalgic. It certainly leans more hard in cliche high school bully drama to be fair. Max even refers to Victoria and her click of goons as the "Mean Girls."

Speaking of Victoria, her characterization, along with the rich son who basically owns the school and is the main antagonist (sorry forget his name) is pretty weak. They both start off as cartoonishly evil, completely apathetic with no redeeming qualities and towards the end of the game the writers try to humanize them. This doesn't work for me at all to be honest. Especially with where they started. Being completely repulsive. And the humanizing just comes out of left field and is pretty abrupt. I also feel a bit mixed about the decision to make Mr. Jefferson the real villain. It feels like kind of a cheap twist on the levels of M. Night Shyamalan. Not feeling clever and more there as an unforeseeable and shocking twist. In spite of me not really liking the aforementioned twist, I still think this game has a strong ending. I really love how reality starts to fall apart at the seams and it results in some really striking visuals. Making the plot contrivances feel worth it for the pay off.

The game does a great job of presenting the mystery around the school, Max's powers and her crusade to fix everything in her hubris, making her an ultimately tragic character. The pacing of the story unfolds well. Never feeling like a slog and always having multiple plot hooks to keep you moving forward with your investigation and being intrigued and second guessing both your decisions and theories of the overarching mystery. With periodic major decisions in the game that can cause you to question your actions, even if the actual impact via gameplay and story really aren't that big.

Gameplay is slow, clunky and simplistic. All puzzles/challenges in the game are solved by rewinding time and collecting items in the environment like an old school point and click adventure. Once you realize this, most puzzles usually just boil down to when you should rewind. Typically after you move into a certain position with the necessary item. So yeah, gameplay isn't too much to write home about, but I found myself still engaged via the characters, art direction and general vibe. I also really liked the journal where Max will write entries. This serves as a flavorful summary of events. This isn't really necessary now a days since you typically can only buy the complete game and don't need to wait for each new episode to be released. That said, this was a craft solution to long gaps between episodes so players wouldn't need to replay previous episodes to remember what happened. I think the writing style of the journal is strong, making it feel authentic. There's also some fun art in it as well.

Overall I think this is worth checking out if you like visual novels. That's what this effectively is. The writing is strong. Good characters (for the most part) and it has a strong and punchy ending. Though the gameplay itself leaves more to be desired.

I started this game in 2016, I got through episode 2 and got a little side tracked. As a person who like adventure games, or walking simulators, or any game where the story is slowly revealed I thought I would love this, but by the end of episode 2 I wasn’t engaged.

I stopped right before the story picked up, and boy does it pick up. By the end you are questioning decisions you made throughout the game.

Life is Strange is the game that David Cage (Heavy Rain, Detroit: Beyond Human) wishes he could make. It’s a story-based game with choices that truly matter, affecting not only the outcome of each episode, but also the relationships between the characters and the tone of the narrative. It’s a game that explores themes like friendship, identity, trauma, and responsibility with sensitivity and nuance. It’s a game that features great characters and voice acting, especially for Max and Chloe, the protagonists whose bond drives the story forward. And it’s a game that has a really good soundtrack that fits perfectly with the mood and setting of each scene.

But Life is Strange is not without its flaws. The writing can be awkward at times, especially when it tries to capture the slang and humor of American teenagers. Some lines sound like they were written by Europeans who watched too many teen movies or TV shows. The lip-syncing can also be off-putting, as well as some of the facial animations. The puzzles are not very challenging or original, mostly involving using Max’s time-rewinding power to find clues or avoid danger. And some of the plot twists can be predictable or contrived, relying on clichés or coincidences.

Despite these shortcomings, Life is Strange is still a remarkable game that deserves praise for its ambition and execution. It’s a game that makes you care about its characters and their choices, even when they are flawed or make mistakes. It’s a game that makes you feel emotions ranging from joy to sadness to anger to fear. And it’s a game that makes you think about your own life and what you would do if you had the power to change it.

When I was in seventh grade, I had to pick an elective to take. I stupidly chose band. Despite being an artist, I assure you that absolutely none of that artistry goes to musicality, and even worse of me, I chose the Trumpet, an instrument I quite literally couldn't play not just because sheet music doesn't make sense to my damaged brain but because I have asthma and a Trumpet is all breath all the time. Needless to say, this was an enormous mistake, but one I couldn't back out on. Thankfully, there was a saving grace to this, and that saving grace was a girl named Natasha.

