"It is often said that life is strange. But compared to what?" -Steve Forbert
Probably to a better game, since, despite its commendable drive to improve and expand on the Telltale formula by attempting to provide choices that actually matter, Life is Strange is everything wrong with a certain side of the indie scene: pretentious, derivative, overwritten, with poor dialogue and characters, a stupid story that doesn't follow its own rules and whose open ended nature is only cosmetic, bad voice acting, bad puzzles, unearned plot twists and obnoxious music to top it all off.
///Full spoilers follow///
The game follows aspiring photographer and patient zero of the blandness disease Maxine "Max" Caulfield, the most basic normie hipster known to man, with her selfie-obsession, her "keep calm and carry on" rug, her plinky plonky acoustic guitar playlist that all sounds the same and her array of "google search: I'm feeling lucky" movie references, who goes to some kind of grotesque ivy league liberal arts college/high school amalgamation with a total of two classrooms and where every student is 18 and looks and sounds 13 (which is what happens when you just don't care about believability). Suddenly, and for no reason the game ever bothers to explain, Max develops the abilty to rewind time to a few minutes back, retaining all of her memories and objects on her person but resetting everything and everyone else.
On the gameplay side of things this translates to being able to rewind time a couple minutes back like in the Ubi Prince of Persia games, usually to fix a bad decision by picking a different option (the game even pressures you by having Max second guess every choice you make and flashing a "rewind!" icon on screen) or, more cleverly, to solve puzzles by manipulating the environment. Need to turn on a generator that's out of reach? Pull it down to the ground so you can use its busted remains as a step ladder to climb, then rewind time so it returns to where you are. It's easy and basic stuff, but it does the job when the game presents it, which isn't very often. Sometimes you might have to impress someone by observing events going on in the environment, then rewinding and announcing them before they happen, then cracking a joke about how cool you are.
Therein lies the first glaring problem with Life is Strange: Max's reaction to this discovery is what amounts to "huh". Where a normal person would freak out and start losing her touch with reality, perhaps growing more and more detached and solitary as she realizes people around her are hollow marionettes that sing and dance at her whim, trapped in tides of the space and time that she alone controls, Max's top priority is still taking pictures of squirrels with her camera, finding out what the popular girls at school think of her and why Brooke is, like, totally a bitch; her first real use of her newfound powers is to drop a bucket of paint on the Mean Girls™ because they were sitting on the stairs and she didn't want to walk through or around them. Her attitude towards this paradigm shift in her own existence and the cosmic order at large is "I'm a human time machine: amazeballs! Time for a selfie."
Enter the supporting cast, divided between two distinct groups: teens and adults. It is worth premising that this is a game written by a man likely in his mid-40s, so it's no surprise the adults are marginally better, with a least a semblance of depth and veridicity to them. The teens however are a complete disaster: aside from Max's submissive friendzoned boy there is not a single one who doesn't sound world-weary, cynical, defensive, overly sarcastic, self-centered, verbally abusive, judgemental and egotistic. This, in short, is how someone who hates teenagers thinks teenagers are like. You will quickly slide into this state of mind where you will find a new NPC to talk to and think "great, let's see what kind of asshole this one is". Furthermore, none of these teens talk like real people, or even human beings at all: an annoying blue haired twat with illusions of grandeur will quiz you on photography to see if you're worthy of looking at his pictures, and then says: "You are a kindred spirit, Max. Would you care for a perusal of my portfolio? It's not a privilege I grant to many." Please shut up.
There is a definite component of persecution porn in this as well: almost everyone Max meets is either hostile or bullying towards her, battering her with verbal abuse, mockery, belittling her or blaming her for everything under the sun. It's a trick that gets old really quick.
Even the characters supposed to be written as kind, quiet and bullied do not escape this curse, with the mouth-breathing class pudge Alyssa, a walking stereotype if ever there was one, still having an obnoxious air of self-importance about her (more on her later) and most notably Kate, the christian fundamentalist girl who, in one of the game's boldest statements, is bullied to a suicide attempt by the most sociopathic students and therefore a prime candidate for the player's sympathy, still comes off as a defensive bipolar lunatic due to the wonky nature of the dialogue trees which make it look like her emotions turn on a dime without rhyme or reason, frustrating any and all attempts to get invested in her character and play along with Life is Strange's emotional endgame.
