Life is Strange review - I didn’t want to kill the plant...

Thanks to the wonderful thing that is Steam winter sale I got around to playing Life is Strange. A game that I’ve heard quite a lot about, most of it really good too. Despite that, and watching a little bit of a playthrough by Dodger on YouTube, I never got interested enough to play it myself, or continue to watch it. But as time went on, and especially after playing through Undertale that also gives you a great deal of choices, I thought I would give Life is Strange a shot.

Developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix Life is Strange is an episodic adventure game. You play as the character Maxine Caulfield, more commonly known as simply Max. Max is an 18 year old girl who just moved back to her hometown of Arcadia Bay to start at Blackwell Academy following her dream of becoming a professional photographer. The story sets off in the middle of the semester, and what seemed like a normal day of school quickly turned into both a beautiful and terrifying journey through time, quite literally.

The game doesn’t spend long to introduce you to the different gameplay mechanics. Right from the first scene you get familiar with what you will be doing most of your time in the game, namely looking and interacting with objects and people. Afterwards you quickly get thrown into a scene which introduces you to the main mechanic (in both gameplay and story) of Life is Strange, the ability to rewind time.

This ability marks the beginning of the adventure that is to come. Rewinding time makes for an interesting journey giving you the option to explore multiple outcomes and thereby decide on what outcome you want. You can only rewind so far however meaning that when you have decided on a choice you have to stick with it, not knowing what consequence it will bring in the future. Life is Strange does a good job on referring to the choices you have previously done, doing so in a way that seems logical.  

Being an adventure game the actions that you will be doing most of the time is as mentioned, looking and interacting, in addition to walking around the environment. This may not be all that interesting in and of itself, but I am happy to tell you that together with rewinding time, an interesting story with secrets to uncover, characters full of personality and a great narrative it results in a truly captivating experience. I found myself having to look at everything in each new scene, not wanting to miss a single bit of story and trying to figure out what was going on in the world. After finishing the game I still have some questions left unanswered.

The way the story progresses, and the way you can get some answers to your questions, is to make choices. Although some are not that important at all, for instance when talking to someone the choices often doesn’t make a difference on the outcome except for the information you get. Other times however, both the dialog choices and actions you do can make drastic changes to the story, resulting in the game having multiple endings. Changes that you more often than not don’t see coming and leave you thinking “Oh shit, I should not have made that choice two hours ago”. One of them being a freakin plant I managed to kill! Not a severe thing but frustrating enough...

Occasionally the story ends up giving you choices that you might never have thought about having to make, choices that you never want make. Not wanting to spoil too much I will just say that these choices are quite serious (or would be in the real world), and that a lot of the plot revolves around the effects of bullying. Implementing a serious message into a game can be a challenge, often causing it to feel out of place. This however is not the case with Life is Strange as the message is tied to the story in a natural way.

Something less natural however is the movement, the facial and vehicle movement to be precise, the latter not being all that important however considering how seldom you see a moving vehicle. Facial expressions on the other hand is important, and they often look stale and unemotional and lip-sync in dialogs are in some cases completely off (This is mainly a problem in the first couple of episodes). Additionally the voice acting of Max in particular gets a bit monotone and doesn’t always fit the situation on screen. It’s a shame really that these issues are here, as they all break some of the immersion of the emotionally loaded story that Life is Strange presents. In addition as the visuals is lacking in detail and looks rather washed out the game appears to fall a bit short from a technical point of view.

However, graphical fidelity and smooth realistic movement is not everything in a video game, and It is worth noting here that the entirety of the game is hand painted. At the time of playing I did not know that this was the case and found myself much more appreciating the artstyle when realizing that this was indeed the case, therefore being the reason for the minimalistic and washed out aesthetic. If you stop and study the paintwork you’ll probably notice that it is certainly quite beautiful.  Although I think Life is Strange would have benefited from a higher graphical fidelity I found that in this game such an aesthetic works great, as reduced detail in total makes the important details all the more apparent, which in turn makes a greater impact on you the player.

And what an impact that it left on me! Life is Strange presents a deep story bearing an important message that naturally ties in with the choices you make. It has a pleasant and minimalistic hand painted aesthetic that does a decent job of presenting the world and characters, characters all with their own identity. However in some scenes this art-style does make the game look rather outdated. In addition it is struggling with lacking facial expressions, bad lip-sync at times, and a voice acting that I found to sometimes be a bit monotone. Thus it is not a perfect game, but considering the game as a whole I could not have been happier about my choice of playing it as the story presented and forged by my choices resulted in one most engaging games that I have ever played!

9/10 

A thoughtful and meaningful adventure through time and memories!