So Adventure games. There’s gonna be some spoilers here, I’ll try and keep them light for Life is Strange, but you should really have played The Walking Dead by now. Both are excellent, go ahead and play throughout them and then come back. This will probably make slightly more sense to you. If you just want a review, go play Life is Strange. It might not seem like your thing, but it’s fantastic because of that. This is a concise, focussed experience where character is king and the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
Life is Strange from DONTOD games is the latest in the adventure game renaissance that began with the popularity of Telltales’s series. It’s coming off DONTNOD’S work on Remember Me, which was… flawed, but had some interesting mechanics. But, here, it’s a straight up modern adventure game. It runs off fairly similar gameplay experiences; walk around the environment, check all the clickable objects, talk to everyone and exhaust all their dialogue options, and then make those all important decisions that shape the play through. Telltale hit on a really good thing when they came up with a formula for those games, and while it’s starting to become a little predictable the more they repeat the formula for each of their series, going back to the The Walking Dead shows how approachable and open it was when it started. The entire time I was playing through Life is Strange, that method was apparent. Telltale’s formula was clearly an influence on the later game but I found that Life is Strange affected me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
The Walking Dead was Telltale’s attempt to tell a story by making you care about characters and choice. The entire game is choosing between people. Doug or Carley. Shawn Greene or Duck. Half the first episode is multiple characters going to great pains to warn you that your choices have consequences and that you need to be aware of that. And it is great at making you feel your choices count. Even on a repeated playthrough, I still felt guilty letting Doug get dragged out a window by zombies. I made the decision, so that was me accepting the consequences. It’s gruesome, and puts all the impetus on you. I felt for the characters who suffered through my decisions.
I was expecting that accepting consequences would be completely unnecessary in Life Is Strange. It’s a game about a quiet, artistic teenage girl, Max, coming home from years away and trying to restart her life in a college that’s seemingly in mourning for a missing girl, but in fact constantly hints at a darker story going on beneath the surface. It’s not exactly original, but the whole thing is then wrapped up in a supernatural/mystery overarching plot that seems to be leading to much bigger things.
Very slightly spoilery, but the whole hook of the game is that Max ends up with the ability to reverse time for brief periods. As teenage girls are wont to do of course. What this means in gameplay terms is that between checkpoints, you can reverse in game actions, and entire conversations. You don’t have to settle for the conversation options you picked, accidentally offending people and screwing up your game. You can fix things, not on a second play through or by resetting the game, but right there and then.
I was assuming this would mean I wouldn’t care about the options presented, and could just game the system till I found the conversation that would advance the story for the best ending.
This didn’t happen. There are no wrong choices. Time travel makes sure of that. The act of choosing almost doesn’t matter in the grand sense. There’s only the decisions you finally settle on, and the world that ends up creating.
I replayed almost every single conversation till I had exhausted all variations of dialogue. I paused after each one, and I took the time to work out what was being said, and how that would impact the world around me afterwards. And damn it, it might not have been someone getting murdered by zombies, but I cared more about the world and the people in it than I ever did in the zombie apocalypse (Barring Clementine. Obviously) And this was strange to me because the stakes were so low comparatively. I was dealing with an ordinary world and ordinary people. Except for the time travel. And yet I was agonizing over decisions like:
Do I comfort the popular girl who hates me and empathise with her, in the hopes she isn’t playing me for a fool?
Should I step in between the overbearing security guard and the mousy, browbeaten religious girl and threaten my position in the school? Is Max being accepted by the authority that runs her life more important than this girl who doesn’t deserve her punishment?
Is it alright for me to snoop around the supposedly pregnant girl’s room to discover more about the rumour ? Just because I can reverse time and not get caught, is this the right thing to do?
All of these decisions were deliberated over, and carefully considered in every way. I not only cared about those characters, I cared about their place in the world, and how my actions would affect not only my relationship with them, but how that would affect them later on. I think the whole reason for this was how the world was so fully realised. I could have played through the game in about an hour and a half, if i’d gone for my first decisions and rushed past all the background information and non plot essential characters. But I didn’t, and the game is infinitely better as a result. I took the time to soak up the atmosphere. The whole college setting worked perfectly for this. The sequence that introduces you to all the characters has Max walking through the hallways, earbuds providing her own personal soundtrack, as she internally provide a rolling commentary of witty asides about each of the cast.
It is instantly relatable. Nearly everyone has had that moment in some form or another. The outsider trying to make sense of the new place. And if you’re lucky, and you don’t know that? Then this might help you understand the rest of us.
That cast might serve to hit the standard high school tropes initially, but later, after listening to every line of dialogue you can get from them through timey wimey nonsense, you get a real sense of personality and presence. Dialogue and character design serve to reinforce who each character is meant to be. The hallway is full of posters and leaflets that might be hinting at plot points for later in the series, but right now serve to immerse you in this world of teenage concerns and worries.
Someone is missing their tablet with important pictures of their cat on it.
Someone wants help with their statistics class because they can’t understand.
Someone wants you to sign a petition about the dangers of surveillance around the school.
All of this was brilliant. I wanted to know more about the world. I was interested in every aspect of it because I truly cared. When Max got a text from her mother asking about getting into trouble, I got genuinely concerned about how I hadn’t thought about whether this might affect Max’s place in the school. When her teacher started pushing her to respond to a question and she didn’t know the answer, I squirmed in my own seat. I may not be a teenage girl, but these were universal experiences. The world mattered. The people mattered. And this meant that my suspension of disbelief was completely overtaken as I was so enamoured with the game. The introduction of higher stakes and the supernatural ideas escalating towards the end of the episode was fine, because I’d been presented with a missing person mystery at the core of the game that I was now under a time limit to solve. It all just worked as the story grew.
Sure, the game is following the Telltale formula described above so far, and the dialogue is in some parts clunky, with weird moments where whole sentences go by without contractions. I’m imagining it might be slightly dated in years to come, with references to drones and kickstarter both coming under this, as well as language choices that seem like they’re trying slightly too hard to be “hip” but overall it all felt natural enough to me in context. The thing is, the whole world around the characters is presented in such a natural, realistic way that all this is easy to overlook. It doesn’t hurt that the game is presented in a truly wonderful style that almost feels like someone has painted broad strokes over the top to cover real photography. The art style is delightful. Gameplay wise, the puzzle mechanics aren’t particularly deep. Time travel here is similar to Braid where enough attempts and rewinds will eventually make things clear. It could even be, unfairly, described as a walking simulator in between the puzzles and plot moments. But it’s so much more than that. Life is Strange’s first episode is a fantastic foray into a world. As soon as the episode ended, I started speculating about what might come about as a result of my choices. The fact that the game broke down the plot choices, in the Telltale fashion, was great, but then it showed me how each choice I had made was related to a specific character. This game is surprisingly deep and engaging so far for something that initially deals with so ordinary and familiar a world.
I can’t wait to see what’s next.