By this point in my life, I had already accepted I was gay, but perhaps wasn't parading the fact around openly, and Natasha was a crush that hit me like a ton of bricks, and to this day remains an example of the kind of girl I like. She was extremely funny with a dark sense of humor, she was actually a fairly talented player of the Trombone, and more than anything, she was nice to me. This was not a period of time in my life where niceness was something I was accustomed to, especially from the same sex, and especially from girls I liked romantically, whether they knew it or not. Though they likely all knew. I'm extremely transparent. So Natasha was my reason for sticking out band. We'd hang out together before class started, during the break of actual performances, and we really seemed to click.

When we graduated middle school, she went to a different high school, and I never saw her again. To this day, as creepy as it may sound, I think of what might have been had I simply put in more effort, even though I had no way of knowing if she herself was into girls or not. You might be wondering, at this point, why I'm telling you all this. What it even has to do with this game. Well, I'm getting to that.

After I graduated high school, I moved to Capitola, California. It's a small little tourist trap beach town full of mostly old rich people and is exceptionally gorgeous, though only because it was landscaped to look that way. My parents had broken up, my grandmother had just died, and both my dogs were dead. Needless to say, I'd lost everything that mattered to me, really, except my girlfriend at the time. On the way up to Capitola, which was only an hour or so ride from where I lived beforehand, I stopped at a small diner on the side of the road, somewhere nobody would ever go to. And behind the counter? There she was.

And what makes it all worthwhile?

She remembered me happily.

So Natasha didn't just serve me what I ordered, she sat with me and we talked all about school, and life after school, and what plans we might have for the future, and even though it never went anywhere and we never saw one another again afterwards, I got a strange sense of closure from this chance encounter, and I've been at ease about it ever since, despite still harboring an enormous crush on her lo these many years later. So what does all of this have to do with Life Is Strange? Because the game, and the title, sum up this whole relationship quite well, honestly. But I guess I'd need to give context for what Life Is Strange is for any of this to make sense of the uninformed.

Life Is Strange is a single player title in which you play as Max, a young photographer at a fancy school, and her relationship with her former childhood best friend Chloe. You saved Chloe's life purely by chance after accidentally discovering you have powers that can rewind time, so you can do something differently, and make better decisions. After Chloe is made aware of these powers, you and she team up to find out what happened to her missing girlfriend, and it...well, it gets pretty fucking dark, to be honest.

It's an extremely solid title, but you don't need me to tell you that. Plenty of reviews already exist lauding praise onto what really is one of the best queercentric games ever made. Okay sure, the dialogue can be hokey, and alright perhaps the melodrama is a tad too overwhelming at times, and yeah, I'll admit it, Chloe's kind of a bitch, but she's your bitch, and that's what matters. It plays well, it's very pretty with a specific artistic style that really makes you feel soft and safe in a world that's anything but, and the soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal to put it mildly. But it's all about returning to someone you once thought the world of, perhaps even romantically so, and realizing what they can really mean to you.

It's all about time.

Time is a big problem for me. I can't comprehend it. I get lost within it easily, as hours drift away easily, bleeding into days in the blink of an eye, and the fact that I know I only have a finite amount of it terrifies me. Not so much the concept of the act of dying itself, as much as the concept of nonexistence afterwards, if that's what happens. Often I wish I could go back. I wish I could return to, well, not a simpler time but a time where life was structured, and made more sense because of it. A time where all I had to worry about was the people I saw at school everyday, what candy I'd get at Halloween and what time my favorite cartoon aired that week. A time where I could feel like a girl I'd only known for a few years was worth being alive for, because perhaps I did in fact have a chance of finding someone to love me in the end.

Time and girls. The two concepts I think about the most. This is what makes up the majority of Life Is Strange. Am I perhaps a bit overly attached, purely because it speaks to me on a molecular level it might not speak to others? Certainly. Is that influencing my review? Certainly. But I'm nothing if not capable of seeing the flaws in things I love, acknowledging them and admitting them to others. And I say that even in light of those flaws I mentioned, Life Is Strange is one of the best games I've ever played, and not just because of how it resonated with me but just because of how achingly beautiful and heartrending it is. It's so well written, plot wise, and it's characters - even at their worst and most ridiculous - are very deep and complex, even the ones you wouldn't expect to be anything more than mere tropes.

