Life Is Strange

So much to say, so little cohesion. It's bullet time! No spoilers, I promise.

• Life Is Strange is an episodic game from Dontnod Entertainment, an indie developer with higher aspirations. The five episodes were released two or three months apart across the span of 2015, and I bought the whole game a few weeks ago. This is actually the first episodic game I've played, though at least one more is waiting in the backlog. I liked the format. One cohesive story, but broken into five somewhat stand-alone chunks. It felt like prestige television, kind of. I still haven't experienced an episodic game in "real time" but if the alleged Final Fantasy VII remake is indeed an episodic experience, I can't see myself waiting for the full game to drop before jumping right in. Wait, that reminds me - way back in 2009-2010 I played Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, which was technically episodic in nature. Still, you know what I mean, I think.
• So, Life Is Strange was only barely a game and much more of a "graphic adventure" in the vein of the Zero Escape series. There's more to do here - more optional scenes and much more of a choose-your-own-adventure vibe - but almost all of the gameplay consists of walking around, talking to people, and making small decisions that could have drastic impacts later on. More on that to follow...
• The core mechanic and story of Life Is Strange revolves around a girl named Max. She's a photography student at a prestigious school in a small coastal Oregon town. As the game begins, Max is haunted by visions of a massive storm engulfing and destroying the little town. She snaps out, wakes up in class, and immediately heads for the restroom to collect herself. There, she witnesses two students arguing about drug money when one of them pulls out a gun and shoots the other in the stomach. Distraught, Max suddenly rewinds time (yes, like in Braid) and finds herself back in photography class. To prevent the bathroom shooting, she pulls a fire alarm.
• The rest of the game hinges on this rewind mechanic. Mainly, it allows you to experiment with multiple dialogue options in certain scenes and then undo what you've said or done if you don't like where it's headed. Most decisions you can make in the game are minor at best. Early on, for instance, an oblivious girl gets hit in the back of the head by a football. Nothing major, but you can rewind time in order to warn her. (And why wouldn't you do this?) The game helpfully provides a little sound riff and an image of a butterfly flapping its wings (ha! get it?) any time you make a decision or take an action that will have consequences down the line. Early on, I found myself dwelling over these choices - even one as minor as whether or not to move a piece of wood in order to get a good picture of a bird's nest. By Episode 4 or 5, I was often barreling forward through my own decision trees without much regard for rewinding in order to see the alternatives, even when those decisions stopped being about footballs and birds nests and started dealing with life and death.
• In addition to the whole "the town is doomed" issue, a number of other subplots weave their way throughout the game and rise to various levels of prominence. For one, a student named Rachel has gone missing. For another, the unhinged drug dealer who shot the other kid in the bathroom is, well, a loose cannon - too bad his family "owns" this small town! For another, the school's head of security is a big old asshole and he's got it in for Max. And lastly - most prominently - Max runs into her old friend, Chloe, and their rekindled friendship is at the center of more or less all of those other plots as well.
• The game varied a lot in tone. This thing felt straight up Donnie Darko at first - small town, calamity on the horizon, high school drama in the background. Then as the missing student took focus and some shadier elements revealed themselves, it was much more Twin Peaks. Then as Max's decisions build up in weight and several alternate realities play out, many of them to horrible conclusions, I could only think of Ashton Kutcher's maligned Butterfly Effect. There's also a hint of Final Destination in there, at least insofar as one character who seems to be doomed no matter what happens.
• How have I gotten this far in without raving about the atmosphere? This game is fucking beautiful, not so much graphically, but just in its fully realized environments. When Max revisits Chloe's house for the first time in five years, there are a dozen or more little details that just reek of nostalgia and yearning. (That the game takes place in autumn is an ingenious touch.) Oh look, there's the wine stain on the living room carpet from the time Max and Chloe got busted sneaking hits from the bottle at thirteen. Here's a rusty charcoal grill in the backyard that maybe hasn't even been touched since Chloe's father died - but man, did he make the best burgers. Chloe's mom still works at the quaint little diner that every townie loves (Mario's, fellow bloggers?) This game makes you feel nostalgic for experiences you never even had - and plenty you did have. Are most of the students at Blackwell Academy trope-y high school stereotypes? Absolutely - but that doesn't make them ring false!
