Is anyone else playing this? It reminds me of Myst or choose your own adventure books. Cool game.
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Admittedly, I'm a little addicted to it I just played through episode 4 earlier today. I also criticize it a little too, due to it's sometimes over reliance on dramatic endings for each episode and the fact it feels less like a game and more like a TV shows with a few choices, some of which seem to be almost inconsequential. Still like though, and I'll still be getting chapter 5 when it comes out.
Wow this has been SO full of twists it makes me dizzy. It is actually starting to seem more like a Bioware game now and not as much like a choose your own adventure. The choices seem so far to matter in the side stories only, the main story seems trapped in a tornado to make a shameless pun.
I finally finished ep4 and without spoilering... I NEVER saw that coming.
The only thing I saw coming was the whole alternate timeline thing, including how it had to end.
Actually as long as Max can survive this and can get to a photo showing herself earlier... which shouldn't be hard for our selfie queen. Then creating an alternate timeline would fix this.
What has me totally stumped is the Eco-disaster story line. I have NO idea what that is about though they dropped a clue.
Also I totally dismissed the creepy things Mr Jefferson was doing so yes HUGE surprise when we learn about him.
Oh and did you notice the view out of Cloe's upstairs hall window the one that triggers the "This is the only thing that never changes" script actually changes AFTER you undo your alternate timeline?
I've been wanting to try it, but haven't yet.
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I just finished Episode 5. This is what I posted on Facebook about it and it contains no spoilers.
I just spent over an hour pondering the final choice I had to make in a game called Life is Strange. After beati.. no, that's not the right word. After finishing the game... I kind of just want to lay in my bed right now.
I've never played a game with such a rollercoaster of feelings in my life before. I doubt I ever will again. I consider Life is Strange to be a pivotal moment in gaming history; it will forever alter how people perceive storytelling in video games.
This was an experience. One that is holds as much impact as other moments in gaming history, like Aeris in FF7, or the ending of ME3, or even the revolution of FPS that was Halo and Goldeneye. I think this will be a game that will, hopefully, have a very positive influence over the gaming industry. Because it's a game that shows that storytelling and video games *can* go together. That you can even build a game entirely upon the plot of the story and interactions with characters.
It has very little in mechanics to it, really, and some of them can be kind of clunky, but it was an experience I think everyone, gamer and non-gamer, should get to enjoy.
Over-all, it was a sort of short game, to be certain. But the story and characters of the game are forever going to be etched in my mind. Life is Strange is definitely one of the greatest games I've ever played. For better or for worse, I'll never experience anything like it again.
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Tels, I generally agree with you, but on this one we're at odds.
I'm going to do my best to avoid direct spoilers, but some things in here could be seen as spoiling, so be warned of that:
Life is Strange is a game modeled in the Telltale mold of game design, making it more of a visual novel akin to Phoenix Wright and other such games, a 'game' more in name than in execution. There's nothing wrong with this, I love games like Phoenix Wright, and from a story perspective I enjoyed The Walking Dead (season 1, season two was...meh.)
If you know this going in, you'll be able to grasp onto things more easily. The characters range from somewhat likable to entirely forgettable, with very little in between. There's quite a lot of bait and switching with different ideas and such, and the native american symbolism and such has no satisfying pay off.
The likable characters are enough to carry the story as long as you're fine with yet another tragic tale of "female character dealing with creepy man with large sexual abuse overtones", and some moments in the game really do shine (such as those with Kate Marsh in episode 2), while others are played incredibly tactlessly (Chloe Price in the beginning of episode 4), which feels most like an ableist pat on the back rather than the emotions it should give due to how it treats being disabled as this 'worst thing ever', although the ending to that scene does barely help to restore it, if slightly.
The problem with this game, and really the reason why I would call it a "game" in quotation marks is that the much vaunted concept of choice doesn't factor in nearly as much as it should. Main characters can die with shockingly little impact on the game, making your choices feel hollow, and the highly touted 'butterfly effect' is used for the most inane of things, such as watering your plants and letting a bird into your friend's house, making the implementation feel silly and entirely ancillary.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the final chapter though, where the villain of the game (someone you know thankfully, it didn't come out of nowhere) becomes a 1 dimensional parody of themselves, and the entire game seemingly plays out on rails. Now it's a Telltale style game, we're used to that, but before you couldn't see the rails, but in the last episode, it's PAINFULLY obvious, and there's also a dreadful amount of padding in the last chapter too in the section before the ending.
The largest problem is that the two endings completely negate any choices you've made up to this point, and for a game based around celebrating your choices, this is an entire betrayal of the premise. I have problems with the endings themselves that are more spoilery, so I'll refrain from mentioning them, but suffice it to say that they feel less like conclusions and more like sadness porn, although perhaps I didn't have nearly as deep a connection with these characters as others.