I'm a hopeless romantic. I always liked the idea of meeting someone when I was a kid and spending my entire life with them. I still, even though many of my generation write it off as a shackle of the past to be broken, believe in the idea of marriage, and having a family. After all the different ways I've been hurt, the various times I've been hurt, by all the multiple people who've hurt me...I believe in true love.

Life Is Strange is very much true love. Not just finding the girl your best friend loved so she can move on, but also finding out you love your best friend as well. It's not explicitly gay, for the record, you don't have to play Max as a gay character, but it's almost like you're taking something away from the core of the game by not. Sort of how Femshep works best in Mass Effect, because it just was made for that character model. Life isn't just strange. It's sad, and painful, and lonely. But sometimes you can find that one person who's worth destroying an entire town for and running away with. Sometimes you can find that one person that gets you better than even you get yourself. Sometimes life isn't just strange, it's actually capable of making sense as well.

I haven't seen Natasha in over a decade now. I still think about her a lot, and I wrote a character based on her in my 2018 novel. She was the first girl I ever met who didn't make me ashamed to feel the way I felt for her, even if she didn't know I felt that way or she was helping me feel better about it.

You see, the first girl I ever had a crush on was in elementary school, and I asked her to a dance. Despite her initially saying yes, something she later told me she only said so I wouldn't be embarrassed, the rejection ultimately hurt. Her father threatened me with a restraining order, and I learned to perhaps keep my romantic feelings to myself after that. But then Natasha came along, and even though I only knew her for two brief years, and even though we only shared one class together within those two brief years, she helped me realize I don't have to keep who I am to myself. She certainly didn't. Like Max, I was quiet and introspective, and obsessed with art. Like Chloe, she was loud and boisterous and somewhat of a juvenile delinquent. But we had something. Something special. Something I'll forever be grateful for.

We understood one another at a base level, like Chloe and Max do, and we never expected more from the other than one could give. Life Is Strange understands something a lot of coming of age stories rarely understand, and are even more rarely willing to attempt to understand, and that is this: sometimes your best friend becomes your most distant, and then sometimes they come back into your life again with a force that makes you question everything. And you don't even care. You're just happy to have them back. Despite my deeply entrenched cynicism, my upmost devotion to hermitness, and my severe antisocial behavior, there's something about certain relationships that make me willing to destroy entire towns for.

Natasha came into my life when I needed a reason to not hate myself.

Natasha reappeared in my life after some of the most devastating events I'd ever been through.

Life is strange like that.

My name is Maggie. I'm an artist/author. I make a lot of stuff. If you liked this review, you can support me over at Patreon or tip me over at Kofi.

Life is Strange had alot of good reviews from friends and game critics alike but boy, I couldn't make it more than 5 minutes into the game's 4th episode. Sorry LiS.

Following Max - a teen girl who can rewind time - Life is Strange is an adventure game that seeks to have real impact on the world it exists in and present you with classic forking choices. This is done pretty well along the way and the time travel mechanic is neat. The idea, on paper, is not inherently bad.

That being said - the characters. The characters feel written by the idea of what someone who thinks teenagers talk and act like, without actually knowing. It was hard for me to find stuff here that hasn't been done with other teen characters but better and the time travel gimmic really didn't offer much insight into the characters until...well in ep 4 (spoilers) Max's choices in time altering put someone in a wheel chair in the present day. The way this was handled was just...pretty dang ableist (imagine the worst thing in the world - being in a wheelchair and disabled! /s) and also just felt extremely cheap. I was done with the game at that point and though I read the ending and I can see, again on paper, how it should work but for me I didn't care about any of the characters for it to matter.

I bought this game cheap both on steam and playstation store, so let this be a lesson to be to not be sucked into hype machines.

Whether this is a perfect game doesn't matter (although it's certainly a well made one); it's a perfect story. It made me fall in love with Chloe and Max, then broke my heart in so many ways, over and over again, and I'm so grateful that it did. One scene in particular even moved me to tears, and that takes A LOT for me. The pacing is great, the soundtrack works so well - all the songs encapsulate the mood of their moment, musically and lyrically. I finished the game and immediately bought the comics that come after.

You must experience this story. And the first part of the game is free, so what's to lose?

