Introduction to Life Is Strange
For this week’s critical play, I played the narrative mystery game Life Is Strange, created by Dontnod Entertainment. I opted to play this game on my iPhone, and with the portability of the game and seeming ease with which one can stop and start the game, it seems that this game is targeting solo players that enjoy a mysterious narrative and play in their spare time, like on public transportation or waiting in line. Players, however, must be old enough (13+) to handle the mature content of the game.
Gameplay
The game follows the main character Max through a third-person perspective. The player starts by watching a dramatic starting sequence during a storm before gameplay begins. Then, after some flashes of stormy trees and of the main character laying on the ground, the first loop begins as the player is taught the first skill of looking around. This looking skill is then chained with the movement skill to then work to the skill of navigating an environment, a chained skill that is tested by prompting the player to navigate to the lighthouse.
The game follows this general format of moving the narrative along slowly as the player learns new skills and is given opportunity to explore new skills and combine them with previous skills, like collecting and using objects or looking at things. As the player learns and develops these skills, the narrative arc is pushed forward by the use of these skills. Given the episodic nature of the game, it seems that each episode has a smaller narrative arc that all combine together for the overarching narrative arc.
Successes & Failures
One thing that this game does well is pacing. As the player is learning new skills, the player is given plenty of time to explore the new skill. At the beginning when I was first taught how to look around and move and then instructed to proceed to the lighthouse, I was worried that I needed to get to the lighthouse in a certain amount of time. However, I found that I had plenty of time to fully explore the looking around and movement skills before chaining them together and slowly making my way to the lighthouse. Then, once I felt more comfortable with my skills, more components were added to add pressure like limited number of actions within a time pressure or forced choices. Overall, the starting slow and then speeding up pacing as the player followed the loop for building each skill creates a nice pacing dynamic that enabled the fun of exploration and creates challenge through investigation and narrative choices rather than through technical skills.
One aspect I would change, however, was the clunkiness of the maneuvering. I found it hard to both smoothly adjust my view and move around the environment, which made it frustrating at times when I was really eager to get to a certain place or look at a certain object. Thus, to further increase the problem-solving fun, I would try to make the finger movements of looking around more technically different than moving Max.
