Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
I went into Life is Strange Episode 1 trying very hard to like it. I knew it wouldn't be perfect; as much as I love Remember Me, developer DONTNOD's previous release, that game still had its problems. Even so, Life is Strange looked different. It promised to take a thread of Remember Me's interesting but underutilized Remixing mechanic and weave it into a more contemporary, more relatable tapestry. Given that the combat was one of the more awkward parts of Remember Me I also wasn't too upset to hear that Life is Strange would be an episodic adventure game, heavily inspired by Gone Home and Telltale Games' recent work. So far, so good.
But after playing episode one, I feel conflicted. While I still admire what DONTNOD is trying to do with this game, its heavy-handed approach risks souring something that could be quite special. Here's why:
Mild spoilers ahead, so consider yourself warned. Life is Strange follows the story of Max, an enthusiastic photographer in 11th grade at a prestigious private school. That school (Blackwell Academy) is coincidentally located in the town she grew up in but moved away from about five years earlier. She's been back for about a month when she starts having visions, and discovers that she has the ability to rewind short stretches of time. In typical game protagonist fashion you meet a colorful cast of characters whose lives you will probably fix or ruin at some point, you find out about a girl who's gone missing, and you realize that bad things are literally on the horizon.
There's no denying that Life is Strange was influenced by Gone Home and Telltale, to the point that it might be tempting to make some slightly sharper accusations especially in regards to the former. This is not one of my problems with the game, but it's something I still want to address. As a friend of mine pointed out while we played, the fact that there are precious few games that really give a shit about teenage girls and their lives makes it very easy to pick out a singular point of influence like this -- to the point of maybe even using words like 'copy' en lieu of the much kinder 'homage'. Meanwhile, first-person shooters can and do draw their inspiration from hundreds of different sources. This is how almost every creative field works, right? You do your own thing, but you draw inspiration from those who have done similar work before you. Maybe you slip in a few clear nods to them where you can, a wink and a nudge between you and your audience. "We loved that game, too!"
That doesn't mean there isn't a problem with invoking those comparisons, though. Life is Strange's biggest issue in my eyes is its lack of subtlety, something that Gone Home has in spades. The first episode plays out like a check list of all the plot points required for teen drama. Bullying, drugs, guns, and all the usual suspects that you might find stretched out across an entire season of Degrassi are shoehorned together into the very first episode, right alongside the introduction of the game's core time travelling mechanic. There's a lot going on. While most of these points will undoubtedly be called upon again in coming episodes, it was all a bit much right off the bat. Every single one of the issues presented certainly deserves to be there, but when they're all thrown in at the same time it starts to feel a bit like when the school calls an assembly so you can watch the drama club put on a play called "Trouble at Blackwell Academy".
That's not to mention how the characters themselves talk. There's been a lot of buzz about questionable/dated slang in Life is Strange, and it's true that that is often quite jarring, but that wasn't what bothered me the most. As a former wordy and precocious teen, I found the way that current wordy and precocious teen Max talks often seems... Rigid. Even bizarre. "Good to see Avedon among the masters... Dali, of course..." She muses as she glances at a row of books in her Photography classroom. The way that Max and her classmates communicate can feel unnatural at best, painfully constructed at worst. And it is. Obviously, all these things are written out on a script somewhere. Instead of masking that fact, though, it's underscored again and again.
Beyond the lack of subtlety in its writing is the lack of subtlety in its actual mechanics. Whenever a relatively significant choice is made, Max wonders loudly if she should rewind and choose a different path. "What if I had done this? What if I hadn't done that?" Yes, Life is Strange Episode 1, I can control time. I recall. Thank you.
For that matter, the progression puzzles are very adventure gamey, which is another area where reminding me about the existence of Gone Home could be a mistake. Puzzles in Gone Home felt very natural, very organic, because the player and the player character's experiences in that space overlapped so well. You were new to this labyrinthine house, and so was she. Of course neither of you knew where anything was. You were left to piece together the answers heuristically because you weren't in a big puzzle box, you were in her family's house. Reminding me of that, of how great that kind of problem solving feels compared to the typical sprinkler-meets-paint-can approach that Life is Strange actually delivers, isn't a good idea.
I'm not ready to give up on Life is Strange. I want to see where the story is going, and I would be lying if I said the game's blend of softly painted assets and hard-edged models didn't appeal to me on a purely aesthetic level. I also want more games like this to be made -- good, bad, or otherwise -- so that maybe one day we'll have more than a handful of points of comparison that we can make between them.
You can pick up Life is Strange Episode 1: Chrysalis on Steam, and episode 2 is due out next month.
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