The game that I played this week is Life is Strange, made by Square Enix and released in 2015. It is on all major platforms including IOS, Android, PlayStation, and Xbox. The audience of the platform is primarily teenagers and young adults who are interested in story-based adventures. The game creates an experience for the players through walking and some interesting formal elements and mechanisms. The game started by creating a sense of urgency that (1. the protagonist suddenly acquired time rewind abilities. 2. the protagonist sees that an apocalyptic hurricane is coming in a few days). So the objective throughout the story is to figure out why the protagonist acquired the abilities and how to save the town from the catastrophe. Through this process, the protagonist ventures into different scenes, walks around, interacts, and gathers clues as to what is going to happen next. The characters can explore the world by walking around and exploring different parts of the scene and solving mysteries with items that we collect. There are a few moments that are really memorable for me. After a full day of exploring in the school(first episode), the protagonist met her friend at the end and drives back to their home into the sunset, while playing the the song “Crosses.” It just hits. It reminded me of the moments when school gets off when I was a kid. One thing that I think should be improved is the pace of the game. The game provides a lot of freedom and an immersive experience for the user to explore. But I think it can feel very slow-paced sometime. It is understandable because the game wants the user to experience or “walk” through a scene without fast-forwarding anything. I think this might be unusual for the players in some bigger scenes. So I think the game might benefit from decreasing the complexity of some scenes that would require the user 30mins to explore. Or simply, just make the protagonist walk a bit faster…
