Life is Stranger - Overview

With the release of Life is Strange: Before the Storm, I wanted to reacquaint myself with the original game. Not so much to remind myself of the story or the characters or the world, though all of those things stuck with me long after I finished. No, I wanted to connect again with the emotions that Life is Strange put me through.

The marvelous thing about Life is Strange is how it really came out of nowhere. An episodic adventure game developed by a French studio with only a single game under its belt and published by the monolithic Square-Enix, I really feel that few people took the game seriously when the first part came out. I remember reading rampant criticism at the writing and the rather skewed perspective of modern teenage life and lingo, so much so that I pushed any thought of playing it to the back of my mind. If I were to play it, it would have to be at a time when I wasn’t playing anything else and if I got it cheap.

As each episode came out, I read more and more about how the game was taking interesting risks with its narrative. That the writers and developers were borrowing from some of my favorite movies and TV shows and creating something wonderful and heartfelt. The writing got better and the voice acting sold it all, even at its hokiest. When the final episode came out, there were some laminations about how it failed to stick its landing. However, despite its missteps, it was a product worth playing.

When the stars aligned and I had a gaming lull and a good sale, I picked up Life is Strange and jumped right in. What I saw right away was that the writers are open with their inspirations. Let’s start with the main character, Max Caulfield. She shares a last name with the sullen, combative Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. While Max may not be as much of a jerk as Holden, she shares a level of ennui with him. She’s moved back to her old home town Arcadia Bay to attend a prestigious art school and she feels like she’s missing something. Soon after we end up in Max’s shoes, she runs into her old best friend Chloe Price in the woman’s restroom, saves her from getting shot and killed by using previously unknown time abilities and our story is off to the races.

The central mystery that stretches across all five episodes involves a young woman named Rachel Amber, and it’s a pretty obvious take on Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. Hell, one of the characters has a TWNPKS license plate and one of the optional photos you can take is of a piece of graffiti that says “Fire Walk with Me.” You can’t really get more on the nose than that. Her constant visions of the destruction of Arcadia Bay are even frustratingly David Lynchian in nature, never giving her enough information to get an answer.

Perhaps the biggest narrative inspiration is The Butterfly Effect, as the literal image of a butterfly appears onscreen whenever Max makes a decision that will have future consequences. It even appears when she saves Chloe for the first of many times. More explicitly, it takes several plot points from the movie and re-purposes it to strong, strong emotional effect. The final choices you make could’ve been from deleted scenes of the movie.

While all these references pleased the dork in me, none of it wouldn’t have worked if I didn’t care about these characters. One of things that the writers succeeded in was making Max and the weirdos of Arcadia Bay feel real. Arcadia Bay has a life to it, thanks to interesting city design and Max’s constant inner thoughts. As odd as it may be, I kinda felt what it was like to be an 18 year girl at the cusp of adulthood. It helps that that Max and Chloe’s actresses put in some amazing performances. I put Ashley Burch’s Chloe on the same level of Dave Fennoy’s Lee Everett and Melissa Hutchison’s Clementine from Telltale’s Walking Dead adventure games and let me tell you, that’s high praise.

The general story of Life is Strange does a pretty good job of keeping the player guessing. The first episode does a solid job of introducing the city and the characters of Arcadia Bay, as well as the dual mysteries of Rachel’s sudden disappearance and Max’s cataclysmic visions. The second episode continues on those lines until Max is put in a very difficult situation at the end where her powers can’t help her and you have to rely on your memory and level of interaction with one

specific character in order to save a life. The fallout from that ending follows through into the third episode, when Max takes a drastic detour with her powers to attempt to fix a mistake in the far past. Episode four picks up immediately afterward and shows that everything Max does not only has consequences for her, but for everybody around her. Once she resolves this and returns to the mystery of Rachel, she ends up finding her answer.

So all that’s left is episode five, the finale. Max starts in peril, due to her discoveries at the end of the previous episode. She seemingly solves everything and goes on to a happy ending. However, the build up of using her time powers causes unforeseen consequences that forces her to go back and try to fix things. Of course, this is how you get yourself in more trouble, and Max is forced to take some rather metaphysical journeys in order to save her self and, with any luck, the

entirety of Arcadia Bay. Here is possibly the largest stumble in the game. There are several rather large logical leaps that have to occur here to get us to the final choice. It does feel like a lot of this comes out of nowhere and you aren’t given a lot of time to process it. While that is an annoyance, it pales in comparison to the aggravation of getting to Max’s end. The entire metaphysical section forces you to play in ways that the game’s engine just isn’t good at doing. I found myself repeating several sections multiple times because of things that were out of my control while sound effects kept playing that did more to annoy me than spook me.

And once you get out of all that, you’re at the last choice which, frankly, kind of blows. I’m not complaining about the choice itself, as it is alternatively interesting and difficult from an objective level. The bigger problem is that it doesn’t feel earned. Based off of how I played the game, and how I feel a lot of people would play the game, the choice isn’t a hard one to make. I feel that the writers wanted this to be a true conundrum, but I didn’t care at all about the other option. And when I picked what I felt was the right choice, I was given a short ending scene that felt rushed and ambiguous. When I looked up the other ending later on YouTube, it was way longer and…I suppose more narrative-ly satisfying? You get your answers, the bad guys get caught and the world is saved, but at a cost that I don’t know that Max would make.

As mentioned earlier, these final shaky narrative choices did nothing to dampen my love of Life is Strange. It has such an earnest love of life and a yearning that makes me feel less jaded. It’s the kind of experience I need more often. It moves me and reminds me of feelings of hope that I forgot I had. It pulls at my heart and just makes me happy. It isn’t for everyone, though. There are many that’ll find the attempts of teenage dialogue (hella) annoying and think that Chloe is an insufferable jerk, and I get it. But man, there aren’t a lot of games that can pull that kind of feeling out of me. So it does my heart good to hear that Life is Strange: Before the Storm is apparently just as successful at pulling heartstrings. I can’t wait to feel that again, for the first time.

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