Being a teenager always has been and always will be difficult. Its a period of time where we don't fully know who we are, what's happening to our bodies, why the world works the way it does and where we are treated like children but expected to act like adults. It can take a toll on someone's mind and leave them in bad places, it can leave us confused, scared and more than likely a sense of not a single person understanding what you are going through; because your problems are different to everyone else's.
Its a time when we are expected to make the decisions that will potentially decide what happens with the rest of our lives and a time where we should find what our purpose is in this world. But as someone who is still in their late teens, nearly into their twenties, I can wholeheartedly say Life is Strange has spoken to me in a way that people have not been able to since I was fourteen years old.
Max is not a little girl, but not quite a woman yet. In her late teens she has been recently enrolled at her dream college to study photography under the wing of her teacher, professional photographer Mark Jefferson. A shy girl, she prefers to look at the world through a camera lens, distorting her perception of the world to the way she wants to see it it.
Having returned to her home town in Oregon after living in Seattle for five years, Max finds that people she knew growing up are not the same people they once were; that time has changed them, herself and their town into something she no longer recognises as the world she grew up in for so many years.
After waking in class from a bad dream, she witnesses the murder of a fellow student during a school shooting. However as she reacts to this event her day begins to replay itself exactly as she remembered it, but she has the power to make things play out differently if she reacts differently to how she did before.
Once realising that she has the ability to rewind time, she makes it her mission to save the student from being killed and live with the repercussions of it, as well as living a normal teenage life and dealing with a single, visceral and incredibly lifelike bad dream.
Thanks to its superb opening, Life is Strange managed to grab my interest very quickly. But holding it would prove to be difficult, because lets face it, teen drama stories are boring and often pointless. But like Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being A Wallflower, LiS is always throwing you curveballs, things you don't see coming, things that escalate the situation and things that are real problems, not just teen dramas. Speaking more of these instances would ruin the surprises, but expect issues such as teenage pregnancy, big brother surveillance, missing persons and the dangers of social media to pop up along the way, with the likelihood of many of these individual storylines being central to the progression of the story.
Its a story that looks at teenagers for what they are, confused and mislead by the society they have been raised by. About looking at people stumble through their lives, the mistakes that will haunt them forever and the good times that they will never forget.
Life is Strange is an episodic game in the bane of Telltale's adventure games, from the folks behind 2013's unique and equally intriguing beat-em up Remember Me.
If you are familiar with Telltale's games such as The Walking Dead, Back to the Future, Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us, then you'll feel right at home with Life is Strange as it plays almost identically to the well established formula.
You control Max with the left stick, the camera with the right and you can interact with various objects you find in different ways, by either looking at them, touching them or taking a photo of them for Max's scrapbook.
You can talk to people and what you say to them will ultimately affect how they treat you, these decisions affect how the game plays and will hopefully lead to being able to have multiple different endings for the final episode.
Life is Strange does include one interesting and game changing mechanic, but one that does make you question the weight of decisions. This ability is to rewind time whenever you choose at the push of a button.
At several points the game will force you to solve puzzles by using this rewind mechanic, such as getting a group of bullies out of the way of a door they are blocking, or allow you to answer the answer for a question correctly after previously getting it wrong.
This mechanic can be used at any time, but during the games major decisions you are often advised to rewind and pick a different option to see how things would have changed had you done it differently, which to me undermines the element of crucial, game altering choices. Luckily, there is no correct way to do things, so you should never feel like you picked the wrong thing; but having that ability to instantly change what I just did if I didn't like how someone reacted almost feels like I'm cheating.
Running on the Unreal Engine, Life is Strange has a very distinct art style that lands somewhere rather awkward in the spectrum of being minimalist and wanting to be a graphical powerhouse.
Everything in Life is Strange looks as if it has come to life from Max's scrapbook, with nothing having overly defined edges and lines, with colours being quite single tonal and nothing ever looking as if its graphically complex.
But the way this is rendered in the Unreal Engine, makes it feel as if the textures haven't loaded properly, or that the anti-aliasing and all those other fancy graphical touches are off. It looks like its meant to be a much prettier game than it comes across as.
Saying that, its not a bad looking game and has a good visual flair, but it just feels like its running in the wrong engine or that it should have a lot more graphical prowess than it currently has.
The voice acting also leaves a little to be desired. Whilst its never outright awful, it will never leave you with the thought that one of these are the next Nolan North or Melissa Hutchinson. Most of this is to do with the awkward dialogue that feels like it was written by adults in their late forties rather than people who are actually the ages of Max & her friends. One use of the word 'Hella' made me cringe and actually want to stick a screwdriver in my ear just so I didn't have to hear it every 10 minutes from that point on. I cant think of a time where I haver ever heard some of this dialogue used in real life apart from in crappy teen movies and it does absolutely no favours for LiS.
Despite those small annoyances though, Life is Strange is a superb opening chapter to what could actually be this years most interesting episodic game narrative.
Telltale may have the properties of Borderlands and Game of Thrones to work with and have always been the masters of storytelling, but something as original as Life is Strange doesn't come around often, especially when its as good as it is.
If you can look past some awkward dialogue and the confusing artistic style the game has then you will find a lot to enjoy in this rather long introductory episode (coming in at just over 3 hours).
Dontnod could be onto a winner here, I cant wait to see where the story goes next.
Life is Strange
Episode 1: Chrysalis – 8/10
+Original Story (With A Hint Of Twin Peaks Inspiration)
+Fleshed Out & Interesting Characters
+Contemporary Look At Teenage Life
-Occasionally Dated & Hideous Dialogue
-Iffy Art Style
