Power Hour Review: Life is Strange- Episode One: Chrysalis (XBox One)

DontNod Entertainment’s new episodic game, Life is Strange is the studio’s answer to the variety of games coming from Tell Tale Games. Life is Strange is point and click with an original storyline and a young female protagonist, Max, who attending high school, Blackwell Academy, in a  small town in Oregon when she discovers that she has the power to manipulate time in order to deal with all of the problems facing a teenaged girl and more.

Life is Strange tells it’s story through a series of takes and retakes of potentially life changing scenes from the moment you press start. DontNod does a great job of making you feel the tensions of being a teenager (again). Signs about gun violence and a missing girl pepper the walls and bulletin boards around campus, all letting you know that something has gone on and that there is definitely more to come. The soundtrack becomes a huge part of the narrative in a subtle way. Rather than music blaring over the conversations, LiS aims for subtlety with soft hipster music played over headphones and car radios as a backdrop to the dialogue itself. 

The game calls upon you to look at everything and everyone in order to learn more about the people that surround you and who will, presumably, become a larger part of the story later in the game. You find yourself reading flier and listening to Max’s perception of people. All of this teaches us that the school is broken into cliques and that the “Vortex Club” kids are definitely the ones that everyone loves to hate.

I have to admit that after a while I got tired of clicking and reading on everything that I came across so I spent most of my time progressing the storyline in a pretty direct way. This will probably come back to bite me in the end. The constant clicking in the first hour of the game was definitely necessary to set the foundation for the story that is unfolding before us. I found myself thinking that if things didn’t get more exciting (and game-like) pretty quickly that it just wasn’t going to hold my attention. Let me just say, play through that. Stick with it. Things will get better, but there is not too much that I can divulge without spoiling the short episode fully.

Max’s ability to rewind is another innovative mechanism that DontNod uses to get to narrative nuance. Don’t like the answer or response that you get from someone? Rewind and approach it differently to see what changes. And this is something that you can do multiple times without repercussions. Others around you won’t remember what you said the first time at all. The only time this mechanic became laborious for me was with some of the puzzles, the times when there seems to be only one way to actually progress the narrative. This means that I had to do certain actions multiple times until I figured out what order to do some things in and where I needed to go to do what. In some cases it called on me to make choices that I really wouldn’t have made if I had really had a choice.

As far as the main characters are concerned we have Max, our resident hipster photography geek, and Chloe, the troubled, grungy, blue haired, pot smoking, and possibly queer childhood friend. Max and Chloe are shaping up to be well developed (but troubled) teenage girls, who are far from what we have come to expect, even in our more recent indie titles. I have to say that overall I was impressed with the diversity of characters in terms of race, gender, and body type. There’s a full figured, female science teacher and students of various shapes and sizes walking in the hall that are not used as objects of ridicule, but rather just a part of the storyscape itself. Unfortunately, an hour in, Max and all of the characters that she has meaningful interactions with (in my play through) are both white and physically thin. It will be interesting to see if this changes as I work through the  remainder of the game.

Overall, Life is Strange is a very pretty game (some of the weirdness of the character animations and the facial features stop me from calling it beautiful) and the soundtrack feel wonderfully appropriate both for the characters and the hippy/hipster feel of the Pacific Northwest. It is important to note that while the game is about teenagers that it definitely is not for (younger) teenagers. It bears a, justified, rating of mature with it’s fair share of violence, profanity, pot smoking, attempted teacher seduction, and other very adult themes that promise to become a larger part of the narrative in future episodes. In some way all of this makes the characters feel much older than high school age, but these things will definitely keep me coming back for more.