No good deed goes unpunished

I finished Life is Strange a while ago,  although I spoiled myself about lots of details of the game before that. Anyway, I wanted to comment on it....

I really like this game and liked playing it. However, after finishing chapter 3, I encountered something that bothers me a bit.

Without going into much detail, at the end of this section you discover you can go back in time lots of years to certain moments if you have a picture of it, and you use that to save someone's life.

Of course, the moment you do, someone else's life in that family gets completely screwed and ends up in a wheelchair.

This bothers me in some games and stories. I understand that stories were everybody is always happy are boring and you need some type of tension or drama...but in some stories it seems some people are predestined to have shitty lives and they can only choose between shitty outcomes...that's especially true in time-travelling stories. In reality, most time travelling stories should be boring because you can just jump back and forth until you fix all the little details, but plenty of such stories don't do that, even if it makes no sense...most of them just jump between drama 1 and drama 2...Stein's Gate is another good example, I loved the anime but the predetermination was very annoying because it made no fucking sense.

If your time travel story is fixed and you cannot change facts, that's fine. It gets annoying when you can actually change facts but there's personal people that get screwed always no matter what.

I mean, if the point was to stop a war (the let's kill Hitler scenario), I understand a certain predestination level because such things are never caused by single events, it is an accumulation  of them...but someone getting killed or in an accident? not that many variables...

Seems to me a lot of time-travel stories have these lazy moments where something "cannot be changed" and everything is like "dramatic" and "sad" and all this.....and well, it sounds ridiculous because as said, usually the solution is stupidly easy and it's so clear this is done for the drama of it, it takes away value in the end. 

Then there's the other type of stories that abuse the drama and bad things happening, the superhero stories where they are responsible for the well being of everyone (I'm remembering daredevil first seasons). The moment they deviate from this or decide to take a day off, the evil guys rape all their family, kill their dogs, behead their romantic interest and make them to be fired from their normal job because they failed to protect everyone by taking just a few moments to actually rest (which is something necessary for people not to go insane). Everything is overly dramatic and grey morality gets punished instantly in some cases (i'm also remembering Spiderman and uncle Ben,  of course).

Regarding indie games, I read an article a while ago where it was mentioned the overly dramatic tone plenty of them have, and I have to agree on that....again, I understand the need to have plot by having struggles and dramatic things happening....but come on,some of them are so over-the-top that it ends being comical sometimes, like that joke of a story where a girlfriend without ovaries gets a transplant from her boyfriend that ends with "share if you cry every time".

I´ve played What remains of Edith Finch recently too, and that's another example. I mean, the premise of the game is based on that, that everyone in that family died too soon with different type of causes. You get to experience all the ways in which this happens. Some are dramatic, some are funny with their black-humour, some are deep, some are nonsensical, but in the end it´s a bit...I don´t know, it leaves you with a feeling that nothing matters much because the characters will suffer regardless.

I read this sentence recently, I believe from Terry Pratchett now that I think of, saying that you can make your characters suffer and go though gruesome ordeals, but you must have hope, there should be hope for a better world, or people will just go numb and not care anymore.

Indie films, indie games, and other artsy things tend to abuse on the drama sometimes to the point of nonsensical, and at the end it feels like bad world-building, in my case it removes interest in the story. I would say that if you set up a situation that is dramatic, no matter how unlikely, as a start, that's ok, you need conflict of some kind to make stories interesting. But if you compound it by adding more and more drama, it becomes ridiculous. It moves the narrative from "this people have problems" to "this people are basically cursed". I don't know if you remember Police Squad! movies, but one of the gags was always an exaggeration of bad things happening to some character, they don't only get shot a thousand times, they get hit in the head, put their foot into a bear trap, bang their fingers against a table, catch fire, and drown. So you have the dramatic unlikely event, getting shot, and you add all the other things and the unlikeness of it just makes it funny. Same applies for content that is supposed to be serious, if it starts resembling a Police Squad! gag of bad things happening, it gets ridiculous to the point of taking your attention out of the content....   

Life Is Strange

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.