For my critical play, I played Episode 1 of Life is Strange on Steam, a 17+ video game created by Deck Nine Games and Don’t Nod Entertainment in 2019. Life is Strange, much like a walking game, depends on users exploring their environment and clicking on interactive elements to jumpstart narrative episodes that help advance a mysterious storyline. In Life is Strange, you play as Max, a young teenage girl who has just discovered her ability to time travel. It is clear that the way the main, bigger-picture storyline should unfold is already pre-determined by the game designers because there is always a clear mission/task that you have to hit to move the story forward. So, you are just exploring your environment and learning from interactions with the people around you while you complete designated, smaller missions/tasks that serve as triggers to move this storyline forward, although there are some conversations where you can make choices about what to say, and those choices have consequences for your character’s experiences and confrontations later on in the story.
When interacting with the world you can walk around a physical space and interact with labeled parts of the environment in 3 different ways: speaking to a person, looking at something/one, or using something. All three options are not always available, that is pre-determined by the game but you always have the choice of walking up and interacting with something or not. There is always one action that the game wants you to complete at a time which helps advance the story. For example, one of the first actions you must complete in the game is going to the bathroom, but on the way to do so, you walk down a long hallway where you have the choice to interact with different people, posters, or lockers and actually can hear ambient conversations that are happening. This is a loop in the game that builds skills as well as introduces sub-arcs within the larger episode. Every time we interact with something new while on our way to our “main mission” we gain more and more accustomed to what we are able to do in the game and how we should approach finding new information. We learn about the differences between just looking at someone and speaking to them through repeated practice, how to rewind time, and how to navigate simultaneously looking around the environment and moving through it (which actually takes a bit of practice when playing on a laptop). At the same time, as we interact with things around us, we learn about the stories and personalities of other characters in the game. For example, on my way to the bathroom, by looking at missing posters on the wall, I learned about Rachel (a missing girl in the game) which added mystery to the game and an additional sub-arc to the one I was trying to explore at the moment which was about Max’s photography, I learned about the jocks at school, about bullied students, and about the principal who always stays locked in his office.
[example of learning about side characters in the hallway]
Sometimes, you don’t know how to complete the smaller missions/steps in the game and you have to interact with elements in your environment to figure it out, helping you learn new things as you explore. For example, there is a part of the game where we must find tools in a garage (we don’t know where they are) and by poking around the environment, I found out that Chloe’s stepdad had cameras in the home and had pictures of Kate (another character in the game). You find smaller story arcs that introduce new questions and mystery as you move through the pre-designed actions in the game. Through every one of these sub-arcs that I experienced, I was constantly asking myself: how might this character/object point to what happened to Rachel? This definitely created the aesthetics of discovery, narrative, and fantasy as I tried to explore every interactive element of the setting to try and get closer to an answer regarding Rachel’s fate, something that I could do only bit by bit as I moved through the game’s structured storyline and its limited interactive environment components (i.e things I could click on to look at and speak with).
Additionally, one of the main mechanics of the game includes being able to make decisions about what to do/say during some interactions which actually has an impact on the type of information you learn when conversing with another character and what consequences you experience later in the game.
[example of a time when I had to make a choice]
After you converse with a character or complete one of the “main missions,” the game often includes a narrative episode where you cannot interrupt as a player but instead must exclusively watch Max witness something, converse with someone, or think through a situation. Walking around and interacting with things is just a way to get to those narrative episodes and learn more about the guided, pre-set mystery of the game which revolves around a missing Rachel and is influenced by the choices you have made so far in the game.
This game was very similar to What Remains of Edith Finch in the way that exploration of the game’s physical environment was a major catalyst in finding new information and triggering stories. One small criticism that I have of the game is that it felt much slower and more overwhelming than What Remains of Edith Finch. This was because there were a lot of interactive elements in the environment that did not contribute much/at all to the storyline. For example, there were many interactive posters that I read and whose main purpose I could see was to teach me more about Max’s humor, but while exploring these unnecessary elements did help me develop a more robust mental image of Max’s personality, they also took a good chunk of time to explore which stalled me from completing the “main mission” at the point of the story that I was at which made it move much slower and ended up making me feel bored and unsure of what parts of my environment were and were not worth looking at. I liked that in What Remains of Edith Finch everything that was interactive helped move the story forward which I think is something that could be better adopted by Life is Strange.
