The Promising Life Is Strange Loses Itself In Time
Decision based adventure games are a trendy game genre with Oxenfree, all of the TellTale releases, Reigns, and many more. Each one of these games excels by making you truly think about your decision, and the ramifications. There is often lasting impact, and even vital story trajectory forking pathways in the interim making you care about your decision. Life Is Strange comes from Square Enix as a port over to iOS, and is the latest 3D choice based adventure game that comes with its own unique twist. You play as Max, a photography student at a private school, who gains the ability to reverse time. The time rewind ability is infused into every decision and puzzle mechanic in the game for an all new experience.
Life Is Strange delivers phenomenal production design with an ornate 3D engine, and deluxe voice work. The storyline is outstanding with the coming of age story mixed with the familiar teenage drama that combined is the backdrop to the Sci-Fi time travel narrative. There is so much intrigue to the storyline, and it’s all such a promising idea. The execution though is what derails the experience on iOS.
The biggest problem with Life Is Strange is the core time rewind idea goes against the core decision engine adventure. The most appealing aspect of a decision based game is that you’re actually deciding things that will have ramifications. Life Is Strange sucks all of the life out of the decision because there’s no consequences to anything that you do. If you pick a poor dialogue choice, or mess up an action, you can just rewind and fix things. The potential to rewind isn’t the problem as much as the game flashes in your face that you should rewind. In fact, the game holds you by the hand to make it an almost on rails experience to follow along with what the developers wanted you to do in each situation. You can’t just go with your gut instinct in the dialogue choices, or react poorly because another character grinds your gears. The storyline won’t even proceed unless you perform a specific set of actions, which removes all of the intrigue in these types of games.
There are instances in which you can ignore Max’s vocal regret, and the flashing of the time rewind logo, but you know you’re doing something wrong. It’s interesting in decision games to ride out your decision, especially when you only have mere seconds to decide. These games normally try to mimic the real world to potentially lead you into a rash or emotional decision. Life Is Strange removes that factor, and you’re left just going through the motions of the game. The worst part is that you want to enjoy this game because of the promise of the narrative and game engine. Having decisions that don’t really let the player decide anything really takes away from what is an otherwise well produced game. When the core concept of the game directly conflicts with the nuance of the game, it definitely detracts from the overall experience and selling point.
Life Is Strange isn’t perfect beyond the conflicting game design. One part that is tough to overlook is the loading screen gauntlet. There’s nothing quite like watching an exit cut scene that moves into a loading screen to then show a transition cut scene that fades into another load screen to then present an intro cut scene. This happens more than once to leave you not actually playing the game for extended periods of time. The touch controls are also a bit off, especially when controlling the camera. It’s a good thing you can rewind time after you spend so much of it trying to get the camera angle right, while moving Max into position. Often times, you know what you want to select, but it’s a challenge to line up Max and the camera angle to select the right item. Also, you can try to tap on an item only for the game to recognize a tap to move action, sending Max off in a new direction. There are so many stumbling blocks in this game.
Life Is Strange is one of the most promising and intriguing releases of 2017, and yet it loses so much momentum that it’s not worth your time. Sadly, I can’t rewind my time, and spend it doing something else.