Life is Strange is a pretty good game. The time travel gimmick is fun to use, the timeline stuff is fun, the plot is engaging, most of the characters are pretty good. What makes it only a 3 star experience starts with Chloe. Chloe is one of the worst videogame characters ever. She's needlessly edgy and acts like a prick for no reason. We get it, your dad died and your friend moved away, shut the fuck up. The dialogue is also terrible. Here are some personal favourites: "Now, let's talk bidness." "The only place I can be "myselfie" is in the dark room." "Broken. Oh man, are you cereal?" "Release the kra-can." "Now you're totally stuck in the retro zone. Sad face." "MaxGyver strikes again." "Ready for the mosh pit, shaka brah." Every line that contains "hella". The dialogue in this game is just the worst. I can understand that it wouldn't be perfect since the writers are French but, I mean, come on. I don't think any French person talks like that either, right?

Overall, Life is Strange is a decent enough game. If you can look past the mediocre characters and voice acting and the aggravatingly terrible dialogue then it's pretty good.

3/5

Sad that Telltale Games has gone belly up? Never fear, DONTNOD has got you covered! At least assuming they keep producing games in this series. I'll be honest, when the game's 5 episodes came out as a PS Plus free game of the month, I was skeptical that I would really get into it. A game about the seemingly normal teenage angst of a couple teen girls didn't really seem to be my cup of tea. But, I thought, this will be a good game to play alongside my wife, who enjoys watching (and participating in choice-making) me playing narrative games like Telltale made. Boy was I wrong. I was the one crying my eyes out through Episode 5. I love the game's soundtrack, and the mechanical gimmick (which has to do with reversing time, trying not to spoiler) is interesting and, I feel, pretty innovative for a narrative game.

Ultimately, this is a game designed from ground-up to use the interactive medium to tell what I feel is an excellent story, and it does it really well.

Only three-and-a-half episodes in so far, so I'll have to update it as the story continues. There's quite a lot to this game.

The gimmick

First off, I love the way it mechanizes how we all play dramatic adventure games. Pick one choice, didn't like it? Wonder how it could have gone differently? Reload, and pick the other choice. We all do it, and this game goes "Hey, what if that could be part of your game experience?", and that is amazing. You are encouraged to go back and forth and see all outcomes of the story in one big playthrough. I really, really enjoyed that "gimmick", and honestly I'd love to see a rewind mechanic even if it implemented outside of the story. That, of course, makes it all the more powerful when you get to the "Yuffie stole your materia" part of the story where your powers don't work, and you suddenly have to fend for yourself, without the luxury you've been getting accustomed to. Making for a very powerful moment at the end of episode two!

I also love that they don't just keep the mechanic the same, but keep building on it with more complex puzzles and also more expansive powers. The twist at the end of Episode 3 is very cool, and a great example of ramping up the gimmick consistently while still taking big leaps!

Episode made great use of the mechanics in a thrilling finale. Quite good! I feel like this is the game that I wanted The Longest Journey and Dreamfall to be.

The Chloe

Secondly, I really dislike Chloe. She's annoying, unreasonable, a shitty friend and a bad influence on Max. Plus, she's totally mean to her supernice mom! I wish Max would just go to class, focus on her photography work, win that competition and finally make some friends at campus. On the upside, Chloe did convince me to break into the university pool at midnight so we could have it for ourselves. As an avid swimmer that got her a lot of brownie points in my book.

The Indie

The entire game has the most indie soundtrack you can imagine. I quite like it. There's these moments in the game where you can sit on a porch or recline on your bed, or chill with a friend and the game will just loop into this scene of you sitting there, the sun setting, birds chirping, all with this indie song playing in in the back. And it'll stay in that looped scene until you interrupt it. I don't know why, but I usually let it go on for quite a while. It's relaxing, like feeding the animals in Okami.

The photo hunting minigame is okay. I enjoy it well enough, but I could have done without it as well. It does add to the lovely melllow atmosphere.

Just as a sidenote

That nightmare maze was totally uncalled for.

I adore this game and eagerly awaited the episodes. I think it was very clever, the choices were cool and the mystery had me eagerly theorising. I liked the lessons in a lot of the reveals, and the characters made me care. It is really the story of a beautiful and complicated friendship. I accepted the weird vocabulary and sometimes awkward dialogue as part of the charm of the universe after initially being a little uncomfortable. Everyone really had their own voice.

My main qualm was in how the final episode was done. It was obvious they ran out of budget and time. I accept the choices and all, but the gameplay was clunky and boring and wasn't true to the style of the game previously; and there were a lot of wasted opportunities and plot threads leading to nothing. It felt unfair to the community.

Nevertheless a game I really enjoyed and a great story.