Summary: Life is Strange
I played the first episode of the game “Life is Strange”, which is a desktop game developed by Square Enix. The overall theme of the game is that you follow a teenager named Max around as they make decisions about their life. Armed with the ability to rewind time, you are able to solve mysteries by going back in time. The game has a rating of Mature – 17+, so the target audience is older teenagers and adults. This maturity rating likely evolves from making decisions that are mature, involving things like alcohol and death.
Loops and Arcs
Arcs
The overall narrative arc of the game involves us helping the main character, Max, with the task of solving the mystery of why a girl named Rachel has disappeared. Another arc that exists in the game is following the rekindling friendship of Max and her old friend Chloe. I assume that within each episode of the game, there are other arcs that keep the game progressing.
Loops
Because of the narrative-emphasis nature of the game, I would argue that there are not many loops in the game. However, there are several loops that help players learn how to enact the narrative aspects of the game. For example, one loop helps players learn how to look around and then one loop helps with moving around. Ultimately, these 2 skills (learned through loops) combine into a skill chain that allows players to navigate the lighthouse scenario.
Types of Fun
The primary types of fun in this game are narrative, discovery, and fellowship. Narrative and discovery are clear through the premise of the game. Despite this game being a single player game, fellowship is established through the friendships that players experience with other characters. Without this fellowship aspect, I think that this game would be too depressing because you would be navigating through very mature scenarios alone. Thus, despite it being a tangential type of fun, it is necessary for players to have fun during this game. This makes me think about primary and secondary types of fun, in which I define a primary type of fun to be essential to the mechanics of the game and the base level of fun, but the secondary type of fun is what makes the game go above and beyond with regards to fun.