The potential of the games is really dashed by how the series ends, and as someone who gradually grew to like these characters from hating the cardboard cutouts that they were in episode 1 (they were HELLA bad), it felt like I as a participant in these games ceased to matter, that my input was invalid, and that I was simply picking the end to someone else's story instead of my own.
There's also a lot to this game that feels like queer baiting as well, something that's a real problem in media today where they can present a non straight couple but never confirm it, so that they can have their cake and eat it too. And as an aside, the fact that Warren can be seen as a romantic option with the obviously predatory things he does in the game (there's too many to count) feels very unsettling, and there's little to redeem him that feels genuine. The few 'bright' spots he has in the game feel more forced, like we accidentally caught him feeding too many starving puppies instead of things that an actually good person would do.
I really wanted to like this game, but there's too much working against it, too many plot threads left unresolved, too much working against logic to make it a complete experience, and for that I am sad.
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The whole point of the Storm is that it's a direct cause of Max tampering with time. In fact, in my second playthrough after beating it, I've noticed cases where, when Max uses her powers to change something, lightning can sometimes be seen flashing in the background if you're outside. This is important.
Chapter 5 wasn't a the chapter in which Max gets to wrap up everything and have a happy little ending. It's the chapter in which Max finally understands that the more she tries to control time, the less control she has over it. She finally learns "Here actions have consequences" and it's time to own up to them.
Life is Strange never meant to have a happy ending. This was sort of obvious, at least to me, from the beginning. As I played through the game, I very much so got a sense of shaky stability. As if the stability of the world were only barely being held up. Kind of like someone who's been floating debt from credit card to credit card, trying to pay it off and one little incident could cause it all to come crashing down and they lose everything.
Ultimately, I think, the ending was perfect, in many ways, because the choice you make in the game matter, because they don't matter. You are supposed to feel like your choices didn't matter, because Max herself is supposed to feel that way too. Max, in the end, feels like everything she's done, all the good deeds she's performed, all the changes she's made, they were all in vain. At the end, when it mattered most, she couldn't save the person most important to her, at least, not without dooming the entire town to destruction.
"No good deed goes unpunished" is an old saying that is very fitting for this game. Without the choices we made in this game, the choice at the end, to Save Chloe, or Save Arcadia Bay would have no impact. You needed to experience everything in the game, in order make that choice matter to you on a personal level.
What Life is Strange did, masterfully, in my opinion, is place the player in Max's Shoes. We, like Max, all thought we could use our rewind power to fix everything, to be able to have a happy ending with Chloe at our side, Arcadia Bay saved, and Nathan and the villain behind bars. However we, like Max, learned that this not true. This was as much a journey for the player, as for Max. Not everything works out how you want.
Max, and the player, trying to control time is not unlike trying to hold a handful of sand. The tighter you try to grasp, the more it slips through your fingers.
I personally believe it was a masterful bit of storytelling. I also think that Max getting the ending she wanted would kind of defeated the whole purpose of the game. If Max got the "happy" ending, the whole theme of "your actions have consequences" would be moot. There are no consequence because she could always rewind and make them better.
This was alluded to at the conclusion of Episode 2, and referenced again in Episode 3 the several times Max mentioned it. Ultimately, when she needed them the most, her powers failed her, and it was up to Max to get Kate off that roof. In the end, her ability to rewind time, has consequences that Max can't forsee. She has to accept those consequences, and destroy Arcadia Bay, or she can sacrifice her best friend, and see it saved. Controlling time won't help her here, because controlling time is was caused it in the first place.
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Response:Definite spoilers
I can agree that no one ever expected a happy ending, although the two ending choice? Painfully limiting. There was rumors that there was going to be at least a third ending, and that was assumed to be the Max goes to San Francisco ending, which I assume would have been a 'selfish' ending, but was just folded into the main story. And honestly? Would have been better as an ending, would have allowed you to distance yourself from Chloe is you the player found her emotionally controlling and a toxic person to be around, which isn't difficult, especially with the way she treats you in the early chapters.
The storm itself is silly considering when it shows up in the story, that it just pops up in episode 1, that the exact scene plays out at the lighthouse. Storyline wise, that has no real reason to happen unless we're saying the first time we saved Chloe we summoned it, and the hurricane was just anxious to be pushed into the scene. This means saving Chloe was the entire reason for the tornado and every other time altering decision we made means nothing, which gives like no reason for the nose bleeds aside from another unexplained effect altering time has.