Her suicide scene is particularly egregious: with Max's time powers suspended, it boils down to a pop quiz to see if the player has paid attention to Kate's dialogue and the content of her room over the course of the brief interactions the game offers with her, all to convince her that at least one person cares about her so she'll walk off the ledge on the safe side. Getting any minor detail wrong causes her to jump to her death (don't worry, you can just reload a checkpoint and try again, negating any lasting impact or consequence that might be interesting) and the way the dialogue is written makes Kate sound like a complete asshole: "Oh Max, you remember my favorite scripture from the bible, I believe that you do care about me", then a second later "NO! You know I don't have any brothers, only sisters! I knew you didn't care about me Max!" and she jumps. The developers could and should have implemented a system in which the charcater gets increasingly frustrated the more answers the player gets wrong, recording multiple responses with varying degrees of aggravation, but they didn't, opting to make the character go from 0 to 100 with her mood without warning or regard for any reassurance achieved moments before. Result: she comes off as bratty and irritating to the point you want her to jump and get out of your face. Abject failure at storytelling.
It doesn't help that the voice acting for some of the characters, including important ones, is nothing short of atrocious, probably not the actor's fault so much as a woeful lack of direction in the recording booth, which has left them to fend for themselves and approximate (too often failing to) the necessary emotions, which further cements the failings of a very poor script.
On that note, the time has come to talk about Chloe. No hate for Ashly Burch, who is a talented actress who has done good work in The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, Saints Row and Borderlands, but Chloe is simply too poorly written for Burch to save her. A rudderless teenager lashing out at the world due to the sudden death of her father, there is is a lot to work with there, but all Chloe does throughout the entirety of the game is be a danger to herself and others, a chaotic narcissistic Candlewick to Max's Pinocchio that you cannot help but find obnoxious and will make your eyes roll back into your skull every time she walks on screen, let alone open her mouth to say nothing but something cynical and sarcastic, or to guilt trip Max into some sort of idiotic self-destructive behavior. She got under my skin so much that i tried to kill her every time the game puts her in harm's way: being repeatedly shot, run over by a train, mauled by a rabid dog, the works. Unfortunately the game won't let you go through with any of it, forcing a time rewind every time you try to get rid of her. "My dad died and abandoned me, you left and abandoned me, everyone abandons me! Fuck you Max and fuck everyone else!" Me, me, me, me, me. That's Chloe in a nutshell.
It is clear to the player that Max is in an abusive relationship, and Chloe is the abuser. Clear to everyone except the writing team, who are quick to brush all of the red flags aside as "poor girl, she has suffered" when all the signs of an abusive relationship are there: Chloe is controlling and jealous, berating Max for answering the phone to talk to another friend. Chloe spends the entire game guilt tripping Max on a constant loop for never calling when she was in Seattle, even though she herself never called. She does this to force Max to do things she wouldn't do otherwise. Chloe constantly talks to Max about her ex girlfriend and how amazing she was, belittling Max in the process. Chloe repeatedly points a gun at Max in jest, but clearly establishing a physical hierarchy through the simulation of violence. Chloe expects Max to take the fall for her screwups, like claiming the weed found in Chloe's room was hers, and repeatedly berates her if she doesn't. The list goes on and on.
And just to dispel any doubt that she is that way because of her father dying, even in the alternate timeline where the man is alive and well but Chloe is paralyzed on a wheelchair, she still aggressively manipulates Max to convince her to pull the plug on her so she can die, which would obviously land Max in monstruous legal troubles, possibly even 25 to life for murder. Chloe doesn't concern herself with that: she is a bad person who only thinks of herself and she doesn't care about Max at all.
