Have you ever been humiliated? Did you ever walk out of the bathroom with toilet paper on your shoe, or confess your undying love for the crush who can't remember your name? Oh how we've all been there, in that hot flush of crushing embarrassment, and oh how we've all longed for the ability to simply rewind time and undo the horrors that had been done. I mean, forget going back in time to exterminate baby Hitler, what about my social life!
As luck would have it (or perhaps not...), this is pretty much the story behind the new episodic game, Life is Strange. After waking from an unusual vision in photography class, nerdy protagonist Max Caulfield is astounded to find that she has the ability to rewind time, and relive moments again and again - kind of like Groundhog Day, but with less Bill Murray. However, much as every wise old man always advises, with great power comes great responsibility - and that's where the story starts to get interesting.
Life is Strange is a point and click adventure game, where the decisions and choices you make affect the gameplay and the story - much like in the recent Walking Dead games. Regularly giving you "branches" where you can choose to tread one path, or turn your back and walk another - will you choose to give your local bully their comeuppance, or turn the other cheek and let your anger slide - with every choice you make, your unique version of the game begins to unfold, with each choice leading to its own consequences and outcomes. You know the sort of thing - "Oh, you thought saving his life was the right decision? Sike! He was the bad guy all along!"
Well, I should have brought an umbrella.
The game sees you walk in the shoes of college student Max, a nerdy, loser girl who just wants to fit into her new high class photography college. Awkward and socially anxious and with a little crush on her oh so handsome photography teacher, Max does reasonably well at blending in and remaining under the radar of the "popular girls" and "jock guys". Phew! That is, until she's overtaken by a vision, in which she's caught in an awful, tremendous storm, in which an unstoppable tornado is heading right for her hometown, Arcadia.
After awakening from her vision, Max suddenly, and weirdly, finds herself with the ability to rewind time - a power she only discovers when she ends up using it to rewind time, and re-arrange events to stop a girl from being shot. From there, you're able to rewind time as and when you see fit - and it's actually a really cool and innovative feature. If you've ever played a game with branching paths before, you'll know how much you end up wishing you could go back in time and unmake a decision when you see how things play out - and Life is Strange finally gives you that choice! If you choose one option, and find that actually, it didn't work out the way you planned, you can simply go back and unmake it! However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the other choice was any better - life sucks, right?
Now, Life is Strange is an episodic series, meaning that a 2 hour or so episode is released every other month, which will eventually form the complete story. As such, it's a bit tricky to determine what the story will actually be (as we've only played 1/5th of it) but it certainly seems to be turning into a tale of Max and her rebellious best friend Chloe against the social world, using the time rewind powers to save Arcadia from certain destruction. Hey, it beats studying for exams in the library!
I will rewind time to make myself socially normal! That makes sense, right?
Another issue with the episodic format is that it makes reviews like this tricky, as it's often difficult to tell how a game will turn out, with only two hours of gameplay to base it on. However, Life is Strange seems chock full of potential, with some well written characters that are genuinely likeable, if heavily clichéd, and an interesting central gameplay feature that brings something new to the genre. However, it also feels like the player does very little in the first episode - and beyond a few conversations, nothing really happens. As a first episode this is to be expected, it has a lot of context to set up, yet still, you end up finished the episode looking back and wondering how much you've actually done. Not much, is the answer.
On the PC version, there were also a lot of bugs and errors to deal with. At first, the game was unplayable due to a strange audio defect in which the voiceovers echoed and overlapped each other in a continuous and inaudible loop. No patch came my way from developers Dontnod to fix it, either, meaning we had to look up some obscure cure online. Then, as icing on the cake, the game was packed full of graphical errors and faults. All black coloured things in the game appeared as glitches, a horrible moulted rainbow colour that was very distracting from the game - again with no patch to fix it. Thanks Dontnod.
Who you calling jar-head?
But, the graphical errors aside, Life is Strange is a very beautiful game. The characters are wonderfully drawn and animated, realistic yet also artistic with the game's focus on art and photography. The location, Arcadia Bay, in Oregon, is a beautiful autumn swept town with a vast and pretty variety of oranges and reds, and so much attention is paid to the smallest detail, such as posters on the walls or simple litter found on the ground. The artists seemed to really care about making the game an incredible visual experience, and succeeded.
All in all, Life is Strange has a lot of potential. It's story has the power to become something impressive, as do its characters, and don't get me started again on how cool the time rewind power is. It completely changes the game. And while not much has happened, I'm sure that more is set to come in the upcoming episodes, in which Max and Chloe will have to find a way to deal with the impending doom heading for Arcadia. Have fun with that!
Format Reviewed: PC
