This week, I played “Life is Strange”. The game is developed by Dontnod entertainment and Deck Nine and is published by Square Enix.
The game’s protagonist is a high schooler called Max and a lot of the story of the game is based in that environment, I therefore feel that the target audience of this game might be teenagers and those in their early to mid 20s.
Formal Elements + Types of Fun
- Mystery – The mystery is the main part of the game that guides the Narrative. The Narrative guides the player in order to helping them solve the overarching mystery of what is going on. The Narrative introduces new events (arcs) and those take the player closer to the heart of the mystery. The mechanics of the game allow the player to explore, move, interact, rewind and make decisions, these contribute to the dynamic of finding out and uncovering things and getting to the heart of the mystery and that leads to the aesthetic of Narrative, Discovery, and Challenge.
- Moving – Moving was a huge part of the game as it allowed the protagonist to go to different locations and progress in the game. It contributed to the dynamic of the player exploring things (eg. reading posters) and interacting with people. This led to the aesthetic of Narrative, Fantasy, and Discovery.
- Choosing – Choosing from the choices presented allowed the game to be a choose your own narrative kind of story and this contributed to the dynamic of having players think about the consequences of their actions and making well calculated decisions since they have short and long term consequences. This lead to the aesthetic of Narrative, Challenge, and Expression.
- Rewinding – Rewinding allowed players to undo decisions and actions. This lead to the dynamic of them not placing too much pressure over any choice, because they knew they could rewind if things did not unfold as intended. This lead to the aesthetic of Narrative and Fantasy.
There were a lot of loops and arcs in the game – an interaction loop would be learning that you made a choice whose consequences you might not want to deal with and then going back and rewinding it to change your choice. Current arcs were displayed at the top (such as go to your dorm etc.) and guided the player through different phases of the game so that they could progress and not feel stuck. Even though I just played one episode, I feel each episode also had a bigger arc for itself.
In terms of successes, I think the game did a great job at weaving the narrative into a mystery. The interactions players could have were very similar to things in the real world (looking at things, talking to people etc.) and that kind of realism made the game very engaging and fun to play. I feel that choosing your own narrative games always come with a lot of pressure – you never want to make the wrong choice– but the rewinding element helped reduce that pressure.
I think the game is a little buggy (I played on Steam on my mac), gets stuck, and has a lag at times. While the overall game moves at a slow pace, I feel it gets too fast at action points (eg. when Nathan was about to shoot the girl) and that leads to having to rewind multiple times to achieve the objective. This can feel like a fail because even though you know what actions to take, it’s just not enough time because you have to change perspective, move things (and there is the lag that makes this slower).
If given the chance, I would make the overall story line a little faster (perhaps an option for players to play the game at 1.25x, 1.5x… speeds). This would allow those who enjoy faster gameplay and get easily bored to remain engaged with the game and be able to play it at a pace that works for them. I would also want to make it bug and lag free so that players do not have to worry about those affecting gameplay.
