(Note: The following piece presumes that the reader has played and finished "Life is Strange" at least once. Spoilers are included.)
Life is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment, Square Enix) is a traditional point & click adventure title, despite its modernized presentation that's geared more toward a console audience. A mouse pointer is present in the PC version, but even when played with the gamepad, the player points with the camera and 'clicks' the appropriate face button to interact. Gameplay is comprised of solving puzzles and finding clues. Like most adventure titles, the game is driven primarily by its narrative.
The story of Max's road to adulthood, through the narrative metaphor of her power to Rewind time as well as her relationship with her childhood friend Chloe, contributes to an experience that stays with the player well after the game has ended. From a purely gameplay design perspective, Life is Strange is fairly deficient in comparison to the better titles in the genre. The mechanics are stiff and unintuitive, the puzzles are boring and lack in imaginative structure and often the game simply tries the player's patience. Though the classic adventure titles of the genre's Golden Age are likely responsible for a whole generation of potheads, solving the simplest puzzle in those games generated a sense of accomplishment that's sorely lacking in Life is Strange. Dontnod's latest entry can be a wholly unpleasant experience during play that the player is forced to tolerate just to see how the story unfolds.
So, here's the question that arises from the experience at first: since it's so reliant on storytelling and its mechanics aren't very entertaining, couldn't Life is Strange have been a film or a TV show or, at least, a walking simulator in the vein of Gone Home or the recent Firewatch?
Looking back at the 20-something hours the game lasts in the first playthrough, the answer would be a definitive "no". Life is Strange is generally one of those experiences that can be infuriating while it lasts, but benefits a lot from reflection and retrospect (it's kind of the anti-The Dark Knight Rises). The story, the plot and particularly the script of the game aren't good enough to stand on their own in a movie or a TV show-- despite the title's presentation being reminiscent of your average teen drama on The CW. The pacing is bad, the story doesn't flow very well, the relationship between Chloe and Max is fairly contrived and a lot of the dialogue suffers from bad "young people speak". The reason that Life is Strange stays with the player is because the player is an active part in the drama; not passive, not merely interacting, but actually experiencing, through gameplay, Max's story.
As mentioned, the backbone of the plot is the relationship between Max and Chloe. Max has just moved away from home, back to her old hometown, to pursue her dream in photography. All of a sudden, she gets the power to rewind Time itself. It doesn't matter how she got that power, all that matters is that she did and particularly that she did at the very moment she reunited with Chloe, her childhood friend. The meat of the story is that Max refuses to grow up. She wants to be a photographer, to observe life from the outside instead of living in it. She reconnects with her childhood friend and her childhood memories, while shunning the new people she meets at school. The Vortex Club is presented as a rich kids thing, but in reality that's only Max's view of it, because she simply refuses to open up. Her friendship with Kate is just a social convenience, until the moment Kate tries to kill herself. That suicide scene serves, among other things, as Max's own realization that she avoids any new emotional connections. Her jerking around Warren means that as well. All that matters to her is Chloe, not because she loves her (though she does), but because Chloe is familiar and safe-- which is in itself ironic, considering Chloe is anything but safe for any normal person.
The entire story is about growing up through trial & error and the game mechanics represent exactly that. The time manipulation mechanic is used in interesting ways only during a couple of puzzles. At all other times, it's just a glorified quick load function, to allow the player to try all the different dialogue options available, whether it's just for fun or to actually progress the game. Essentially, gameplay is restricted within Max's constant fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and exposing herself to other people. The basic mechanics as well as the game's level design are all metaphors for the story, the protagonist and, primarily, the themes of the title as a whole.
Take the ending of Episode 3; Max goes back in time to stop William from driving his car to his wife's diner, which would have got him killed and would've left Chloe orphaned. To do this, Max has many options: she can pull the cord of the telephone, she can pick it up before William does, she can call the diner beforehand and warn Joyce or she can hide William's keys. Even if she does hide the keys, she needs to hide them in a very specific spot for William to not find them (that spot is the kitchen sink).
