Do you remember your freshman year of college? The sweet elation of freedom that came as you lay down in your dorm bed for the first time, probably wasted as hell, and realized you were responsible for your own fate? This game is that moment.
Life is of course a collection of moments, but Life is Strange is a collection of very distinct moments. When you realized you had total control over what you could eat for the first time. The slow learning that friendships were way more important than they were in high school. Coming to terms with your sexual wants and needs and pursuing them. Staying up drunk with your friends till sunrise talking about nothing. Getting stoned at a friend’s house off campus and being discovered on the floor of a stranger’s home the next morning. Spewing bullshit philosophical theories and believing you and your friends were at the height of your intellect. Spending a full 18 hours studying for a test without eating or sleeping in between. These are the moments, the feelings, that are captured in Life is Strange. If those moments are foreign to you, I can understand if this game doesn’t hit as hard. This game is for those who want to live in that moment again, if just for this one video game.
You play as Max, the somewhat awkward but somewhat confident freshman at a prestigious but tiny art school in the pacific northwest. Max wakes up on a day like any other only to discover she has super powers — she can rewind time by about 30 seconds. This realization of course leads to some wild shenanigans at school, until the shit hits the fan and you see a girl murdered in the bathroom during a drug deal gone wrong. Rewinding time, you save her life only to discover it’s your childhood best friend, Chloe. The crazy, junked up teenager who murdered Chloe happens to be the son of the school’s largest donor and is insanely rich (of course). In addition to that, you’ve got your bitch-ass bitch classmate Veronica to deal with that is majorly crushing your vibes. Plus your best friend Warren who’s falling in love with you. And there has been a mysterious number of young women that have gone missing in Arcadia Bay recently… I don’t want to give away much more of the story than that. Suffice it to say it’s quite interesting.
The characters are lovely and quite believable. Max feels like a real person I could have known in college, and in a lot of ways she feels like me. Max feels like one of those characters, like Harry Potter, that anyone can find a piece of themselves in. Chloe is a wonderfully developed character as well, and their investigation into the missing girls drives the plot forward.
The game controls like a Telltale game with a bit more freedom. You will be making A LOT of decisions, big and small, without and without consequences. You will second guess yourself on all of them. The game’s brilliant design comes out during the choices you make. Remember, you can rewind time. So if you make a decision and it seems to have a negative outcome, you can just rewind and do it another way, right? Have fun with that. Every decision you make has immediately negative consequences. You will never be given the impression after making a choice that you’ve done the “right” thing (if there is such a thing). There are simple puzzles to solve here and there, but the bulk of the game is mostly dialogue and conversation trees with immaculate voice acting and writing.
Most people you talk to have had a different experience with the story. The story does morph and change around you as you make decisions — for instance, I was speaking to a friend and she was reminiscing about the very memorable scene one of the characters had in the last chapter. My response? “Oh, that character died in chapter 2 for me.” She was shocked, and didn’t even know that could happen.
This game is episodic, but all five parts have been out for a while now and you’ll get the full game experience at once. This is one of those that I could not put down, even for a day. I had to see my way to the end of it. The game’s ending has been pretty reviled by a lot of people, but I saw it through a different lens and quite liked it. Or at least it gave me closure. I highly recommend it for anyone that’s maybe a little lonely, a little nostalgic, or who just wants to live in a teen d
Life is Strange is a game that will tug on your heartstrings. It feels like a real journey that you’ve been on before, sometime long ago. That evening in the early fall where you and your friends ran from one side of campus to the other for ice cream, got blasted in someone’s dorm room, played Mario Kart until you passed out — you can live in that again with this game, if only for a moment.
Life is of course a collection of moments, but Life is Strange is a collection of very distinct moments. When you realized you had total control over what you could eat for the first time. The slow learning that friendships were way more important than they were in high school. Coming to terms with your sexual wants and needs and pursuing them. Staying up drunk with your friends till sunrise talking about nothing. Getting stoned at a friend’s house off campus and being discovered on the floor of a stranger’s home the next morning. Spewing bullshit philosophical theories and believing you and your friends were at the height of your intellect. Spending a full 18 hours studying for a test without eating or sleeping in between. These are the moments, the feelings, that are captured in Life is Strange. If those moments are foreign to you, I can understand if this game doesn’t hit as hard. This game is for those who want to live in that moment again, if just for this one video game.
You play as Max, the somewhat awkward but somewhat confident freshman at a prestigious but tiny art school in the pacific northwest. Max wakes up on a day like any other only to discover she has super powers — she can rewind time by about 30 seconds. This realization of course leads to some wild shenanigans at school, until the shit hits the fan and you see a girl murdered in the bathroom during a drug deal gone wrong. Rewinding time, you save her life only to discover it’s your childhood best friend, Chloe. The crazy, junked up teenager who murdered Chloe happens to be the son of the school’s largest donor and is insanely rich (of course). In addition to that, you’ve got your bitch-ass bitch classmate Veronica to deal with that is majorly crushing your vibes. Plus your best friend Warren who’s falling in love with you. And there has been a mysterious number of young women that have gone missing in Arcadia Bay recently… I don’t want to give away much more of the story than that. Suffice it to say it’s quite interesting.
The characters are lovely and quite believable. Max feels like a real person I could have known in college, and in a lot of ways she feels like me. Max feels like one of those characters, like Harry Potter, that anyone can find a piece of themselves in. Chloe is a wonderfully developed character as well, and their investigation into the missing girls drives the plot forward.
The game controls like a Telltale game with a bit more freedom. You will be making A LOT of decisions, big and small, without and without consequences. You will second guess yourself on all of them. The game’s brilliant design comes out during the choices you make. Remember, you can rewind time. So if you make a decision and it seems to have a negative outcome, you can just rewind and do it another way, right? Have fun with that. Every decision you make has immediately negative consequences. You will never be given the impression after making a choice that you’ve done the “right” thing (if there is such a thing). There are simple puzzles to solve here and there, but the bulk of the game is mostly dialogue and conversation trees with immaculate voice acting and writing.
Most people you talk to have had a different experience with the story. The story does morph and change around you as you make decisions — for instance, I was speaking to a friend and she was reminiscing about the very memorable scene one of the characters had in the last chapter. My response? “Oh, that character died in chapter 2 for me.” She was shocked, and didn’t even know that could happen.
This game is episodic, but all five parts have been out for a while now and you’ll get the full game experience at once. This is one of those that I could not put down, even for a day. I had to see my way to the end of it. The game’s ending has been pretty reviled by a lot of people, but I saw it through a different lens and quite liked it. Or at least it gave me closure. I highly recommend it for anyone that’s maybe a little lonely, a little nostalgic, or who just wants to live in a teen d
Life is Strange is a game that will tug on your heartstrings. It feels like a real journey that you’ve been on before, sometime long ago. That evening in the early fall where you and your friends ran from one side of campus to the other for ice cream, got blasted in someone’s dorm room, played Mario Kart until you passed out — you can live in that again with this game, if only for a moment.