Hysterically, the finale of the game gives you a choice between two endings (the usual button A or button B affair, with no impact deriving from your decisions in the game), all hinging on whether Max decides to sacrifice the entire town to save Chloe or the other way around. For some baffling reason this is a 50/50 split if the players' choice stat screen is to be believed, but one I didn't even have to think about: Chloe just had to go and it's a shame you only get to make that choice at the very end. She is a terminal sociopath under every angle of scrutiny, self-obsessed, manipulative and possessive to the extreme. The fact that the writers were evidently convinced they had written a complex and relatable character is disconcerting to say the least.
The above mention of the finale segues into another problem: your decisions have no lasting impact on the way the story ends, which wastes all the effort put into trying to elevate the game above Telltale levels of storytelling. Sure, your choices are brought up by the NPCs in lines of dialogue, and they might even hold a grudge which might lock or unlock some dialogue option, but the results are usually the same. Does it matter if David gets to install his surveillance cameras or not, or whether he has to leave home or not? No, he still shows up at the climax as normal. Does it matter if Victoria hates or likes Max by the end as a result of their interactions? No, she still gets kidnapped and killed because Max warns her about the wrong person anyway. Is there any consequence to killing Frank as opposed to wounding him or resolving peacefully? There isn't, only a few lines of dialogue.
So your choices don't ultimately matter, but does the game at least provide the illusion of player involvement in the development of the plot? Ultimately, no, because what really sets this game below the par line in that regard is the fact it forces you to pick between doing something stupid and something even more stupid. After Chloe steals a handgun from her stepfather, Max eventually faces the decision of who should keep that gun between her irresponsible sociopath of a friend and a shady drug dealer out for her blood. there is no sensible decision possible, like taking the gun back to the police or dropping it into the owner's mailbox. When the mean girls are sitting on the steps of Max's dormitory and she is too much of a wimp to just walk through them, your only recourse is to use your powers to drop a bucket of paint on them, which is blamed on the janitor (and Max doesn't care, because he's weird and talks to squirrels, so fuck him). Max very rarely does behave like an intelligent person would. The only time Max does something sensible is when she starts wondering if she's actually a self-righteous hypocrite, which of course she is.
On top of all this there are instances in which the game dips into pure and simple idiocy. A few examples: Max going to take a shower in her pijamas, hanging it inside the shower and them coming out perfectly dry, or how, after breaking into the drug dealer's trailer and stealing his encrypted notepad, Max and Chloe go knock on his door to ask him for the encyption key, which he gives to them with the right dialogue choices, without putting 2 and 2 together that they would only need it if they stole his notes (he freaks out if they know his dog's name though: "the only way you'd know his name is if you broke into my house!" what?) at which point he pulls a weapon on them. What about the aforementioned pudgy nerd Alyssa, who, over the course of the game, you can save from being hit with a mundane object five times: a paper ball, a football, being splashed with water by a car and so on. If you fail to do so even a single time, Alyssa will refuse your help during the final scene when the town is being ravaged by a tornado, and as a result dies. Even though she doted on you four times for somehow saving her from very minor inconvenience, she flees in terror at the sight of you to her death because you failed to warn her about a paper ball in class that one time. There are literal dozens of moments like these that are too stupid to be believed.
Lastly, the resolution of the story: this is where the game actually managed to surprise me, since the entire time I assumed that the missing girl you keep hearing about was actually going to be revealed to be alive and well somewhere, thus my brain discarded the possibility of this inane snoozefest hiding a killer at all. When the twist does come, and the friendly (though gratingly pretentious) hipster professor turns out to be a psycho murderer it feels absolutely out of the blue, mostly because his character is so incredibly irrelevant to your experience that you would be excused for even forgetting he existed in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if many players had a "who are you again?" moment, especially those who played the episodes months apart as they were released.
Life is Strange was an ambitious game, but ultimately its repulsive misportrayal of an abusive relationship as something pure and aspirational, plus its poor execution under every point of view completely negates whatever good ideas there might have been in there. Even stranger than life is the fact this series had the success that it did, spawning a disconcerting number of sequels and prequels. Sometimes you just can't stop failing upwards.
