by Aaron Ross, news editor & Zach Kluver, entertainment editor
Life may be strange, but it’s also incredibly dull.
Normally, slow pacing in video games isn’t horrible. Normally, game developers try and disperse the lack of anything happening with jokes, or interesting characters, or some sort of ambiguity that draws the player in. Well, Life is Strange creators DONTNOD (Square Enix is just the publisher. Be sure to correct the idiots on the Internet who think they developed it) decided they didn’t need any of that. Instead, this first episode of the time-travel & choose your own adventure series serves as little more than an expository slap in the face with its irritating characters and unexciting plotline.
This game has surprisingly rave reviews from critics for some reason. Maybe it’s been awhile since they went to high school. A lot of the ‘plot’ comes from largely one-dimensional characters getting in petty arguments, such as when lead villain Victoria tells goof-ball Juliet that her boyfriend has been sexting her room-mate. Like any logical person, Juliet decides to lock her room-mate in their room (?) and stand outside until she apologizes for it (??). So Max is forced to go into Victoria’s conveniently open room (???), and print out a tab of evidence that she lied and conveniently left open on her computer (????) on Victoria’s own laptop which conveniently is not password protected. That’s quite a suspension of belief for just one quest.
The choices in the first episode range from really stupid (see the plant watering choice) to kind of neat. Most of them don’t really affect the plot in the first episode, similar to telltale. A lot of the choices seem kind of inconsequential, however, because oftentimes you can just rewind time (a main mechanic in the game) and choose a different option. Sometimes third options are unlocked which are clearly better than the other two, which disappointingly turns them into really linear choices.
The puzzles in this episode are really not very good, often revolving around rewinding time and changing one thing in the environment for desired effects. Sometimes the rewinding time function screws up really bad, such as in one of our playthroughs, in which the school janitor turned invisible and climbed a ladder holding his still visible paint brush, something that is apparently not that uncommon.
Another major cause for annoyance that we don’t believe we have ever complained about with a video game – there are waaaaaaayy too many references in this game. Every single thing in this game is a reference, from the protagonist’s last name, Caulfield (possibly a reference to Holden Caulfield, the protagonist from The Catcher in The Rye [as it is also referenced by a poster in her room], or it could be a reference to the English actor Max Caulfield) to a license plate that spells out Twin Peaks without vowels. It sounds like a minor complaint, but there are SO FREAKING MANY that it really becomes obnoxious. Probably everyone who was important to photography at some point is mentioned by the characters, and the game actually just starts listing movies and TV shows in Max’s journal in one of the most pathetic appeals to its audience I’ve ever seen. It’s like DONTNOD just went to a Wikipedia page for geeky/cult films and then just copy-pasted them into the game.
For sure, Life Is Strange is going to have to change a lot of things in the next episode – like a well-paced plot, improving its characters beyond the most unimaginative stereotypes, less arbitrary choices, and to stop calling Max a ‘hipster’ when she’s clearly not. They still have a few months – let’s hope DONTNOD can pull it off.
You can play Life Is Strange on Steam (PC) or on one of the many game consoles as a digital download.
