You should play Life Is Strange
Dedicated to everyone who contributed to Life Is Strange. You guys are hella cool.
Note: In an attempt to not spoil anything, I've added spoiler tags to the text below. They look like this:
Darth Vader is Luke's father.
Click on it to reveal the treasure within.
Preface
I love Life Is Strange. No, let me rephrase that: I love love Life Is Strange.
Physically.
Light-headed, unable to concentrate, happy for no reason, little blue butterflies in my tummy, the works. I've been this way since finishing the game a week ago, and it's a little bit scary and a little bit awesome. I decided to jot down some thoughts and feelings to clear my head a little, so here we are.
Life Is Strange?
For those of you who don't already know, Life is Strange is an adventure game created by the French studio DONTNOD Entertainment. The premise should be summed up by someone far more eloquent than me:
(Spoilers for the start of Episode 1)
It's hard to sum up the game's premise in a way that doesn't make it sound awful. You play as a shy, thoughtful, photography-obsessed 18-year-old who returns to her childhood hometown after a few years away in order to attend an elite academy known for turning out up and coming artists. She keeps a diary, takes selfies, and without a doubt has 'free-thinker, tea-drinker' in her Tumblr or Instagram bio. She finds out she can rewind time after a girl is fatally shot in her school bathroom. After saving the girl, Max finds out that it's her childhood friend Chloe, whom she hasn't connected with in over five years. Over the course of the next week, the two are brought closer than ever as they investigate the disappearance of Chloe's friend Rachel Amber, Max comes to terms with her powers, and the threat of an apocalyptic storm looms over their sleepy Pacific Northwestern town of Arcadia Bay.
Love letter
Steam reviews for Life Is Strange are "Overwhelmingly Positive", and the score people give it is somewhere between 10/10 and 11/10. Can't say I disagree. There is one review that I found particularly striking though:
This game deserves a love letter, not a review. So here it goes..
Dear Lis,
Ever since you showed up, you've caught everyone's attention. Although not mine, at least not until I kept hearing your name and seeing your pictures everywhere. Everyone talking about your beauty, perfection, mystery and how interesting you were. [...]
Yes, it does deserve a love letter. I also found myself completely unsurprised that anyone would put this much effort in a Steam review.
Inspiration
Life is Strange is inspiring. Not only has it inspired Venus to write her love letter, but it has inspired me as well. I would not be writing this if it weren't for LIS, obviously. But did I mention that this is the first time I've written anything of substance voluntarily? Throughout my school years I've only ever written what others wanted me to write, and I hated it. Like Max, I never consider my work good enough for public consumption.
Well, I did make a "fan-made mission" for Thief 2 once – for a contest that was about making crappy missions. I didn't win.
Heck, I didn't even have a Twitter handle to my name a week ago, and now I'm posting pretentious screenshot compositions every other day. What have you done to me, game? But I'm not even mad. I'll take hipster douche over that person who never played LIS any day.
Why should you play Life Is Strange?
I've declared LIS obligatory playing at this point, if only for the revolutionary way it blends mechanics and narrative. It makes intuitive sense that in a choice-and-consequence game, decisions are more dramatic if you can only make them once, and preferably on a time limit. Life Is Strange calls bullshit on that, and sets out to prove the opposite.
The suspense in LIS comes from being able to change your mind as many times as you want. The immediate result may please you, but there's always that nagging doubt that it will come back to bite you in the ass later. And that is also where it ties in with the story and characters in such an excellent way: Max is a beautifully imperfect character, and one of those imperfections is her anxiety. She always agonizes over decisions, and makes sure to let you know her doubts. And with the shit that is about to go down in Arcadia Bay, it's hard not to emphathize.
But other than being obligatory, there are many reasons why you should play Life Is Strange. Here are some of them.
Graphics
Its painterly style and romanticism makes it just gorgeous to look at.
It successfully evokes nostalgia and serenity, and in doing so, it also makes the occasional violent scene that much more of a gut punch.
The animations may be a bit stiff, but they are otherwise lovely and contribute emotion through body language to every moment.
It's is not very often you see a heartfelt double deuce in a computer game.
It is also the only game I've ever seen where the main character has a motor tic.
Edit: Upon playing the game again I noticed that other characters do it too. I've never seen anyone perform that gesture in real life though. Perhaps it's a French thing?
Music
The music is excellent, both in the choice of licensed songs, and in the pieces composed for this game. I didn't even know I liked acoustic guitar music, much less to lounge around doing nothing while listening to it (and in the game!). I listen to the unofficial sound track every day now, and the menu music is my alarm sound.
Voice
Ashly Burch, the voice of Chloe, won the Golden Joystick Performance of The Year award, and I'm incredibly happy that she did. It was absolutely deserved. There's a wonderful but spoilery interview with Ashly where she discusses her character. But it wouldn't be Life Is Strange without the fantastic performance of Hannah Telle, the voice of Max, as well. Together they deliver the most raw and moving performance I've heard in recent time.
Camera
I haven't forgotten you, camera. You only ever get mentioned when you fuck up, which is why nobody has mentioned you yet. You didn't fuck up this time, and I'm grateful for that.
Feels
I'm sueing the devs of this game for first degree murder of my feels.
10/10 would cry again
EDIT: I'm not okay.
Between the graphics, the music, Ashly and Hannah, it was inevitable that feels would be broken. But don't let that discourage you from playing Life Is Strange. For every tearjerking scene there's a comforting moment that makes it all worth it.
I started the game again just to take screenshots, but I quickly found myself forgetting to do so, instead basking in the environment and in the company of my favourite characters.
Dr. Strangelife, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Disaster
(Major spoilers for the ending)
I sacrificed Arcadia Bay. It took me exactly two seconds to make the decision. There are many reasons I could give for doing what I did, but I'm going to be honest with you:
I did it for me.
After all that shit I'd gone through – that Max had gone through – I just wanted this one thing for us. The one thing we had fought so hard for, the one thing we truly loved: Chloe. An Arcadia Bay without Chloe would not be one worth saving.
Fuck that. No... no way. You are my number one priority now. You're all that matters to me.
Max Caulfield
And through the fourth wall as well, I knew that if I chose the other option, my memories of Life Is Strange would always be loaded with sadness.
Yes, that puts me somewhere between selfish coward and mass murderer. The opposite of a superhero: A supervillain. I found myself surprisingly okay with that. For once I didn't regret the choice I'd made, I knew instantly that it was the right one and had no desire to go back and change it. I still don't.
Besides, how fucking cool is it to have the protagonist become a proper Fallen Hero in a computer game? That doesn't seem to happen very often.
Now that I've confirmed to you that I'm a terrible person, I'd also like to bring up a more rational reason. After a bit of thought, this is the excuse I came up with: To save Arcadia Bay you'd have to screw around with the past again. As we've witnessed throughout the entire game, that rarely works out the way you hope. You even promised yourself you wouldn't do that any more.
Sure, you could probably do it anyway. You could go back and save Arcadia Bay, just like you could go back and stop William from dying. But what happens afterwards? Will you actually succeed in un-breaking time?
This is where it gets complicated: In the San Francisco museum, when you go back and destroy your own picture, you end up in the Dark Room. But in the SF timeline you never were in the Dark Room in the first place, so how did you end up back there? Apparantly, when you destroyed your picture you altered not just the past, but also your own past that includes all your time travel shennanigans. Your actions made you unable to change the past in order to escape from the Dark Room in your own past, even if you never had to escape in the past. So what happens if you go back and prevent yourself from discovering your rewind power?
You create a temporal paradox, of course.
Time to choose
I've told you everything you needed to know. The rest is up to you.