Probably to a better game, since, despite its commendable drive to improve and expand on the Telltale formula by attempting to provide choices that actually matter, Life is Strange is everything wrong with a certain side of the indie scene: pretentious, derivative, overwritten, with poor dialogue and characters, a stupid story that doesn't follow its own rules and whose open ended nature is only cosmetic, bad voice acting, bad puzzles, unearned plot twists and obnoxious music to top it all off.
///Full spoilers follow///
The game follows aspiring photographer and patient zero of the blandness disease Maxine "Max" Caulfield, the most basic normie hipster known to man, with her selfie-obsession, her "keep calm and carry on" rug, her plinky plonky acoustic guitar playlist that all sounds the same and her array of "google search: I'm feeling lucky" movie references, who goes to some kind of grotesque ivy league liberal arts college/high school amalgamation with a total of two classrooms and where every student is 18 and looks and sounds 13 (which is what happens when you just don't care about believability). Suddenly, and for no reason the game ever bothers to explain, Max develops the abilty to rewind time to a few minutes back, retaining all of her memories and objects on her person but resetting everything and everyone else.
On the gameplay side of things this translates to being able to rewind time a couple minutes back like in the Ubi Prince of Persia games, usually to fix a bad decision by picking a different option (the game even pressures you by having Max second guess every choice you make and flashing a "rewind!" icon on screen) or, more cleverly, to solve puzzles by manipulating the environment. Need to turn on a generator that's out of reach? Pull it down to the ground so you can use its busted remains as a step ladder to climb, then rewind time so it returns to where you are. It's easy and basic stuff, but it does the job when the game presents it, which isn't very often. Sometimes you might have to impress someone by observing events going on in the environment, then rewinding and announcing them before they happen, then cracking a joke about how cool you are.
Therein lies the first glaring problem with Life is Strange: Max's reaction to this discovery is what amounts to "huh". Where a normal person would freak out and start losing her touch with reality, perhaps growing more and more detached and solitary as she realizes people around her are hollow marionettes that sing and dance at her whim, trapped in tides of the space and time that she alone controls, Max's top priority is still taking pictures of squirrels with her camera, finding out what the popular girls at school think of her and why Brooke is, like, totally a bitch; her first real use of her newfound powers is to drop a bucket of paint on the Mean Girls™ because they were sitting on the stairs and she didn't want to walk through or around them. Her attitude towards this paradigm shift in her own existence and the cosmic order at large is "I'm a human time machine: amazeballs! Time for a selfie."
Enter the supporting cast, divided between two distinct groups: teens and adults. It is worth premising that this is a game written by a man likely in his mid-40s, so it's no surprise the adults are marginally better, with a least a semblance of depth and veridicity to them. The teens however are a complete disaster: aside from Max's submissive friendzoned boy there is not a single one who doesn't sound world-weary, cynical, defensive, overly sarcastic, self-centered, verbally abusive, judgemental and egotistic. This, in short, is how someone who hates teenagers thinks teenagers are like. You will quickly slide into this state of mind where you will find a new NPC to talk to and think "great, let's see what kind of asshole this one is". Furthermore, none of these teens talk like real people, or even human beings at all: an annoying blue haired twat with illusions of grandeur will quiz you on photography to see if you're worthy of looking at his pictures, and then says: "You are a kindred spirit, Max. Would you care for a perusal of my portfolio? It's not a privilege I grant to many." Please shut up.
There is a definite component of persecution porn in this as well: almost everyone Max meets is either hostile or bullying towards her, battering her with verbal abuse, mockery, belittling her or blaming her for everything under the sun. It's a trick that gets old really quick.
Even the characters supposed to be written as kind, quiet and bullied do not escape this curse, with the mouth-breathing class pudge Alyssa, a walking stereotype if ever there was one, still having an obnoxious air of self-importance about her (more on her later) and most notably Kate, the christian fundamentalist girl who, in one of the game's boldest statements, is bullied to a suicide attempt by the most sociopathic students and therefore a prime candidate for the player's sympathy, still comes off as a defensive bipolar lunatic due to the wonky nature of the dialogue trees which make it look like her emotions turn on a dime without rhyme or reason, frustrating any and all attempts to get invested in her character and play along with Life is Strange's emotional endgame.
