Critical Play: Life Is Strange
Life Is Strange is an episodic graphic adventure video game developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix. The game is free to download on the App Store.
For our second project in CS247G, my team is essentially creating a mystery game that simulates snooping through someone’s phone. Players will solve immersive puzzles (e.g. cracking passwords, acquiring clues from texts) in order to progress through an unfolding narrative centered around a mysterious cheating scandal. I’m mentioning this because I like the way narrative is woven into the mystery in Life Is Strange, and I discuss how specific mechanics may come in handy for our project.
I played Life Is Strange for about an hour, and I think this was enough time to get a pretty good feel for the game’s core plot and mechanics. The game follows Max, a photography student who discovers she has the ability to rewind time. The player controls Max and can make her explore the environment by walking around and interacting with objects. The game provides visual cues that inform the player which objects in the environment they can interact with. This helps drive the narrative forward. As a player, I often knew exactly which items I was supposed to interact with and which ones I could ignore. I feel like this mechanic encouraged exploration, which contributed to a Narrative aesthetic rather than a Challenge aesthetic. I still found this to be quite compelling. I’m pretty competitive by nature, so I was unsure if a game that was super easy could be fun. I only played Life Is Strange for about an hour, but it never felt difficult whatsoever… but I still enjoyed myself. I think it was a different type of fun than I’m used to but it was fun nevertheless. This is an important takeaway for me when thinking about Project 2:
Our mystery/puzzle game doesn’t need to be super challenging to be fun. There is value and fun in a compelling narrative.
The game leads the player through a narrative by prompting them to complete certain tasks. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see the game prompted me to go into the bathroom by providing flashing a task at the top of the screen. Furthermore, the game provided additional cues to guide me through the environment (e.g. the label on the door that says “Bathroom”).
I think this an effective mechanic that leads the player efficiently through the narrative. Like, I never would’ve thought to go to the bathroom and splash water on my face otherwise. Again, it did make the game pretty easy, but I would say it didn’t make it too easy to the point where it was boring.
I think this is a mechanic that could be easily incorporated into our Project 2. Initially, we were thinking we would allow a player to just blinding peruse the phone with no guidance. I think this may be too challenging, though. It would probably be helpful to have our player receive similar hints/walkthroughs (e.g. “Check the messages app and see who she’s been texting”).
I think that these two mechanics were the most critical in informing, guiding, and engaging the player. They create dynamics of curiosity and exploration, which fosters strong narrative. The narrative was intimately intertwined with the mystery. By following the storyline, the player begins to learn how to harness their time traveling powers. Overall, the game successfully achieved Narrative fun. I was skeptical that a game without Challenge could be fun, but I think that Life Is Strange has definitely shown this to be possible. This will inform how I approach Project 2 moving forward.
