Life is Strange: a Game Review

For all its flaws, Life is Strange has accumulated quite a pop culture following since its recent release. 
Photo courtesy of youtube.com

For all of the arguments about whether video is art or not, one cannot deny that the majority of games do not even attempt to talk about the struggles faced by people in their daily lives. Games are often seen by those that play them as an escape from reality, so why should they tackle heady issues that are in the real world? That a game like Life is Strange even attempts to do so in a market saturated by grimdark space marines automatically makes it worthy of attention. The game, created by French developer Dontnod and published for the PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PS4 by Square Enix, recently finished its five episode run. It was a roller coaster of a ride, but despite many emotional highs, is a ride I ultimately cannot recommend. 

The game centers around the exploits of 18-year-old Maxine Caulfield, a 12th grade student attending a private art school known as Blackwell Academy in the fictional town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon in the year 2013.  Maxine (known to all simply as Max) is a selfie obsessed lay-about drifting by on the fumes of life until one afternoon she witnesses a rich student named Nathan Prescott gun down a girl in a bathroom. In an involuntary burst of energy and for reasons never fully explained, she discovers she can rewind time and is able to save the girl from her demise. It is later revealed that the girl she saved is Chloe Price, her estranged best friend from childhood. After reconnecting with Max, Chloe enlists her to use her newly discovered time powers to help her find her missing friend Rachel Amber. However, looming above this investigation is a series of seemingly apocalyptic phenomenon, including a vision seen by Max of a tornado coming to destroy Arcadia Bay. What follows is a story that deals in Chaos Theory, parallel universes, rape culture, sexual violence, drug abuse, sexuality, teenage pregnancy, grief, loss, nostalgia, suicide, religious bigotry, gun violence, the finality of death, and above all, what it means to grow up as a member of the post-Youtube generation. 

If it seems like that is a lot of themes to juggle, it is. Life is Strange however, does not manage to keep them all up in the air. There are love triangles that go nowhere, a reliance on tropes and archetypes that grew old 30 years ago, and plot choices that often lead to nowhere. Life is Strange is like The Walking Dead and Mass Effect  in that it touts having dialogue choices that will change the outcome of the story. However, because of much of the story jumps around across parallel universes so much, the choices you make are inevitably made unimportant as the swapping results in the status quo being reset. For example, there is one gut-wrenching scene where you as the player have to choose whether or not to assist in the suicide of someone. At first I thought this was a gutsy move that would get people talking about what games could teach us as a medium. But the game chickens out at the last minute by resetting the timeline back to the original universe of the story. What could have been a ripe chance to open a dialogue on the benefits and negatives of physician assisted suicide became yet another cheap way of heightening tension. But for all the inconsistencies in tone, the main cast is well-written, and the player will likely come to like them. Even some of the ensemble gets better over time, with many characters receiving redemptions by the end of it all. Of course, I also have to applaud for attempting to sensibly and sensitively deal in issues that most other games would not touch with a ten foot pole. Sadly though, the plot seems to forget about some of the other characters. This, coupled with an ending that leaves contradictions within the game’s own lore, leaves the impression of an overwrought, bloated script that eventually collapses from its own weight. 

Besides all this, the game is buggy. The lips on the animations do not match up with the voices of the characters, rewinding time often left objects floating in the air for some reason, and sometimes the skip cutscene feature would crash my computer.  The game also has a lot of boneheaded quick time events. This leads to frustrating gameplay where if one does not push a button at exactly the right time, they die, wrecking any pacing the story has and necessitating rewinding and watching the cutscene again. In the year 2015, there is no excuse for such poor programming in a retail game, even if it is at the moment download only. 

Life is Strange is, in essence, a delightfully ambitious but ultimately failed experiment in interactive storytelling. The bugs and poor game design decisions get in the way of what little pacing the story has. Though the characters are endearing and their interactions fun, they are ultimately wasted on a plot that revolves in circular logic before tuckering out and falling to bits by the fifth episode. While it is a decent story for a video game and it tries to deal in themes not often seen in games, it fails at nearly every turn and only proves that games have a long way to go before the medium as a whole can be taken seriously. For those still interested in having a flawed experience, the game’s first episode is $4.99 on Steam with the other four episodes retailing at $16.99. I would not recommend it, though. 

For alternate recommendations, I would point towards To The Moon, an indie title with a fraction of the budget that deals with time travel and the finality of death in a much better way. For those interested in a more interactive experience where choices have real weight, I point toward the previously mentioned Walking Dead, but be sure to play the First Season before moving into the Second Season. The story will mean that much more. Life is Strange is rated M for Mature, and I would not recommend children to play it.