A few weeks ago, while checking a list of recommended games on Steam I came across Life Is Strange.
I watched the trailer, and it seemed to me like a very interesting premise. I researched a little more, and I though the idea was really awesome, so I decided to buy it, and I would recommend anyone to do so too.
In the game, you are a young 18-years old girl studying in some academy in a small town. Because of a confrontation, you discover you can go back in time for a couple of minutes, giving you the ability to change actions and conversation, and to obtain clues and knowledge to use after rewinding time.
This is the basic premise, and then you need to explore this world with the small town and the academy, investigating certain dark occurrences and a disappearance.
From the start, the game gave me a very strong "Twin Peaks" atmosphere. The setting is quite similar, a small town with power plays, secrets and some supernatural occurrences. You can even find a "Fire walk with me" graffiti at some moment, so this similarity is done on purpose. The atmosphere becomes quite mysterious and interesting thanks to that.
At the same time, the calm indie soundtrack makes you feel relaxed and sad, slowing down the pace and making you sometimes to just sit and observe the scenery. You want to read and observer every little detail of each of the places you can visit, to make sure you don't miss a thing. The process is incredibly immersive, and you get easily lost in this world.
The time-travel skill is really useful, and there are several nice puzzles where you need to play with the ability to extract information, or fix an action that caused unexpected effects (like breaking something by accident). Lots of actions show a small butterfly afterwards, indicating to you that the action will have consequences. Most of the time those key actions are based on conversations, about what you decide to tell or do with someone. And there's way too many to easily control them, so plenty of times you set for a certain course and hope for the best.
Of course here a big point is that you know you're in a game, so sometimes some action may seem weird if you would be in real life. Since you're in the narrative of the game, where you are extra aware of being in a story that follows certain tropes, you need to guess if sometimes the game is playing a trope straight with you or is trying to subvert it (or if it is trying to make you think they subverted it when they played it straight actually), so it is quite a fun mental exercise of deciding which action will have the best outcome in such a story, the usual "I know you know I know you know", and trying to guess in which step we need to stop. Hopefully you can always rewind and see the direct outcomes, but the ripples these create are hard to predict.
The game comes in episodes, and last episode (episode 5) has not come out yet and is expected in October. I finished the first 2 episodes and I'm in the middle of the third, delaying it a little bit so I don't need to wait for the 5th one.I don't want to get caught in a cliffhanger or very tense situation, waiting to see the final outcome of everything....
The story turns very serious quite fast and punches you in the gut repeatedly, reminding you that it was your choices the ones that created this situation. It is clearly dramatic, and we still don't know how it will end, but even with time-travelling, the situation you put yourself in is quite complicated and hard to solve....
I will say that it is true that every single thing you do may affect greatly the outcome of the game, and that some plot points that I have seen would not have been possible using other choices. The game itself does not have hard puzzles, but the overall puzzle of making the best choice selection is not an easy one, and it makes you obsess about past actions while considering things very carefully.
I believe it is a very innovative game (even if other games have done the time-travel thing already), also in the aspect of characters used and the story it tells. Not many games really commit to the idea that your choice matters, triggering completely different outcomes based on that and in this way creating not a single story, but the possibility for thousands.
This game was recommended by Feminist Frequency because of its use of female characters, and I was appalled to know some publishers wanted to convert the main character into a boy. The story works perfectly as it is because it is a girl, and I cannot understand how some people, in this day an age, still believe such a game cannot work. However, I want to dedicate another post about these topics, soon...
For the moment, I'll just finish saying that this is an amazing game that will suck you into its world, and you need to give it a try, it is totally worth it.
I watched the trailer, and it seemed to me like a very interesting premise. I researched a little more, and I though the idea was really awesome, so I decided to buy it, and I would recommend anyone to do so too.
In the game, you are a young 18-years old girl studying in some academy in a small town. Because of a confrontation, you discover you can go back in time for a couple of minutes, giving you the ability to change actions and conversation, and to obtain clues and knowledge to use after rewinding time.
This is the basic premise, and then you need to explore this world with the small town and the academy, investigating certain dark occurrences and a disappearance.
From the start, the game gave me a very strong "Twin Peaks" atmosphere. The setting is quite similar, a small town with power plays, secrets and some supernatural occurrences. You can even find a "Fire walk with me" graffiti at some moment, so this similarity is done on purpose. The atmosphere becomes quite mysterious and interesting thanks to that.
At the same time, the calm indie soundtrack makes you feel relaxed and sad, slowing down the pace and making you sometimes to just sit and observe the scenery. You want to read and observer every little detail of each of the places you can visit, to make sure you don't miss a thing. The process is incredibly immersive, and you get easily lost in this world.
The time-travel skill is really useful, and there are several nice puzzles where you need to play with the ability to extract information, or fix an action that caused unexpected effects (like breaking something by accident). Lots of actions show a small butterfly afterwards, indicating to you that the action will have consequences. Most of the time those key actions are based on conversations, about what you decide to tell or do with someone. And there's way too many to easily control them, so plenty of times you set for a certain course and hope for the best.
Of course here a big point is that you know you're in a game, so sometimes some action may seem weird if you would be in real life. Since you're in the narrative of the game, where you are extra aware of being in a story that follows certain tropes, you need to guess if sometimes the game is playing a trope straight with you or is trying to subvert it (or if it is trying to make you think they subverted it when they played it straight actually), so it is quite a fun mental exercise of deciding which action will have the best outcome in such a story, the usual "I know you know I know you know", and trying to guess in which step we need to stop. Hopefully you can always rewind and see the direct outcomes, but the ripples these create are hard to predict.
The game comes in episodes, and last episode (episode 5) has not come out yet and is expected in October. I finished the first 2 episodes and I'm in the middle of the third, delaying it a little bit so I don't need to wait for the 5th one.I don't want to get caught in a cliffhanger or very tense situation, waiting to see the final outcome of everything....
The story turns very serious quite fast and punches you in the gut repeatedly, reminding you that it was your choices the ones that created this situation. It is clearly dramatic, and we still don't know how it will end, but even with time-travelling, the situation you put yourself in is quite complicated and hard to solve....
I will say that it is true that every single thing you do may affect greatly the outcome of the game, and that some plot points that I have seen would not have been possible using other choices. The game itself does not have hard puzzles, but the overall puzzle of making the best choice selection is not an easy one, and it makes you obsess about past actions while considering things very carefully.
I believe it is a very innovative game (even if other games have done the time-travel thing already), also in the aspect of characters used and the story it tells. Not many games really commit to the idea that your choice matters, triggering completely different outcomes based on that and in this way creating not a single story, but the possibility for thousands.
This game was recommended by Feminist Frequency because of its use of female characters, and I was appalled to know some publishers wanted to convert the main character into a boy. The story works perfectly as it is because it is a girl, and I cannot understand how some people, in this day an age, still believe such a game cannot work. However, I want to dedicate another post about these topics, soon...
For the moment, I'll just finish saying that this is an amazing game that will suck you into its world, and you need to give it a try, it is totally worth it.
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