Until the player discovers this in the first playthrough, the sequence is over-long and extremely frustrating. It's like a labyrinth; a lot of different paths, but only one exit. There is a reason the game elects to try the player's patience and that reason is that it fits, thematically, with the story. Part of growing up, of taking responsibilities as big as, cooking without burning the apartment down (or changing History itself in Max's case) is trying out many solutions until you find the one that sticks. In the world of adults, not every choice is the right choice. There's right and there's wrong, not just ethically, but from a purely practical standpoint as well. There is nobody that will tell you or, indeed, convince you of the right choices and the proper solutions. You'll have to find those yourself, through tons of trial and error.
Another interesting point comes toward the end of the game, in Episode 5. The mechanically irrelevant and equally annoying stealth sequence, during Max's Nightmare, seems sloppily shoved just to artificially lengthen the game. It's the moment where you'll probably end up spamming Rewind, because the game wasn't built for this type of play. The point of the sequence, though, isn't the stealth; it's the hiding.
Who is Max hiding from in that sequence? The men she has met in Arcadia Bay. If it dangled and Max spoke to it for more than five seconds in the story, it was in that sequence. It may have been a coincidence. Perhaps the developers were trying to pad the game indeed and this is just reading into it too much. But what we have here is the most erotically-impaired female protagonist of any game, ever, who acts like a 12-year-old and looks like she's 5, trying to get away from every man that has shown up in the game, from the father figures, to the nice guys, to the psychopaths; and holy shit are they all creepy and say overly sexist things!
It's a sequence so antithetical to the rest of the game that functions as a callback to only one other such scene earlier, in Episode 3, when she and Chloe take a dip in the school's pool in the middle of the night and then try to escape Chloe's step-dad. That scene is followed up with Max and Chloe sleeping together in their underwear and Chloe daring Max to lock lips with her the next morning. The Nightmare stealth bit is followed with Max in her nightgown, strapped to Jefferson's chair, watching him and her female friends getting physical and mocking her behind her back. The youthful blushing and curious experimentation juxtaposed to the raw, dangerous eroticism of a sexually-aware adulthood. If not for the stealth sequence, if these juxtapositions had left the player as part of a passive audience, they would've failed; either in getting their point across, or simply in connecting and resonating with the player/audience as anything other than amateurish, exploitative bullshit.
Another point of mechanics-as-metaphors that stands out is the game's choice system. Though seemingly reliant on its choice system, the game only offers binary, meaningless options that only change details in the bigger picture of the story. The main story-beats remain the same and large, important choices are made automatically for the player, if the plot needs to move on. Most games do function like this, but Life is Strange stands out, because it's a closed system. Every other game with such a mechanic promises some impact in the larger world built around said game, but Dontnod's title drops the pretence and admits, wholeheartedly, that your choices are meaningless. Because Chaos Theory. Because shit happens.
That's why at the end of Episode 3, the game literally shuts the player out from the most important choice in the game. You'd think that in a title that choices matter, the player should be asked whether or not they want to literally change History. But no, you never get that choice, because it's not your choice to make.
The better example of this is at the end of Episode 2, when Kate's on the roof and about to jump off. The game decides at that point to take away your Rewind powers. It's a scary moment, not so much because of Kate's threat to kill herself, but because Max and by extension the player, have suddenly been stripped off of the safety and comfort and assurance that Rewind provided. What hasn't been taken away is the player's agency and that's why this scene resonates so well. Your choices will truly matter (probably the only point in the entire game, beyond the finale), because they're irreversible. Both the player and Max come to face the consequences of their actions and take their time to truly work to save that girl. If they fail, Kate's gone, for good. It's a prelude to the finale, a preview of how Max is supposed to act in order to mature and be a good, grown-up person.
Kate's life and saving her is the one tragedy, before the ending, that Max must try and prevent. It's juxtaposed to the Rachel Amber mystery, the heinous crime that haunts the plot, but which ultimately is irrelevant. For Max's character, Amber's disappearance is less a tragedy and more a tie to Chloe, a silly game of cops-and-robbers that the two young women can play like little girls in Chloe's backyard. It's important, because you spend so much time on Rachel Amber, which is generally just a bonding exercise with Chloe, but the one moment that matters happens in the blink of an eye and it's a moment that wouldn't have worked in the slightest if the title didn't offer actual gameplay.
