(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?
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?
