Despite some incredible sequences, Episode Five is largely on-rails and nullifies many of the choices you’ve made throughout the earlier chapters. Knowing you caused something horrible is far worse than knowing it was destined to happen.

And what’s worse: Some of those moments are avoidable, if you make the right choices. There are some truly depraved moments in the story, the likes of which I’d expect more from Condemned than some twee game about high school kids. There’s something wrong with Blackwell Academy, and Max dons her deerstalker cap to try and uncover the school’s darkest secret. Rachel Amber’s disappearance is a near-constant presence in Arcadia Bay, her face staring out from dozens of Missing Person posters. It’s fortuitous she got it when she did, though. And the mystery of how or why Max was granted this ability? Never properly addressed. Any rules about Max’s ability are largely arbitrary, held to only until the moment the story calls for them to be broken. And I like that.īut like I warned when I looked at Episode One in January, the time travel in Life is Strange makes more sense as a game mechanic than as a plot device.

It’s the type of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too plot branching players usually get by save-scumming, but codified into the actual game mechanics. Since this is a choice-driven game, you’re given the ability to make a decision on how events play out, then rewind and see how the other option plays out, then decide. Max discovers the time travel ability early in the game and, to its credit, the game makes good use of it.

Feelings of insecurity, of “playing at adulthood,” are powerful and not often-explored in video games, given our tendency towards trying to escape those exact same feelings through supercharged power fantasies. If Life is Strange doesn’t completely capture its subject matter, it at least hits on truth enough of the time. There’s a level of artifice to it-a feeling, sometimes, of “Do kids actually talk like this?” (And the subsequent “No, no they don’t.”) It’s not so much an accurate appraisal of teenage-dom as it is someone’s earnest recollection of what it felt like to be a teenager.īut the ideas are real.

Trying to figure out what you believe in. Trying to figure out how to stand up for what you believe in. Complete with its own “That Was An Important Decision” indicator.Īnd for the most part, you’re a teenage girl with teenage problems. The game takes heavy inspiration from Telltale’s style of adventure game-half the game is walking around and listening to Max comment on her surroundings, the other half made up of lengthy choice-ridden dialogue sequences.

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