Life Is Strange is a game that needs to be played rather than read about, I’ll try my best to explain but it’s difficult when the game is almost all spoilers!
Originally released as episodic content through 2015, Life Is Strange is a game that looked to take the idea of story based narrative game but gives it a much more open feel with emphasis on taking in your surroundings and absorbing the finer details.
You play as Max, a photography student who discovers that she has the ability to reverse time and see into the future. Foreseeing the destruction of your town, it’s up to you to think of a way to stop it.
But instead of focusing on that big main event you’re forced to play out the life of a teenager at a private school…what a ridiculous notion! – that was exactly what I said out loud when I started playing. Whereas most narrative-based games drop you into very intense stories, Life Is Strange instead has you following a mostly normal narrative with the overall notion of there being a bigger storyline kept to small portions of the game.
Published by Square Enix. Available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows.
The weird thing with this is that it’s actually the parts when you’re being a normal teenager that are the most compelling, during these broad sequences you’re trying to prove someone isn’t cheating or being at a party trying to find a friend, this is when the game really stands out. For days after I’d made seemingly innocuous choices, I found myself still thinking about how my choices have affected the story as it played out, and how the stories within the stories are what really kept me going.
Later on into the game, when the bigger story started to reveal itself, I did start to find myself longing back to when I was rewinding time to stop a girl from getting hit in the head by a football, but even then some of the choices I had to make left me staring blankly into the screen with no idea of what to do. That’s why Life Is Strange stands out so much in my mind every choice I ever had to make felt like the biggest choice of my life, I felt like I was actively deciding the fate of the characters I was seeing in the game, for a game about a teenage girl to really draw me in and make me feel like I was involved in every aspect of storytelling is no easy task!
To be honest, this isn’t so much a game review as the game part isn’t something you can go into much detail about without ruining it for everyone. But aside from its unique premise, as with a lot of games of this type, you spend a lot of time walking around exploring your surroundings, collecting items and casually chatting to people. The idea is to make the right decisions and to use your rewind ability when you think you did something wrong. The gameplay is decent enough, nothing too revolutionary but it’s the perfect frame to hold an enlightening story that you write yourself over time – which you can control don’t forget.
Life Is Strange is an emotional rollercoaster and is something you should definitely check out if you’re into more story-based games and don’t mind gut-wrenching decisions that will make you question your entire existence.
Author – Hal, Plymouth store