Her suicide scene is particularly egregious: with Max's time powers suspended, it boils down to a pop quiz to see if the player has paid attention to Kate's dialogue and the content of her room over the course of the brief interactions the game offers with her, all to convince her that at least one person cares about her so she'll walk off the ledge on the safe side. Getting any minor detail wrong causes her to jump to her death (don't worry, you can just reload a checkpoint and try again, negating any lasting impact or consequence that might be interesting) and the way the dialogue is written makes Kate sound like a complete asshole: "Oh Max, you remember my favorite scripture from the bible, I believe that you do care about me", then a second later "NO! You know I don't have any brothers, only sisters! I knew you didn't care about me Max!" and she jumps. The developers could and should have implemented a system in which the charcater gets increasingly frustrated the more answers the player gets wrong, recording multiple responses with varying degrees of aggravation, but they didn't, opting to make the character go from 0 to 100 with her mood without warning or regard for any reassurance achieved moments before. Result: she comes off as bratty and irritating to the point you want her to jump and get out of your face. Abject failure at storytelling.
It doesn't help that the voice acting for some of the characters, including important ones, is nothing short of atrocious, probably not the actor's fault so much as a woeful lack of direction in the recording booth, which has left them to fend for themselves and approximate (too often failing to) the necessary emotions, which further cements the failings of a very poor script.
On that note, the time has come to talk about Chloe. No hate for Ashly Burch, who is a talented actress who has done good work in The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, Saints Row and Borderlands, but Chloe is simply too poorly written for Burch to save her. A rudderless teenager lashing out at the world due to the sudden death of her father, there is is a lot to work with there, but all Chloe does throughout the entirety of the game is be a danger to herself and others, a chaotic narcissistic Candlewick to Max's Pinocchio that you cannot help but find obnoxious and will make your eyes roll back into your skull every time she walks on screen, let alone open her mouth to say nothing but something cynical and sarcastic, or to guilt trip Max into some sort of idiotic self-destructive behavior. She got under my skin so much that i tried to kill her every time the game puts her in harm's way: being repeatedly shot, run over by a train, mauled by a rabid dog, the works. Unfortunately the game won't let you go through with any of it, forcing a time rewind every time you try to get rid of her. "My dad died and abandoned me, you left and abandoned me, everyone abandons me! Fuck you Max and fuck everyone else!" Me, me, me, me, me. That's Chloe in a nutshell.
It is clear to the player that Max is in an abusive relationship, and Chloe is the abuser. Clear to everyone except the writing team, who are quick to brush all of the red flags aside as "poor girl, she has suffered" when all the signs of an abusive relationship are there: Chloe is controlling and jealous, berating Max for answering the phone to talk to another friend. Chloe spends the entire game guilt tripping Max on a constant loop for never calling when she was in Seattle, even though she herself never called. She does this to force Max to do things she wouldn't do otherwise. Chloe constantly talks to Max about her ex girlfriend and how amazing she was, belittling Max in the process. Chloe repeatedly points a gun at Max in jest, but clearly establishing a physical hierarchy through the simulation of violence. Chloe expects Max to take the fall for her screwups, like claiming the weed found in Chloe's room was hers, and repeatedly berates her if she doesn't. The list goes on and on.
And just to dispel any doubt that she is that way because of her father dying, even in the alternate timeline where the man is alive and well but Chloe is paralyzed on a wheelchair, she still aggressively manipulates Max to convince her to pull the plug on her so she can die, which would obviously land Max in monstruous legal troubles, possibly even 25 to life for murder. Chloe doesn't concern herself with that: she is a bad person who only thinks of herself and she doesn't care about Max at all.