The other genuinely important moment comes in the finale. The binary options, which disregard practically everything the player has elected to do in the game up to that point, have caused criticism by critics and players alike. Thing is, it couldn't have been any other way. Max's story is linear. The details may change, but there are no multiple paths and different solutions to problems. There's only one choice; the right choice. The player needs to make that choice.
When you are presented with the option to sacrifice Chloe or Arcadia Bay, there are no multiple choices. You will sacrifice Chloe. You will save Arcadia Bay. That's what you're supposed to do. This final question isn't a choice leading to a different ending to the story, not really; it's a quiz, the developers are indirectly asking you if you got it, if you understood anything of the story they spent over the last 20 hours telling you. Max must leave Chloe behind, say goodbye and move on and so do you. You've spend a lot of time in Arcadia Bay, you used your powers, you learned the people there and you have formulated your own opinion on everything. You're invested and in the finale, you must let go. You must leave behind the comfort of the game, the experience you just had and say goodbye. At that moment, the game itself is waving goodbye as well.
That's where Life is Strange differs in its choice system; it presents the player with the illusion of choice, because the burden of the consequences is shifted on to the player. In most other games there are choices that are better than some others, but they all lead somewhere, they all present rewards or punishment to the player in some form or another. They promise the players that they will be able to shape the story how they want, to the extend that it's possible. For this game, choice is simply including the players in the one story that the developers tell, making them part of it, making them work for it.
A lot of the above may be over-reaching, reading too much into the multiple facets of the game. There is no confirmation either way and even if there was, would it matter? What each experience, particularly of the artistic variety, relies on is different impact on and different interpretation from different parts of its audience. Whether the above piece accurately describes the more vague aspects of the game is a moot point; what remains is that the basic gameplay design is, undoubtedly, mirroring the story and themes of Life is Strange. Though there is no rule that demands all games should be following this design philosophy, Dontnod's work is a good example of how to use mechanics to tell a story, even when tons of dialogue is on offer. Whether it's the trial and error mechanics or shifting the weight of a right decision to the player instead of the developer, the game stands out for it and it is my belief the gaming industry is a better, richer place for calling Life is Strange a videogame.
(The pictures included in the piece are a result of Google Image Search, as my own screencaps of the game went the way of the Dodo after a recent format)
Life is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment, Square Enix) is a traditional point & click adventure title, despite its modernized presentation that's geared more toward a console audience. A mouse pointer is present in the PC version, but even when played with the gamepad, the player points with the camera and 'clicks' the appropriate face button to interact. Gameplay is comprised of solving puzzles and finding clues. Like most adventure titles, the game is driven primarily by its narrative.
The story of Max's road to adulthood, through the narrative metaphor of her power to Rewind time as well as her relationship with her childhood friend Chloe, contributes to an experience that stays with the player well after the game has ended. From a purely gameplay design perspective, Life is Strange is fairly deficient in comparison to the better titles in the genre. The mechanics are stiff and unintuitive, the puzzles are boring and lack in imaginative structure and often the game simply tries the player's patience. Though the classic adventure titles of the genre's Golden Age are likely responsible for a whole generation of potheads, solving the simplest puzzle in those games generated a sense of accomplishment that's sorely lacking in Life is Strange. Dontnod's latest entry can be a wholly unpleasant experience during play that the player is forced to tolerate just to see how the story unfolds.
So, here's the question that arises from the experience at first: since it's so reliant on storytelling and its mechanics aren't very entertaining, couldn't Life is Strange have been a film or a TV show or, at least, a walking simulator in the vein of Gone Home or the recent Firewatch?
Looking back at the 20-something hours the game lasts in the first playthrough, the answer would be a definitive "no". Life is Strange is generally one of those experiences that can be infuriating while it lasts, but benefits a lot from reflection and retrospect (it's kind of the anti-The Dark Knight Rises). The story, the plot and particularly the script of the game aren't good enough to stand on their own in a movie or a TV show-- despite the title's presentation being reminiscent of your average teen drama on The CW. The pacing is bad, the story doesn't flow very well, the relationship between Chloe and Max is fairly contrived and a lot of the dialogue suffers from bad "young people speak". The reason that Life is Strange stays with the player is because the player is an active part in the drama; not passive, not merely interacting, but actually experiencing, through gameplay, Max's story.
