About the Game
Life is Strange is a series of episodes of adventure game developed by Dontnod Entertainment. I played episode 1 on PC for about 2 hours (though still wasn’t able to reach the ending yet). The target audience is players 16 years of age or above due to some mature content. It’s for people who are into interactive stories, mysteries, and the concept of manipulating time.
The player controls the protagonist Max, who is passionate about photography and has recently returned to her hometown to attend Blackwell Academy, an arts-focused school for high school seniors. Shortly after starting the game, Max discovers a special ability to rewind time to a certain extent, and therefore can stop incidents from happening or try a different choice of action. The main mystery of the game is that a girl named Rachel Amber has gone missing for a while. Max attempts to uncover the mystery while juggling many different challenges in her own life. These are the objectives of the game (at least for episode 1)
Analysis
The gameplay somewhat resembles a walking simulator in that the player controls Max by walking and interacting with the environment. The player interacts with objects such as posters and drawers by dragging the mouse to the action text. In some cases, the player can only choose to “Look,” and this often gives the player some background information about either the environment, the story, or the characters. In other cases, the player can further interact with the objects with “open,” “search,” or “use” actions. This is an interesting design of mechanics and procedures because the player isn’t simple told things, but rather discover things by looking around. In fact, this is how the player first discovers the mystery of Rachel Amber’s disappearance before learning about it from characters in the game — through looking at posters and getting information about the missing girl. As a result, the Narrative type of fun in is very strong as the player proceeds to collect additional information about all the mysteries in the game.
However, there is much more to this game than simply walking around collecting pieces of information. The player is actually in the driver’s seat rather than the passenger’s seat because the game progresses by the player making choices about what actions to take. What’s very unique about this game is that the player has the ability to undo actions and pick a different one instead. This design of rules (manipulating time/action) helps to build the Fantasy type of fun as the player gets to imagine they can rewind time. In addition, the game always warns the player about an action having consequences so that the player can decide whether to undo their last action and pick a different one instead. This mechanic creates a unique dynamic because it gives me mixed feelings about the ability to undo actions. On the one hand, it’s cool that I can actually try all action choices and see which action might be better to take. On the other hand, even though I’m told that an action will have consequences, I have no visibility into future events that would be impacted by my choice of action, so I’m still only able to make a judgment using what I know and my hunch. Therefore, I also feel a Challenge type of fun when playing this game because I’m making choices to try to quickly uncover the mystery using my newly learned ability to unwind time.
In terms of arcs and loops, this game has a mixed architecture in that pieces of the story are a part of an overarching mystery arc (with smaller arcs involving character stories parallel to the central one) and the player performs actions in loops to progress down the arcs. I think the arcs in the game are all very well designed — while attempting to meet small objectives and solve short-term conflicts built into the story, the player learns more about the biggest mystery in the game which is Rachel’s disappearance. There was not a moment when I felt bored in this game because the narrative is so strong. The loops, on the other hand, involves things like interacting with objects and characters, and unwinding time. I think the loops could be better designed so as to not overwhelm the player, by reducing the number of things available for the player to interact with in each environment and by making the time rewind ability easier to perform. I felt a bit tired having to perform so many actions in order to move forward in the story, so it would be helpful to have overall less actions to take.
