Life is Strange is an award-winning and critically acclaimed episodic adventure game that allows the player to rewind time and affect the past, present, and future. It is made by Square Enix, Don’t Nod, Deck Nine, Feral Interactive, and Black Wing Foundation. I played through the first episode which is free on Steam, and it was such a wonderful adventure. I’ve been wanting to play this game for such a long time, and now I finally got the chance to do it! My argument for this piece is that Life is Strange’s rewind time mechanic allows players to not have FOMO in a branching narrative, which typically happens in other branching narrative games.
The start of the game brings together a huge mystery of what happened and if the main character died or if that was just a dream. The narrative is woken into the mystery through the mechanics in various ways. One of them is by having a branching narrative. In the mechanics, you can choose various things to interact with (ex: a photo, reading a diary, or looking at a bag) as seen in Figure 1. Each of these options provides adventure for the player with a choice, which adds a dynamic of mystery as the player must choose between what to do. This is further incentive by the illusion of choice (common among Telltale games) where the narrative can be branched apart but realistically leads to the same outcomes, which gives the players while playing their first run-through (until later on which will be discussed) this huge sense of mystery as they aren’t sure what the other options would lead to and the players have FOMO.
The mechanics of the game are relatively simple but each one of these mechanics leads to so much mystery. While walking around, the narrator begins talking about what they see. This is a mechanic baked in and is similar to a walking simulator. However, each of these dialogue options and the small interactions we can do throughout the scene such as opening up the locker leads to more mystery and more world-building (figure 3).
All of these small interactions build up to the school setting, and it overall leads to a major event shift in the first episode where a student is shot and murdered (figure 4), followed by the main character rewinding back to the past. This is when the first narrative shift happens and the real mystery occurs as the player is trying to figure out how to rewind time and affect the past, present, and future.
Now, the narrative allows the player to skip back time by holding down L2 on the PlayStation. So, the decisions you make have very small consequences. This also makes the player no longer have that FOMO that was discussed earlier. By being able to view one decision, then rewind time and see the other decisions, the players are able to uncover the mystery of what is going on and get a full picture. This one single mechanic is what drives Life is Strange and sets it apart from other mystery games. The loops of the story and playing the same adventure over and over but making minor decisions that could have major impacts later on make this game so much fun and enjoyable as a mystery, and this makes it so the players feel much less FOMO compared to other adventure games such as the other Telltale games. One of the best examples of this is telling the principal that the student had a gun, then that same student confronts you later in the game (figure 5) saying how he knows you told the principal that he had a gun. Although this doesn’t impact the overall narrative structure, it does make individual scenes stand out and different from the rest.
This game in general has a lot of loops through the rewind mechanic, and there is this huge narrative arc with the school. The story progresses linearly but with branches depending on player choices. The rewind mechanics do not affect the overarching narrative structure like groundhog-day loops would but are rather localized within individual scenes. This makes it seem that players do not have FOMO as they are able to choose the best option for that specific scene that they want and view all the multiple scenes that could occur from the different choices by rewinding time.
Overall, this game is amazing and I am super glad I got to play Life is Strange. The rewind time mechanic is an amazing feature that sets apart this game from any other adventure mystery game, and this allows players to not have FOMO in a branching narrative, which typically happens in other similar games.
Figure 1: you have options for which ones to choose and continue down or not choose any of them at all. Each of these options leads to more story and more narrative, leading to more mystery.
Figure 2: Books for you to read and flip through all the pages for a lot of storytelling and world-building
Figure 3: Ability to open up locker and get more world-building
Figure 4: A student was shot in the bathroom and after the scene rewinded.
Figure 5: Nathaniel confronts you for telling the principal he had a gun.