As mentioned, the backbone of the plot is the relationship between Max and Chloe. Max has just moved away from home, back to her old hometown, to pursue her dream in photography. All of a sudden, she gets the power to rewind Time itself. It doesn't matter how she got that power, all that matters is that she did and particularly that she did at the very moment she reunited with Chloe, her childhood friend. The meat of the story is that Max refuses to grow up. She wants to be a photographer, to observe life from the outside instead of living in it. She reconnects with her childhood friend and her childhood memories, while shunning the new people she meets at school. The Vortex Club is presented as a rich kids thing, but in reality that's only Max's view of it, because she simply refuses to open up. Her friendship with Kate is just a social convenience, until the moment Kate tries to kill herself. That suicide scene serves, among other things, as Max's own realization that she avoids any new emotional connections. Her jerking around Warren means that as well. All that matters to her is Chloe, not because she loves her (though she does), but because Chloe is familiar and safe-- which is in itself ironic, considering Chloe is anything but safe for any normal person.
The entire story is about growing up through trial & error and the game mechanics represent exactly that. The time manipulation mechanic is used in interesting ways only during a couple of puzzles. At all other times, it's just a glorified quick load function, to allow the player to try all the different dialogue options available, whether it's just for fun or to actually progress the game. Essentially, gameplay is restricted within Max's constant fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and exposing herself to other people. The basic mechanics as well as the game's level design are all metaphors for the story, the protagonist and, primarily, the themes of the title as a whole.
Take the ending of Episode 3; Max goes back in time to stop William from driving his car to his wife's diner, which would have got him killed and would've left Chloe orphaned. To do this, Max has many options: she can pull the cord of the telephone, she can pick it up before William does, she can call the diner beforehand and warn Joyce or she can hide William's keys. Even if she does hide the keys, she needs to hide them in a very specific spot for William to not find them (that spot is the kitchen sink).
Until the player discovers this in the first playthrough, the sequence is over-long and extremely frustrating. It's like a labyrinth; a lot of different paths, but only one exit. There is a reason the game elects to try the player's patience and that reason is that it fits, thematically, with the story. Part of growing up, of taking responsibilities as big as, cooking without burning the apartment down (or changing History itself in Max's case) is trying out many solutions until you find the one that sticks. In the world of adults, not every choice is the right choice. There's right and there's wrong, not just ethically, but from a purely practical standpoint as well. There is nobody that will tell you or, indeed, convince you of the right choices and the proper solutions. You'll have to find those yourself, through tons of trial and error.
Another interesting point comes toward the end of the game, in Episode 5. The mechanically irrelevant and equally annoying stealth sequence, during Max's Nightmare, seems sloppily shoved just to artificially lengthen the game. It's the moment where you'll probably end up spamming Rewind, because the game wasn't built for this type of play. The point of the sequence, though, isn't the stealth; it's the hiding.
Who is Max hiding from in that sequence? The men she has met in Arcadia Bay. If it dangled and Max spoke to it for more than five seconds in the story, it was in that sequence. It may have been a coincidence. Perhaps the developers were trying to pad the game indeed and this is just reading into it too much. But what we have here is the most erotically-impaired female protagonist of any game, ever, who acts like a 12-year-old and looks like she's 5, trying to get away from every man that has shown up in the game, from the father figures, to the nice guys, to the psychopaths; and holy shit are they all creepy and say overly sexist things!
It's a sequence so antithetical to the rest of the game that functions as a callback to only one other such scene earlier, in Episode 3, when she and Chloe take a dip in the school's pool in the middle of the night and then try to escape Chloe's step-dad. That scene is followed up with Max and Chloe sleeping together in their underwear and Chloe daring Max to lock lips with her the next morning. The Nightmare stealth bit is followed with Max in her nightgown, strapped to Jefferson's chair, watching him and her female friends getting physical and mocking her behind her back. The youthful blushing and curious experimentation juxtaposed to the raw, dangerous eroticism of a sexually-aware adulthood. If not for the stealth sequence, if these juxtapositions had left the player as part of a passive audience, they would've failed; either in getting their point across, or simply in connecting and resonating with the player/audience as anything other than amateurish, exploitative bullshit.
