Life is strange is a visual novel (IN 3-D!) that sold a huge number of digital copies (limited edition digital copies to boot!) for some reason. As the first chapter was free and I mainly play video games for ShiTEAM achievements now (as I'm done with all the endless-type online games I used to play in the last 8 or so years for various reasons), and I was searching for a point & click adventure anyway I picked it up (as much as you can pick up a download - which is not at all because it doesn't physically exist!).
So in LiS you run around (or rather walk at a snail's pace - the couch potato main character clearly never exercises.) a small town campus. The main character, Maxine (wtf is that name?!), is studying photography MAYBE - I know nothing of the American university system - well, at least that is the only class she ever visits (1 out of 1 in the first chapter). Movement isn't the only thing at a crawling speed in this game, as gameplay consists of 25% walking (no kidding!), 25% dialogue cutscenes with various NPCs and 50% listening to Max describing various objects, landmarks and whatnot. Even with such a limited degree of interactivity, the controls are really not very good, as is typical for each and every console port I've ever played (granted, that's a very small number...). Invisible walls are really restrictive - there certainly is no exploring in this game.
Setting:
Loner hipster girl 18-year-old Maxine Caulfield (note the really unsubtle and irrelevant reference to Holden Caulfield of The catcher in the rye fame) - wait does that make any sense? Being a hipster doesn't make any sense if you can't show it off to your hipster peers. Anyway, she is a massive photography nerd, exclusively using a Polaroid camera (which would clearly never be allowed at university). Her hobbies include not contacting her best friend, getting bullied and standing up for pathetic losers she doesn't have any relationship with in the first place (that is, if you let her do that - this IS an interactive novel after all. You can make some limited choices... but more on that later). She really isn't too interesting, but not offensively loathable either, and that already beats most women (both in fiction and in reality) by default. Also she got a pretty good body - however this is rendered pointless by the fact we don't see anything in that shower scene. BOO. In fact, it's quite hard to ever see her feet outside of cutscenes cause the camera is really rigid. Some fanservice really would've worked wonders there.
Anyway, so Max goes to class, lives at a dorm, has limited social interactions with her nerd and loser friends and uses social media. Note that "taking selfies" isn't on that list cause you can ONLY take "selfies" with a "smartphone" - and not with a Polaroid camera (don't listen to the game's lies). And BAM suddenly she develops the magical ability to rewind time to a limited amount. However, instead of using that power in a sensible way to e.g. take over the world, she merely uses her rewind to impress her hipster teacher (who she naturally has a crush on) and protect her loser friends. In fact, there is no reason for this supernatural bullshit to be in the game in the first place. It's a stupid gimmick that adds little to nothing - especially as your choices are really not important in the first place as they are way too limited in the moral sense. You can't kill the stupid bitch bully, you can't tell Chloe (again, WTF IS THAT NAME?! that's one of the stupidest non-black names in existence!) to FUCK OFF, even when she tries to make you take the blame for smoking a joint IN FRONT OF THE INSANE SCHOOL SECURITY GUARD (which probably would cost Max her scholarship), you can't even do small things like outright telling the pathetic CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST loser queen to leave you the fuck alone. So if you can't make meaningful (= moral) choices anyway, what's the point of being able to reverse them instantly instead of via reloading...?! Possibly the rewind gimmick will pay off later, but I can't see right now how it would be able to convince of its necessity in the story.
Story:
The storyline can be summed up in one sentence.
Characters:
So we got Max, which is, like I said above, not too bad. She is actually interested in something useful (namely photography), and that's quite a likeable trait.
Chloe: is a massive bitch. Implied to be a vegan subhuman, doing nothing but blaming Max for not contacting her (note: that always goes both ways...), daddy's girl (too bad her father died in a freak triple penetration accident), confuses smilies for emojis (seriously, are the writers of this game that stupid?!) even though smileys predate them by 20 years, fake hair colour, nail dirt, hipster punk cunt. However even with all of those traits I don't actually *hate* her - something in this game actually works quite excellent, but I can't put my finger on it yet. Certainly it has to do with the high productions values. Oh and she gets murdered by one of her drug dealer peers at the beginning of the game but unfortunately you can't not reverse time there (as you can have EITHER full voice acting or large-scale branching in a visual novel. Guess which one I prefer...).
Bitch: rich bitch with short hair that likes to make fun of poor losers and outcasts. However, she doesn't do that with style so she's quite annoying. Maybe we can kill her in one of the later episodes...
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| Not too hard to figure out the inspiration behind the Bitch character... |
Christian fundamentalist girl: one of the worst characters I've ever seen in video games and sadly you can't tell her to get lost once and for all. However I'm keeping my fingers crossed I can drive her to commit suicide in the course of the story.
Other characters don't matter in Episode 1 and never will.
Summary:
Life is strange is doing many things wrong, but all in all it is quite playable. Ep 1 is really short though. At the end I expect a payoff that even might fill me with a slight warm and fuzzy feeling. LiS really only works as a visual novel as it doesn't have the substance to even fill a TV show. Technically it is really well made, graphics and sound are good. The music is godawful though (I especially HATED that "American girls" song!). In my eyes, the format works even if the content really isn't that good, and I can imagine much better games made with the same sophistication of production values. For example, imagine Higurashi married with this technology! Who says visual novels have to be static pictures for all eternity! Life is strange Chapter 1 at least disproved that idea for me once and for all and for that I'm glad I have played it...
PS: yeah, the title makes no sense. Nothing in this game is strange whatsoever. And while most of the references in this game mean nothing to me, some made me chuckle. Nekromantik, lol. And that literally one day after I had watched a different Jörg Buttgereit movie (namely Der Todesking)!
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