Review: Life Is Strange: Episode One

Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, PC
Release Date: Out now
Developer: Dontnod Entertainment
Publisher: Square Enix

Ever since Telltale released The Walking Dead to the world, the interactive storytelling genre has exploded into the mainstream. Thanks to this, many of them are becoming boring (not helped by Telltale themselves, who just keep making more games), as they all use the same mechanics and nobody tries to be inventive or new. Until Life Is Strange.

The game revolves around Max, a student at what can only be described as the worst school in all of history, and her friend Chloe, a punk teenager. The two of them try to live normal lives at school and at home, dealing with problems ranging from bullies to step-dads, whilst at the same time coping with the disappearance of another school-girl in mysterious circumstances.

At the core of the game is a mechanic that has the potential to change the genre (if the game’s developers at Dontnod are to be believed). Max has the ability to turn back time whenever she likes, meaning you can reverse decisions that you’ve already made and see how things play out if you hadn’t taken the first path. While put to use in a few puzzles, time reversal is primarily for decision-based gameplay and is limited to the area you are currently occupying. You also can’t reverse time indefinitely, so there’s still an element of suspense around the consequences actions can have later on in the game. Nevertheless, the mechanic feels a little unjustified in the first outing, and will probably need to bear fruit in later episodes so as not to appear a gimmicky attempt at shaking things up.

Linked with this is another issue I had with the first episode, which is that the story is utterly bewildering. It attempts to straddle different genres, simultaneously being a game about two school girls living in the wake of a possible murder, and a game about a girl who gains supernatural abilities, and it is worse off for it. Neither side of the story comes off particularly well. The school stuff is bland and uninteresting, and the supernatural stuff just feels unnecessary and out of place. For a style of play that pretty much demands an engaging story to be successful, Life Is Strange struggles. It doesn’t help that characters come across as poor stereotypes dreamt up by people who have no idea what school life is like (i.e. the hipster kid, the punk kid, the nerdy kid who isn’t good with girls, the ‘mean girl’) meaning that, so far, I don’t care what happens to any of them.

Life Is Strange doesn’t fare much better on the technical side of things. The graphical style, though occasionally quite pretty can be over-simplistic, and yet the first episode stuttered on a machine that can play much more advanced games a lot more smoothly. The same stuttering occurred with the audio. When I first turned the game on, the audio hitching was so bad that it rendered the game unplayable until I turned the graphical quality down, but even then the drop in frame-rate persisted throughout.

For a style of play that pretty much demands an engaging story to be successful, Life Is Strange struggles

However, the worst technical offence has to be the lip sync, which is awful. Most of the time, you can’t actually tell that the lips of the characters are meant to be moving. Imagine particularly bad animatronics made ten times worse, and you have something in the region of Life Is Strange. One of the only parts of the game’s presentation that provides a reprieve is a decent acoustic guitar musical intro, but the soundtrack only grows cheesier and more annoying the further you progress.

It’s clear that Life Is Strange has issues that need sorting out and, to be honest, I’m being a bit hard on it because it has so much potential. Prior to release it’s been lauded for its female protagonists and potentially innovative time mechanic, and it’s for these reasons that the hype for the game hasn’t yet been completely smashed to pieces. The game could easily turn into something wonderful, and become an absolute treat. However, at the moment, Life Is Strange falls far short of that. [divider_top]

Header Image: Flickr/BagoGames

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