Life is Strange: A meditation on the meaning of life through time travel

Life is Strange is a weird video game experience. I’ve played through Until Dawn, and though it has limited gameplay, the effect of the game was pretty straightforward. It asked you to be scared and intrigued, giving you some form of control over the fates of the characters as they solve mysteries and navigate through a typical horror movie scenario. The gameplay was limited (walk around and observe things) as was the puzzle-solving. Life is Strange has a similar gameplay style, heavy on walking around and exploring your environment, with tasks that lead you to the next part of the story. It adds a bit more strategy as some tasks require you to rewind time after you’ve already changed something, and rewards players who investigate everything, either through necessary exposition or changing the story itself. The main difference between Life is Strange and most other story-based single-player games, including Until Dawn, is how the story is told. Even without the aspect of time travel, it’s a unique experience. It shouldn’t really work, because the story is so emo that were it a movie, only teenagers would enjoy watching it. The game revolves around a young girl, Max, who came back to her hometown, Arcadia Bay, after leaving 4 years ago and finds that she’s able to rewind small bits of time. Max is also having visions about the impending doom of Arcadia Bay, as she hallucinates during class about a massive storm heading for town. There are also posters for a missing girl stapled all over the school, and she bumps into her old friend, Chloe, who became friends with the missing girl after Max skipped town with her parents 4 years ago. It all sounds like an afterschool special with some sci-fi thrown in.

Playing Life is Strange doesn’t feel like an afterschool special at all though, and I think it boils down to ownership of the character and the pace of the game. What many movies in the drama genre fail to develop is a sense of identity. They gloss over key details that allow the audience to generate empathy for the actors, either turning them into stereotypes or making them do illogical or unreasonable things. Life is Strange is odd, in that your actions, whether you know it or not, affect the characters, and you get to peer into their lives by looking at all their most personal belongings. The basic storyline won’t change, but by putting the audience in a position to make choices about everyone’s outcome—including Max—in response to certain events, it makes you feel so much worse when you fail to save one or end up hurting another. This effect isn’t a quick burn like Until Dawn, where button presses ultimately dictate whether your character lives or dies. The choices you make can be contemplated and taken back in the moment, if you wish, by reversing time. They’re deliberate and, once chosen, permanent, because the effects are usually only seen later in the game. Just like real life, your choices appear to matter, and many of them are neither right nor wrong. As such, time travel is the perfect theme for Life is Strange, where tinkering with each decision can alter the timeline and affect people in unexpected ways. I should put a disclaimer on that statement though, since there still is a streamlined plot that requires puzzle-solving as well as choices that all advance said plot one way or another. However, the game gives you ample opportunities to fiddle with how it advances, with varying results for each character.   

The pace of the game is perfectly suited to the themes the game explores. You never feel rushed, even when you’re sneaking around, trying to avoid the security guard. The game shines in its quieter moments though, like in Chloe’s bedroom, the dorm where Max lives, or the diner where Chloe’s mom works. They’re small, lonely places that remind you of when you were 18 years old, hanging around at your friend’s house with nothing to do and all the time in the world. The music is also something that’s both relaxing and bittersweet, never veering off to cater to each specific moment, but rather emitting a calm atmosphere over everything and making each revelation more affecting than it otherwise would be. Just the intro, with Max walking down the hallway of her school, gave me goosebumps and had me listening to Syd Matters on YouTube.  

I haven’t played through the entire game yet, so writing this review may be a naïve proposition since I have no idea how the finale will be changed based on my in-game choices. It could end up like Until Dawn, which was disappointing in that there was just one endgame after all and very little can change it. I’m hoping that’s not the case, but even if it turns out that way, I still FEEL like my choices mattered anyway. Things happened throughout my playthrough that I had no control of, yet I still feel like I was somehow responsible. I guess that’s just life though, and like the game says, it’s very strange.