Life is Strange is one of the most surprisingly fresh and engaging games we’ve come across for some time. Based around the increasingly troubled and complicated life of 17-year-old max, the themes and ideas here centre on the difficulties of growing up, not fitting in and struggling to come to terms with the uncompromising reality of the situations around you.
Max has returned to her home town after a five-year absence, a period which has seen her best friend, Chloe, change dramatically. Once the quintessential promising student, Chloe is now a renegade with a love of blue hair dye, smoking weed and general rebellion. It’s implied that this new demeanour is a direct result of the feelings of abandonment and loss she felt at max’s initial leaving.
Many of these underlying, depthenhancing narrative elements and sub-plots are found by exploring the environment and interacting with what is on offer. For the purposes of our 30-minute demo, this environment is limited to Chloe’s house – the two girls hanging out there after another day at school.
In the vein of Telltale’s The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, this form of investigation is performed by simply walking through the world and optionally clicking on objects of interest. doing this in Chloe’s room reveals photos of the pair at a younger age, a personality building Cd collection and a snow globe that max accidentally drops and breaks – much to Chloe’s annoyance.
It’s in this exact moment that max’s most special gift is revealed: she can rewind time. doing so returns the snow globe back to its original position on the shelf, just as it was and with no damage done. This ability is used later to solve a simple puzzle involving the acquisition of a set of screwdrivers from a high ledge, a brain teaser of minor challenge.
As in Telltale’s releases, such puzzles are incorporated simply as a pacing tool. They are not designed to provide a serious barrier to your progression or to keep you occupied in cooking up a solution for hours on end. The screwdriver puzzle, as with other examples (we’re told), can be solved almost immediately with the help of the few interactable elements in the nearby area.
The real power of the rewind ability is revealed in moments of conversation, during which you’re asked to make various dialogue choices. One sequence towards the end of our demo sees Chloe’s stepdad burst into the bedroom in a fit of rage, annoyed that she is (again) smoking in the house… and, indeed, at all.
In this moment you can either keep quiet and let Chloe fend for herself, or you can step in and take the blame. It’s not clear which is the better option and the result of each choice is starkly different from the other. The rewind ability enables you to view them both, but even after this it’s impossible to know for sure what the long term implications are going to be for either character.
That is the key to Life is Strange’s intrigue: the decisions you’re asked to make are not simple matters of who will eventually die and who won’t, as they are in something like The Walking Dead. Here your options revolve around the emotional impact of your actions, making them more ambiguous and mysterious in the short term – and hopefully more meaningful in the long term.
As a matter of analogy, the time rewind power is supposed to represent the feelings of confusion and insecurity held by every teenager to ever have lived. They represent that desire to take a second shot at decisions that seem small at the time, but end up having an enormous consequential effect. Dontnod is
tackling some very complex ground here, but Life is Strange seems to be handling the problem with maturity and sensitivity.
The episodic release structure will enable players to discuss the events of their games with one another, giving time for everybody to experience the same moment before the next is available. A reliable window between episodes is vital to prevent player frustration, and Dontnod is planning on leaving five to six weeks between instalments.
It’s also worth mentioning how charming it looks in motion; the washed out, heavily contrasted fields of focus creating something that looks as though it belongs at the Sundance Film Festival or an independent cinema. It’s very much in keeping with the indie vibe exuded by the rest of Life is Strange.
+ Original and appealing characters
+ Embracing new ideas
+ Charming visual style
- Episodic structure is risky
- Lack of challenge not for everyone
- Pressure of mature experience
FORMAT: PS3, PS4, X360, XOne, PC
PUBLISHER: Square Enix
DEVELOPER: Dontnod Entertainment
RELEASED: TBC 2015