Game: Life is Strange
Creator: Dontnod Entertainment
Platform: PC
Target Audience Teens / young people
Types of fun: fantasy, narrative, discovery
In Life is Strange, you play as a teenage photographer who can rewind time, and the story is told with the player learning new information and going back to change their old actions as they hope to get a certain outcome. Being able to make changes to the narrative yourself drastically impacts the story: the game is full of realizations and subsequent non-linear progressions that means you understand the dynamics of every interpersonal interaction a lot more than you would otherwise. I first got stuck in the game trying to make the bucket fall, and realizing I needed to go back to before I even saw the bucket to tamper with it was super unintuitive at first but made a lot of sense afterwards as way to play. The ability to reverse time also means there are no risks in gameplay: the challenge is never in choosing the right choice before you see the outcome, but in analyzing the outcome to decide if your choice was right. There is a lot of narrative fun in feeling like you fully understand an interaction and have control over it, and this is interestingly different from the type of fun that comes from making the right decision in the moment, something you can do every time in Life is Strange. The game is interesting to analyze in terms of loops and arcs because the player has very direct control over the loopiness and arcyness of the game via the time travel mechanic. The main loop is play an interaction – rewind time – play it again – repeat until satisfied. You can turn (almost) any linear narrative arc into a loop by simply going back and trying it again, and often you are required to. I did feel like some of the loops were narratively a little too long for me, and I felt like I wished I was progressing through the story arc a little bit faster than I was, but this definitely could’ve been mitigated by just exploring less story options.