The fact that there was no attempt to explain the time powers, covering it up with pseudo science trash whenever asked about it "Hey Max, ever heard of Chaos Theory?", it just felt like someone wanting to drop fun facts into the game rather than give us an explanation. I can accept that the 'how' of it wasn't the point of the game, but for something so fundamental to the story, the amount of teasing as to the reason for it felt very antagonizing, and again, the native american mysticism being used as a set piece was painfully disrespectful.
And really, I wasn't looking for a happy ending here, I was looking for an ending in which I was more than a spectator. Having checked the reviews and a lot of people's commentary, I'm not alone in this. The last chapter felt hollow, and nothing you did in it mattered in the slightest. All the drama felt very forced to me, making everything have less impact.
Nathan's 'redemption' was insulting being killed off screen after being such an important character felt incredibly rushed, like they forgot he was a character to begin with, and Jefferson's villain turn made him into a cliche "murder artist" instead of the suave jerk that people could at least try to defend. Episode 5 Jefferson might as well have twirled his mustache at us and said "Muhahahaha!" and it would have had the same impact.
You can say that choices not mattering was a theme of the game, and I won't argue with that, but it goes against what the advertising for the game told us. This is a Telltale style game, we all knew that we were on rails, but the developers advertised it as our choices mattering, and what do we get? Chloe murdering Frank matters painfully little, we can do our best to ruin David's life and he still saves us (props to David for that), Victoria takes a total back seat this chapter to everything else, and the game preaches at us with its morality BS.
Since I'm actually talking about it now, Warren is a predator, pure and simple. In episode 2 you can see him staring into your window if you look for him at the beginning of the chapter (which is why he is stammering out when you talk to him later), whenever he does something nice for Max he has to try and use it as leverage (while already in a relationship with another girl no less), our first introduction to him is him trying to invade our personal space with a hug that Max shuts down HARD, and even him beating up Nathan feels like it's trying to be leveraged against us, and yet he's still portrayed as 'just a nice guy.' My distaste for Warren is immense, but he's still treated as a viable romantic option, with the decision to kiss him, but kissing Chloe is only possible if you kill her.
The 'bury the gays' trope there is very strong and insulting, and Chloe's time in Episode 4 while crippled feels very ableist as well as another reminder that 'time travel is bad!" which is beat into us constantly. The ending would have had more value if we hadn't been 'taught' the lesson like 20 other times during the game, robbing it of its impact. Max also doesn't have timenado visions from saving William, does he not count? Yeah in that timeline stuff's still messing up, but really a third ending could have been going back to save William and letting Chloe die in that timeline, make you feel like you have some agency in how she dies.
I'm so critical of this because I WANTED it to be good, I really did. And it's funny you again compare this to Mass Effect 3, since it had the same binary morality for a game based around choices, to the point where Bioware had to give a new ending to the game due to the massive distaste the audience had for it. Life is Strange left the same bad taste in my mouth, although I doubt we'll get anything like that from its developer.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, and if the ending worked for you, aces. I'm just saying as a piece of media, this failed me and my expectations for it.
I'm going to say I disagree with a lot of what you posted for various reasons. However, I will also mention, I don't think Life is Strange's story is complete. This article seems to imply that Dontnod Entertainment wants to make a "season 2" of Life is Strange. Whether that will be with the same characters, or new characters or not is unknown, but it makes me think there is more to the story than what is in those 5 episodes. It may also resolve some of the issues you have with the game as well.
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I'm a huge fan of the game Telltale have been putting out these last few years (Walking Dead wracked me, season 2 had issues but was still great, currently playing through Wolf Among Us and enjoying it despite finding the setting not very exciting), and this game is certainly on my radar - although it looks less interesting than all of Telltales' current and up-and-coming games except maybe for Minecraft story mode, so it might be years before I'll play this.
Episode 5 was a disappointment. It was almost completely predictable, no great OMG moments, a huge swath of psycho filler, and the sad "the whole series never happened" kind of ending.
I'm going to say I disagree with a lot of what you posted for various reasons. However, I will also mention, I don't think Life is Strange's story is complete. This article seems to imply that Dontnod Entertainment wants to make a "season 2" of Life is Strange. Whether that will be with the same characters, or new characters or not is unknown, but it makes me think there is more to the story than what is in those 5 episodes. It may also resolve some of the issues you have with the game as well.
If they make another "Life is Strange," according to this article it would definitely be with an all-new cast.
Somewhat a shame... I haven't been playing Life is Strange but I've been watching playthroughs (to see if I'd like it or not)... the one element I really liked is Max herself, and I'd love to see her in another story, even if it otherwise had a totally different cast. Probably not going to happen though. As it is, the game seems a bit too sadness porny for me to want to play through myself. Personal preference, of course, and my personal preferences are not a judgment upon yours or what you found entertaining.