LogFAQs > #932858983

I did take a lot of time off! Okay, back to work. No more delays from me.

#33





Years of release: 2015 (most consoles)
Beaten?: Yes*

This does raise the question of what "beating" a game means, because I never actually took control of the game once - I 'played' this game via watching Dels play it over screensharing, and giving suggestions for stuff to do and talking about the game's plot and all that. I experienced the whole game and I very much "felt" like I had played it in the end, so I'm counting games like that where I meaningfully experienced it. I love playing story games like this with someone else, anyway; having someone to bounce crazy theories off really enhances of a game designed to make you have crazy theories like Life Is Strange.

Remember how I said I really liked Gone Home, but I felt like other games would come along and do similar things to Gone Home but better? Life Is Strange REALLY gave me Gone Home vibes - or I guess I should say Gone Home gave me LIS vibes because that's the order I played them in. Just with, uh, more narration and characters and gameplay. And instead of a single house, it's a small town in Oregon. Much like Gone Home, I like this story of interpersonal drama that takes place in a world that feels very lived in - I love the design of the homes, the school, all the little posters and fliers on the wall, all the objects sitting in the corner that you can look at.

Of course, I'm also just a sucker for time travel stories. I don't care too much if the time travel logic has issues - I enjoy exploring the different worlds that going back and making different choices has to offer, seeing how things would play out differently, changing the future by altering events in the past and all that. It's an interesting space to explore, and Life Is Strange uses it really well, offering the chance to rewind time and see how different actions play out before deciding which choice you want to commit to. Even if most of the game's decisions don't matter in the grand scheme of things, there's still a very "journey, not the destination" feeling to all of it, and the choices you make do come up later in little ways that I found pleasing. And best of all, I like that these choices create talking points - it's really fun to see the statistics of which choices people chose, and I wish more games featured something like this.

I like the cast in this game a lot. As much as I like the Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, etc series, there is something nice about this game's down to earth characters, and Max and Chloe are really easy to like and follow along the story with. All of the side characters are great too - this game was clever, and even the most unsympathetic-seeming characters have surprising nuance to them. This story plays in a lot of gray areas - characters who aren't simple, problems that aren't easy to fix - and it does it without feeling too melancholy, despite some of the more tragic outcomes of the game's story.

I played this game as an episodic thing, and it was pretty fun to do it that way, since that built up anticipation for each episode. Episode 2 was definitely a highlight for me, as the climax of that one featured some really cool use of the game's mechanics as well as being an emotional peak as well, though some of the twists and turns near the ends of episodes 3 and 4 were very welcome as well. A lot of people didn't like the ending because it kind of ends exactly where it looks like it's going to without your choices influencing it, but - I mean that's partly the point? And I don't mind that the story winds up arriving at the place it says it's going to. Not everything needs to be a twist ending! I don't want to get into it here, just to say that I didn't feel too much discontent with the plot overall. I had a few issues here and there, and some intrigue didn't build up to anything as interesting as I had hoped, but it was overall good.

I think that's most of what I have to say about it - it's been a few years so maybe if I had played it more recently I'd have more stuff on the brain. While not my singular favorite story game, it set a very high bar for what a game like this could be. I'll play Before the Storm and LIS2 at some point eventually, but I did not get around to those this decade.

Random aside - this was the game I had the most trouble getting screenshots for. Most things came up with BTS or LIS2 and I just didn't find any pics that I found particularly satisfying for this one. It's strange that this of all games would be the one.