Life is Strange is a single player third person adventure mystery game by Dontnod Entertainment and Deck Nine. It’s available on Steam for PC/Mac, Xbox, and PS4/5. Its target audience is teenagers and young adults, as it follows a teenager who is making important life decisions, who just happens to have the power to unwind them.
“How is narrative woven into the mystery through its mechanics? How does the architecture of the setting control the story? Then, look for loops and arcs. Does this game have one, both or something else?”
Narrative is woven into the mystery through the main mechanic of rewinding. Rewinding in Life is Strange allows the player to rewind an important decision. The player could want to rewind for a variety of reasons including but not limited to: seeing what other outcomes are possible, feeling like they made the wrong choice, wanted to play the scene again, etc. The game is set at what seems to be a boarding school and through playing, I realized we’re probably going to be looking for the missing girl on the posters around said school. As we progress through the story, we’re given the chance to loop (rewind) back to time before an important decision. There are a lot of games that employ a strategy of “1) talk with NPC 2) make decision 3) decision leads to different outcome depending on choice”. This feels like a DFS (depth first search) algorithm where you follow a single path all the way to the end, but for some reason I really want to play games in a BFS (breadth first search) way where we explore all paths equally before reaching any end. Almost all games are DFS and not BFS in terms of story lines. However, this game makes it feel like you have more BFS power by being able to undo some of your decisions, even if you can’t really go back multiple decisions (at least I wasn’t able to do that in the hour and a half I played).
A few things I noticed that I did not like are:
- Script writing: the slang used is really outdated, but not in a funny way… its in more of a cringe way.
- Lip animations: are abhorrent. They are so far off what the character is actually saying that I thought the game may have been originally produced in a different language and dubbed/subbed in English. It’s to the point where it kind of affects immersion for me.
- Rewind: feels very clunky. As a designer, you want all your main mechanics to feel really polished and smooth, and understood by the user. This one main mechanic feels quite slow at times and sometimes hard to think about how I need to use it and when. The “slow” feeling could just be due to my laptop though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
- Interact flow: The click and drag method is similarly clunky to the rewind. In addition to clunky, every interaction/item seems to have a “look” option. It makes me feel like I should be looking at these things, but usually looking at them doesn’t give me much more information, meaning I’m wasting time. Also some items need to be interactable (sprinkler valve for ex) but require you to interact with them at a specific time and instead just put “look” instead of allowing me to interact. This part just feels kind of annoying because it took me 5-10 min to figure out the sprinkler paint situation. The game felt like it was hinting at me but in a way that could be improved using highlighting, setting/item design, or some other guidance system.
The main mechanic of the game, rewinding, is somewhat novel but I think the execution could be improved in the four ways I described above. However, I like how you have the option to rewind in a continuous spiral, as it makes me (the player) feel like I have more control over the situation. It’s also nice that they display a little dot on the time spiral so you know when to skip back to.
One dynamic that is very clear is the ability to change your future. You might not have a clear idea how changing decisions will impact your future, but at least you have the ability to use the rewind mechanic to go back as many times as you want. This plays back to the idea of control, which is very important to feel like you have in a single player drama.
Lastly, for aesthetics, Life is Strange employs Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Discovery, I would argue Expression, and also Submission. You’re set in a make believe world where you have a magic power that can turn time back (Fantasy). Someone has gone missing and you need to figure out what happened (Narrative). You must figure out which decisions to make at what times and when to rewind while also solving in game puzzles to progress (Challenge). Throughout the story, you encounter new physical map territories, ways to use your powers, and clues to solve the mystery (Discovery). For teens and young adults, this game could help shape how they make decisions in life, allowing them to view multiple angles and replay situations, which could help them in real life (Expression). Lastly the game is just fun, so I would play it as a pastime. I wonder how Life is Strange would be different if you could go way back in time, instead of just a few minutes.
In the first few minutes of the game, I tried to look at this picture I took, but I couldn’t figure out how it worked. The game even had to give me specific subtitles to show me what to do, and even then I didn’t get it. Maybe I’m illiterate or maybe it could be redesigned.
Opening my journal in the classroom, I was presented with a very different color scheme that what I was used to in the dark classroom (pic above). It was fun to read through some of the lore, though I think the game should release this information to you more progressively as you complete more of the story, since right now I have no incentive to read the whole journal and it feels like a waste of time.
