Life is Strange Critical Play

I played Life is Strange on an iphone through the app store.

Life is Strange is a mix of a walking sim, mystery, and choose-your-own adventure game. Narrative is the key feature that connects everything together. It tells you where to walk and what might be important. It also interrupts your controls to pull the narrative forward. The majority of the game seems to actually be narration.

Narration is what creates the movement and goals of the game. The mystery keeps you playing but the narration tells you how to play and what’s going on right now. In this game, even the puzzles rely on the narration. You can see this in the break glass puzzle where the entire time the character was explaining why she couldn’t do what you told her to and what she needed instead. It was a very interesting way of providing the player clues to progress in the game.

The first scene was super similar to walking sims in that it dropped us into a strange area where even the character didn’t know what was happening.

The game quickly introduced us to lots of items to interact with. It was a little overwhelming since I didn’t know what would help me move forward vs what is just fluff/fun to do.

The game offered lots of direction on where to go through on screen messages and through the voice narration.

Even the puzzles rely on the narration

But sometimes the narration can fail you. I have no idea where “The Main Campus” is and am currently trapped in this room…