Hysterically, the finale of the game gives you a choice between two endings (the usual button A or button B affair, with no impact deriving from your decisions in the game), all hinging on whether Max decides to sacrifice the entire town to save Chloe or the other way around. For some baffling reason this is a 50/50 split if the players' choice stat screen is to be believed, but one I didn't even have to think about: Chloe just had to go and it's a shame you only get to make that choice at the very end. She is a terminal sociopath under every angle of scrutiny, self-obsessed, manipulative and possessive to the extreme. The fact that the writers were evidently convinced they had written a complex and relatable character is disconcerting to say the least.
The above mention of the finale segues into another problem: your decisions have no lasting impact on the way the story ends, which wastes all the effort put into trying to elevate the game above Telltale levels of storytelling. Sure, your choices are brought up by the NPCs in lines of dialogue, and they might even hold a grudge which might lock or unlock some dialogue option, but the results are usually the same. Does it matter if David gets to install his surveillance cameras or not, or whether he has to leave home or not? No, he still shows up at the climax as normal. Does it matter if Victoria hates or likes Max by the end as a result of their interactions? No, she still gets kidnapped and killed because Max warns her about the wrong person anyway. Is there any consequence to killing Frank as opposed to wounding him or resolving peacefully? There isn't, only a few lines of dialogue.
So your choices don't ultimately matter, but does the game at least provide the illusion of player involvement in the development of the plot? Ultimately, no, because what really sets this game below the par line in that regard is the fact it forces you to pick between doing something stupid and something even more stupid. After Chloe steals a handgun from her stepfather, Max eventually faces the decision of who should keep that gun between her irresponsible sociopath of a friend and a shady drug dealer out for her blood. there is no sensible decision possible, like taking the gun back to the police or dropping it into the owner's mailbox. When the mean girls are sitting on the steps of Max's dormitory and she is too much of a wimp to just walk through them, your only recourse is to use your powers to drop a bucket of paint on them, which is blamed on the janitor (and Max doesn't care, because he's weird and talks to squirrels, so fuck him). Max very rarely does behave like an intelligent person would. The only time Max does something sensible is when she starts wondering if she's actually a self-righteous hypocrite, which of course she is.
On top of all this there are instances in which the game dips into pure and simple idiocy. A few examples: Max going to take a shower in her pijamas, hanging it inside the shower and them coming out perfectly dry, or how, after breaking into the drug dealer's trailer and stealing his encrypted notepad, Max and Chloe go knock on his door to ask him for the encyption key, which he gives to them with the right dialogue choices, without putting 2 and 2 together that they would only need it if they stole his notes (he freaks out if they know his dog's name though: "the only way you'd know his name is if you broke into my house!" what?) at which point he pulls a weapon on them. What about the aforementioned pudgy nerd Alyssa, who, over the course of the game, you can save from being hit with a mundane object five times: a paper ball, a football, being splashed with water by a car and so on. If you fail to do so even a single time, Alyssa will refuse your help during the final scene when the town is being ravaged by a tornado, and as a result dies. Even though she doted on you four times for somehow saving her from very minor inconvenience, she flees in terror at the sight of you to her death because you failed to warn her about a paper ball in class that one time. There are literal dozens of moments like these that are too stupid to be believed.
Lastly, the resolution of the story: this is where the game actually managed to surprise me, since the entire time I assumed that the missing girl you keep hearing about was actually going to be revealed to be alive and well somewhere, thus my brain discarded the possibility of this inane snoozefest hiding a killer at all. When the twist does come, and the friendly (though gratingly pretentious) hipster professor turns out to be a psycho murderer it feels absolutely out of the blue, mostly because his character is so incredibly irrelevant to your experience that you would be excused for even forgetting he existed in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if many players had a "who are you again?" moment, especially those who played the episodes months apart as they were released.
Life is Strange was an ambitious game, but ultimately its repulsive misportrayal of an abusive relationship as something pure and aspirational, plus its poor execution under every point of view completely negates whatever good ideas there might have been in there. Even stranger than life is the fact this series had the success that it did, spawning a disconcerting number of sequels and prequels. Sometimes you just can't stop failing upwards.
Acquiescence
1 year ago