Another point of mechanics-as-metaphors that stands out is the game's choice system. Though seemingly reliant on its choice system, the game only offers binary, meaningless options that only change details in the bigger picture of the story. The main story-beats remain the same and large, important choices are made automatically for the player, if the plot needs to move on. Most games do function like this, but Life is Strange stands out, because it's a closed system. Every other game with such a mechanic promises some impact in the larger world built around said game, but Dontnod's title drops the pretence and admits, wholeheartedly, that your choices are meaningless. Because Chaos Theory. Because shit happens.
That's why at the end of Episode 3, the game literally shuts the player out from the most important choice in the game. You'd think that in a title that choices matter, the player should be asked whether or not they want to literally change History. But no, you never get that choice, because it's not your choice to make.
The better example of this is at the end of Episode 2, when Kate's on the roof and about to jump off. The game decides at that point to take away your Rewind powers. It's a scary moment, not so much because of Kate's threat to kill herself, but because Max and by extension the player, have suddenly been stripped off of the safety and comfort and assurance that Rewind provided. What hasn't been taken away is the player's agency and that's why this scene resonates so well. Your choices will truly matter (probably the only point in the entire game, beyond the finale), because they're irreversible. Both the player and Max come to face the consequences of their actions and take their time to truly work to save that girl. If they fail, Kate's gone, for good. It's a prelude to the finale, a preview of how Max is supposed to act in order to mature and be a good, grown-up person.
Kate's life and saving her is the one tragedy, before the ending, that Max must try and prevent. It's juxtaposed to the Rachel Amber mystery, the heinous crime that haunts the plot, but which ultimately is irrelevant. For Max's character, Amber's disappearance is less a tragedy and more a tie to Chloe, a silly game of cops-and-robbers that the two young women can play like little girls in Chloe's backyard. It's important, because you spend so much time on Rachel Amber, which is generally just a bonding exercise with Chloe, but the one moment that matters happens in the blink of an eye and it's a moment that wouldn't have worked in the slightest if the title didn't offer actual gameplay.
The other genuinely important moment comes in the finale. The binary options, which disregard practically everything the player has elected to do in the game up to that point, have caused criticism by critics and players alike. Thing is, it couldn't have been any other way. Max's story is linear. The details may change, but there are no multiple paths and different solutions to problems. There's only one choice; the right choice. The player needs to make that choice.
When you are presented with the option to sacrifice Chloe or Arcadia Bay, there are no multiple choices. You will sacrifice Chloe. You will save Arcadia Bay. That's what you're supposed to do. This final question isn't a choice leading to a different ending to the story, not really; it's a quiz, the developers are indirectly asking you if you got it, if you understood anything of the story they spent over the last 20 hours telling you. Max must leave Chloe behind, say goodbye and move on and so do you. You've spend a lot of time in Arcadia Bay, you used your powers, you learned the people there and you have formulated your own opinion on everything. You're invested and in the finale, you must let go. You must leave behind the comfort of the game, the experience you just had and say goodbye. At that moment, the game itself is waving goodbye as well.
 |
| Expert trolling or daddy issues or sexual frustration? |
That's where Life is Strange differs in its choice system; it presents the player with the illusion of choice, because the burden of the consequences is shifted on to the player. In most other games there are choices that are better than some others, but they all lead somewhere, they all present rewards or punishment to the player in some form or another. They promise the players that they will be able to shape the story how they want, to the extend that it's possible. For this game, choice is simply including the players in the one story that the developers tell, making them part of it, making them work for it.
A lot of the above may be over-reaching, reading too much into the multiple facets of the game. There is no confirmation either way and even if there was, would it matter? What each experience, particularly of the artistic variety, relies on is different impact on and different interpretation from different parts of its audience. Whether the above piece accurately describes the more vague aspects of the game is a moot point; what remains is that the basic gameplay design is, undoubtedly, mirroring the story and themes of Life is Strange. Though there is no rule that demands all games should be following this design philosophy, Dontnod's work is a good example of how to use mechanics to tell a story, even when tons of dialogue is on offer. Whether it's the trial and error mechanics or shifting the weight of a right decision to the player instead of the developer, the game stands out for it and it is my belief the gaming industry is a better, richer place for calling Life is Strange a videogame.
(The pictures included in the piece are a result of Google Image Search, as my own screencaps of the game went the way of the Dodo after a recent format)
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