Life is Strange is an adventure game that comes to us via publisher Square Enix and relative newcomer indie developer Dontnod, founded by former Criterion Entertainment, Ubisoft and EA staff. As of yet Dontnod is only known for Remember Me, which had its own embittered tale with warm reviews, lukewarm sales and a controversial history. Dontnod’s Life is Strange opens up with a title card familiar to anyone who may have cracked open a Telltale title in the past, informing us our actions will have long reaching consequences. This application of Telltale’s model is clear to the end, when Life is Strange matches your gameplay stats against other players who’ve cleared the game. So essentially while Dontnod is still a somewhat fresh faced developer that’s got to reestablish themselves in the industry, the bar they have set for themselves is high. They want this to be a Telltale title set in a small town.
The not so subtly named Max Caulfield is the master of the ‘deer in headlights’ look.
The game slots you into the role of the doe eyed Max Caulfield, a photography student who attends the prestigious Blackwell Academy, a boarding school for America’s elite artists and thinkers located in the backwater town of Arcadia, Maine. Max is almost a near perfect character to navigate the drama bomb waters of high school, as she’s not well liked, nor is she reviled, she’s just kind of a nobody, a shy outsider trying to uncover a world that’s new to her. She’s an excellent everyman, sorry, everygirl, for the player to inhabit and use to represent their will in this world, however this falls to the game’s detriment in other moments of the story, and I’ll explain why later in the review.
Max wakes up with a bizarre set of powers. You see, she has the ability to rewind time. While the power to time travel may be a very shocking thing for some, Max seems pretty damn cool with the fact she can manipulate the infinite and gets a grasp on it quite fast. She addresses it with no more than the occasional “Man, this is kind of weird.” While Max is just a little too cool with her new gift for comfort, I do appreciate how she goes about using it. Often she’ll affect time to get the right answer to a question, make herself more (or less) popular with certain individuals. It does feel very much like something a teenager might do when gifted with incredible abilities; irresponsibly abuse them. Some of the puzzles based around her time rewind powers are a bit weak, and she uses it to gain information that as a photography savant she should likely already know, but overall the gift works more for the narrative than against.
The game unfolds much like a independent film, a character drama more driven by a want to study the individual than the plot. While this approach is fine in practice, it’s a very difficult art to nail in execution. Max works nicely as a lead for an adventure game, though this makes her less great for a study, there’s nothing that really makes her tick aside from her general love of photography. She keeps a diary, but her journal entries are more exposition than character development. Max is a good little girl, and whether you play her a bit too saintly, a bit too cowardly, or a bit too brave, all her paths seem to lack the kind of serious bite you may find with Guybush Threepwood or Clementine or quite literally Bigby Wolf. I’m not looking for someone who may be an exact copy of those Adventure leads that came before, but I am looking for someone who is interesting to watch, especially if presented with more character than drama.
You can tell the developers of this title have a love for all things auteur, alternative and sublime. It’s got hints of The Dreamlife of Angels and American Beauty, mated off with Twin Peaks and Twilight Zone, though sadly doesn’t hit the depths of any of those works. They make constant references to classic anime, sci-fi shows, novels, and a few of the punk and rock musicians of the 70s, 80s and 90s. The game often makes fun of the fact Max is a hipster, but you can quite readily tell the programmers aren’t far off from hipsters themselves, and when their lead makes a reference to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or the October Country you have to wonder if it’s Max talking or the developers just using her as a mouthpiece.
The mysteries in the game aren’t quite strong enough to keep you solely motivated, with the writers blowing their load far too early by resolving nearly every question the first act offers up. Other titles such as their strong Telltale competitors, or survival horror with a similar format such as Alan Wake, will hold back their hand, really draw you in and wait a few episodes until clearing up its finer plot points. Yes there are still a few unanswered questions at the end of Life is Strange Episode 1, but they aren’t quite as appetite whetting as Dontnod would like to believe.
There’s another problem here, and that’s with the games supposed sense of consequence, often the game will tell you via dialogue or a journal entry you should feel bad about some of the choices you made, versus a Telltale title where you actually feel bad for your actions, it’s an emotional nuance that may have added massively to the Life is Strange experience. In fact deflating its own balloon is the risk Life is Strange carries through out, though time travel is a key mechanic, the game ‘warning’ you which actions have consequences spoils a bit of the surprise later.
It’s really the little things in this game that begin to detract from it. One example is the game going out its way to mention these high schoolers are 18 years of age or older. So the characters go from feeling like geniuses who will change the arts and sciences, to children perpetually stuck in remedial courses. I completely understand this may have been done for legal reasons, but perhaps a single disclaimer at the top of the game or a bit more subtlety in advertising their ages may have helped. The game presents itself as a coming-of-age story, but then the characters act far too much like petty clique clinging clichés than the budding adults they should be.
The high school staff and Max’s classmates are initially believable (emphasis on initially), taking on the mannerisms and slanguage of today’s teenagers. However the game often tip toes the line between believable dialogue and parodies of the all American teen twittersphere. Life is Strange will often trip up and abuse language to the point you can’t help but laugh at, not with, the game. One such character that comes to mind is the title’s rebellious punk grrl Chloe, who will often slip “hella” into her dialogue, which I’m not sure was cool slang, ever. Not helping the occasional slang abuse is the performance of the voice actors. Though the lead actress behind Max (Hannah Telle) often tries to deliver a believable performance, with Chloe (Ashley Burch), the second best performer until she pushes another ‘hella’ through her teeth, the rest of the cast has a tendency to sound too over the top, too stale, or like they’ve watched one too many teen angst movies.
It’s a fairly pretty game that does a lot with a little, there’s not a whole lot of depth to the character models, textures or lighting, but it worked for the simplicity of it all. The music selection is excellent, and the environments were well done enough I easily felt I could get lost in both the town of Arcadia and the campus of Blackwell Academy. While I ran into one or two oddly heavy load times, most of my experience was smooth running.
Ultimately I had very mixed feelings upon completing episode 1. It didn’t turn me off so much I don’t want to dive into episode 2, there are definitely enough sparks there to keep me interested, but I also can’t whole heartedly recommend digging into it from the get-go like I was able to with Game of Thrones episode 1. For all the game’s weaker puzzles, it had moments like the episode’s climax that put Max’s time travel powers to excellent use. Life is Strange is most definitely a ‘wait and see’ title, the overall mystery may ultimately prove worth it, your choices and actions may be largely consequential afterall, Max may end up a character with far more depth, and Dontnod may take us on a wild ride. However for now Life is Strange feels a bit too derivative of stronger works, falling just short of the notches it needs to turn it into a classic.
