Game of the Month: Life is Strange
Created | Updated Dec 6, 2015
Mags plays the game of life, and it's a bit Strange
Life's a bit odd, innit?
The curveballs that be thrown at you. The situations that could have been avoided. Would you rewind time?
That was Maxine Caulfield’s dilemma, not that she knew what she was doing.
You may already know that I like the episodic Tell Tale Games but I've got a new one, Life is Strange which is a Square Enix presentation by Dontnod. It came out at the beginning of the year, but I hadn't really played any games while hubby was away so by the time he got back all episodes had been released so I could just play it through without the wait.
You play as Maxine Caulfield, newly returned to Arcadia Bay to attend college. Starting in classroom, you fall asleep and dream of a huge tornado hitting the area. When you enter the bathroom things turn a little for the weird. After taking a photo of a butterfly, you hear other students entering and fight ensues. One of them has a gun and shoots the other, killing them instantly. As you stare at the photograph, you go back in time and realise that you can save the other girl. It turns out that the 'other girl' is your old friend Chloe who had dropped out of college when her friend Rachel had gone missing. While it was widely assumed that Rachel had left for California, Chloe didn't think that was the case and when she knew what Max could do, sought her help in finding he friend.
As with most episodic games there not so much in the way of gameplay but much more in the way conversations turn and point and click discovery. As Max's powers increase she is able to back even further in time and to her childhood with Chloe. The story is one huge emotional rollercoaster as Max changes one thing and the Butterfly Effect has some devasting consequences. For example, stopping one accident in her past means another one happens instead. Of course being able to rewind time also means that once you've changed something and it doesn't work means that there are no 'Game Over' scenes.
As well as the main story there are a whole truck load of additional photos to take, some of them quite obscure, however these can picked up after you've completed each chapter, or in my case the whole game, by going back to certain points in the game.
Overall this game is really rather excellent and scores very highly with players regularly getting over 80%. As one reviewer said it's like watching your very own TV show and while I'm happy to finish it I can't wait for the next season.
