The reason I’m writing my opinion on Life is Strange is really simple – I hated my first hour with the game 3 years ago. The writing, the characters, the pacing – it all felt wrong, badly written, all “how do you do fellow kids” and I just quit. But there’s just so much love the game has I tried to guilt trip myself into getting back to it several times. Only now did I completely open myself to going through it as much as I can, and went through the whole game. And I’m actually glad I did.
Now, the opening hour is still dreadful. In fact, if I could point to the absolute worst parts of the entire game I’d name the most of Episode 1 and most of Episode 5. Episode 1 does feel boring, badly written and just off throughout most of it until close to the end, and actually the scene that kicked off the game development, where things come together, where plot properly begins and suddenly characters start feeling well-written. And Episodes 2 through 4 are really well done.
What Life is Strange is – a mix of supernatural mystery story (very clearly influenced by Twin Peaks), with a very down to earth life story of young adults dealing with everyday things, with different types of relationships in a society. So you have Max, the main character, having an ability to rewind time, which she doesn’t understand, trying to uncover something that is clearly wrong about the town she just came back to. But mostly dealing not with this, but with the fact that she’s a shy student, who is a bit alien to the town she hasn’t been to for 5 years, trying to connect to new people and reconnect with her best friend from teenage years. And dealing with simple choices like taking a hit for a friend, or comforting a person being bullied much more often than being a supernatural detective.
After the really slow and bad start, it actually works. The characters feel alive with truly amazing voice acting backed up by really good animation work and very cool art style selected for the game. Story does go very interesting directions and keeps you engaged with both the “simple life” things and the “mystery stuff”. And, surprisingly, the ability to rewind time doesn’t lessen the impact of your choices but instead adds to them, and hits home that there are no easy choices. Sure, this is “the Telltale formula” of gameplay used since The Walking Dead: Season 1, but it’s being used here in a much richer way than Telltale ever did and might be the best example so far of this type of game I’ve seen so far.
Things do get messy by the end. Most of Episode 5 feels like a rather bad attempt to bring a lot of ideas and themes into one finishing act, though I can’t blame the developers for trying – they really set a high bar for themselves, and while the ending(s) on their own are great conclusions nonetheless, with a lot of story scenes leading up to them, the Episode itself feels rather poorly made, gameplay- and pacing-wise. Hell, they even put some of the optional “collectible” stuff in parts where they would completely ruing the pacing if you’d try to go for them (so I didn’t). This Episode is also slightly broken, with lip sync simply not working for some scenes and other weird occasional glitches.
But they did try. And Episodes 2 through 4 make up for the slow start and messy ending parts. Now, a part of me wants to compare the game to Night in the Woods, since there are parallels to be drawn – games about young adults dealing with personal stuff and mysterious crap in a small town, with the personal relationship stories being the most important part. And if I’d go for this comparison it wouldn’t be in Life is Strange’s favor… but that would really be very stupid of me to do, as the games are very different in what themes they want to explore and it’d also be down to personal bias – I’m more connected to the experiences and characters on NitW, rather than the ones in Life is Strange. Yet, I have to admit, that despite never being like Max or even really knowing a lot of people like Max, I could “get in her head” and understand the experiences the characters were going through, just because of how well acted and, eventually, well written they became.
So, somewhat to my own surprise, I would highly recommend Life is Strange – just be aware that you have to “suffer” through the opening hour or so until it starts getting good. Can’t say I’m interested in seeing more games in this universe (as there is a prequel now and sequel announced), as the game feels very self-contained. But I’ll be lying if I tell you that I wasn’t glad I finally did play through Life is Strange.