Critical Play: Life is Strange
‘Life is Strange’ is an adventure game developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix. The game is available on PC, Playstation, Xbox, iOS, and Android.
Target Audience
The player’s avatar in the game is called Max Caufield, an aspiring photographer at Blackwell Academy. As the game is based in a high-school environment, it seems like it is targeting a young audience, especially other high-schoolers. This becomes more obvious as the game tackles highly relevant issues to this age group that is generally considered taboo. These topics include drug abuse, underage drinking, bullying, teen pregnancy, strong language, mental disorders, physical disabilities, and youth violence.
On the other hand, the game can be quite graphic at times and use strong language. Therefore, it can be slightly difficult to reach even younger audiences due to age and parental restrictions.
Formal Elements
The player can move in the game in three different ways: “tap to move”, “virtual pad” and “joystick”. Interestingly, the first option seems very different from the last two options. In “tap to move”, the player takes a very passive role as the player just needs to tap at a certain place and wait for the character to move to that position. In the last two options, the player has more dynamic control and can to move the avatar more freely. Therefore, depending on the option that the player chooses, they can have a significantly different game experience from what the creator intended.
Other than this type of 2D movement, the player has a mysterious superpower mechanic that can be used to rewind time. This is introduced in a highly mysterious manner. At the start of the game, Max finds herself near a lighthouse that collapses on her wakes her up. Later, she witnesses another student getting murdered, which again abruptly “wakes” her up to a previous moment in time. As the game doesn’t provide any strong clues regarding the overarching storyline, the player finds itself with this kind of mysterious inception-style superpower to turn back time to change the past.
Although there is not a very clear objective in the game other than delving deeper into the story, the game is interlaced with mini-objectives in the form of mini-games. For example, in the scenario described above where the player witnesses a murder, the player has to race against time to find a way to prevent the murder from happening. Also, as there is no straightforward way to do that, the player has to find a solution using items in the surrounding environment. The interplay of these objectives in these mini-games keeps the story thrilling and prevents the player from losing interest too soon.
Another thing to note is that the game doesn’t truly seem to be an open-world environment as the various control options suggest at the beginning. Although the player is able to freely move in any direction, there are no meaningful interactions with the environment unless the player follows the main storyline. For example, in the picture below, Max can look at the pencil case or gaze at the polaroid on her desk but in order to do anything meaningful, Max has to use the camera to take a selfie, or else the story would be stuck at that point. Therefore, the game is very good at giving an illusion of choice where the actual interactive options are quite limited by its rules.
The game breaks the overarching story into 5 different episodes, thus creating a sequence of arcs. This provides two main benefits. First, it ensures that there is a content treadmill as it provides an opportunity to add more episodes and keeps the game relevant and lucrative for a longer period of time. Second, it prevents the players from burning out if they want to finish the game in a few sessions by allowing them to take breaks in between episodes without breaking immersion. The publisher makes good use of this fact by charging the player for each additional episode after the first one. Fortunately, the player can experience the first episode at no cost and the second episode at a very low cost. However, the prices increase significantly for the last three episodes, which can seem a little predatory to those players who got hooked by the first episode and want to see the story to its end.
Types of Fun
The gameplay is a mix of cutscenes as well as player interactions with the surroundings. Cutscenes allow the game to make significant progress with the plot without the need to gamify every single detail. However, in this game, it can feel like there are a lot of cutscenes, especially as Max can rewind time and go through the same cutscenes over and over again, making them feel very repetitive. Fortunately, the game introduces a skip button to skip those cutscenes that have already been experienced once. On the other hand, player interactions are really enjoyable as the player gets to make fairly significant decisions that decide the direction of the plot. For example, in the above-mentioned example where Max uses her superpower to rewind time and prevent a murder from happening, the player can choose to report the student (Nathan) who almost shot another student after the incident. If the player chooses to “report Nathan”, Nathan retaliates back by assaulting Max in a parking lot later in the game. On the other hand, if the player “hide[s] the truth”, there is no such assault. This type of gameplay is very effective as it provides an authentic and immersive experience. Overall, as these player interactions are quite fun, the game can cut down on a few cutscenes to find a better balance and prevent the game’s pace from feeling too slow to evoke a stronger sense of narration.
The game is also full of mini-objectives as mentioned above. These mini-objectives are usually accompanied by a puzzle that needs to be solved in a limited time or else Max will have to rewind time repeatedly. For example, in the picture below, Max must use break the fire glass and trigger the fire bell to distract Nathan from shooting another student. In order to do that, the player must explore the surroundings, and find an object to break the glass with. However, at least in my experience, this puzzle feels too simplistic as there is only one way to break the glass, which is using a hammer hidden under the cleaning cart. Therefore, it does not evoke a strong sense of challenge for me. However, the added time pressure and ability to rewind doesn’t make it seem too unoriginal and the added benefit from the relative simplicity is that it doesn’t break the player immersion by attracting too much attention to the puzzle itself.
Lastly, the game successfully evokes a sense of discovery as there are so many objects that a player can interact within the environment. Moreover, most of these objects provide some subtle, contextual hints towards the overall storyline of this episode. For example, the player can find missing posters for Rachel Amber, as seen in the picture below, in various forms all over Blackwell Academy, hinting that this is going to become a significant part of the story. Therefore, the player is encouraged to keep discovering new pieces of information and get even more immersed in the story.
Overall, although the game starts a little slow, once the player gets used to it, it can get very interesting due to the intriguing mechanic of rewinding time and the mysterious storyline.