• The music. God damn. Using a blend of original scores and licensed tracks, Life Is Strange feels almost specifically designed for people like me - white men in their late twenties who went through high school and college ten years ago. The opening titles are set to Syd Matters' "To All of You," perhaps best known as a song from the O.C. prom episode that aired in 2006. Another episode begins with the use of Bright Eyes' "Lua," a track from 2004. There's "Crosses," José González, 2005. The list goes on and on. Would a high school senior/college freshman born in the mid-'90s really be all about indie-folk from ten years prior? I guess it's not impossible - I was plenty into some mid-'90s stuff myself in the mid-'00s - but, come on, Dontnod  -those songs aren't there for Max; they're there for me! And thank you!
• Most games that ask you to make moral choices (BioShock, Infamous, etc.) very clearly end up rewarding or punishing you accordingly. Infamous has a completely binary meter that very much wants you to act purely good or entirely evil; there's no incentive to dabble around with shades of grey. BioShock has a decidedly "good" ending that occurs only if you've rescued every single Little Sister in the game. Both of these games even give you achievements for being good or bad to varying extents. Here, there's none of that. If you want to play nice with the bitchy alpha girl on campus instead of humiliating her when you have the chance, that's your prerogative; the story will evolve accordingly, but there are no "points" to be gained or lost for being an everyday hero. Most major decisions you need to make will pit one character against another in some way, and you're forced to choose sides. Again, no "right" or "wrong" answer.
• The game's emotional climax - for me- came at the end of Episode 2. I'll spoil nothing, but let's just say that I learned "the hard way" that even having the power to rewind time can't prevent some tragedies, whereas being a good person can. There's a certain event that occurs here that the game seems to present in an inevitable manner, and only afterward did I realize I could have prevented it from happening by paying closer attention to something earlier on in the episode.
• That was a gut punch, but a very minor thing at the beginning of Episode 3 hit me even harder; I realized that a certain decision I'd made, which I was sure had been the right one, resulted in an unquestionably negative outcome. Not only was the tragedy that closed out Episode 2 not actually beyond my control; the much smaller one that opened up Episode 3 was very much entirely due to mistakes I'd made; had I never existed at all, the Episode 2 tragedy absolutely would have occurred, but not the mishap to begin Episode 3. Wow! Gut punch.
• The game grows darker and more unsettling as it goes on, and this is no easy feat; usually resolving some of these sinister mysteries takes the edge off of them, but not so here. By the same token, I can't say that the game stuck the landing, narrative-wise. It may have started reaching just a little too far somewhere in Episode 4, and Episode 5 was largely this time-bending nightmare vision sequence spent jumping between timelines - not even realities, as some of this was Lynchian nightmare fuel for the sake of Lynchian nightmare fuel. It worked beautifully - always love when a movie or a game can really convey what it is to have a "bad dream" - and some tweaked game mechanics worked well too, but allow me to say that, after how connected I felt to the rest of the narrative, the mystery, the small town, what have you, the ending just felt kind of "eh, alright, so that's how they were always going to play this?"
• Once I finished playing the game, my immediate course of action was twofold: one, look up how the game would have played out differently had I made a few different choices at major junctions. (Plenty to discuss here, but only with people who've beaten it already - Trev won't be long, and I know this is something Sween would enjoy!) And, two, start reading up on all the fan theories - not from after the game's conclusion, which was fairly unambiguous, but all the speculation people were doing back in 2015 when the game was only two, then, three, then four episodes old. It's crazy to see, with just a few months' hindsight, how easy it was for the fanbase at large to predict a few things and then also how out there and absurd some theories ended up being. Such is fandom in the age of the Internet - poor George R.R. Martin probably isn't capable of shocking his bookreaders anymore when it comes to A Song of Ice and Fire, as virtually every possible outcome is something fans have predicted after inscrutable analysis.
• So yeah, this game's not perfect. The ending isn't terrible, or even really bad - just a bit safe and predictable. And in a story-based game, a lackluster ending is enough not to consider this one of the all time greta games I've played. Still! I liked it a lot, and I liked how unique it was and I loved all the things it tried to do and I really loved how well it succeeded at so many of those things.
• Two big criticisms of the game were the lip-syncing and a perceived abundance of terrible teenspeak. On the former, I'll just say, yeah, it's pretty bad - but why are you playing video games for the lip-syncing? On the latter, I have to disagree. The characters in the game - high schoolers or college freshman, it's never exactly made clear, but they're all 18 or 19 - sound for the most part like I think "kids these days" actually sound. Probably far less insufferable, actually. My youngest sister just got out of college and she and her friends have some remarkably, extraordinarily weird, dumb, original turns of phrase. No self-respecting adult should want to play a video game full of kids who talk like high schoolers talk.

Check this out! That's really all I've got. For all I've rambled here, I still don't think I've been able to describe or convey just what it is this game gets right and how it makes you feel.