NB: This story freely discusses the plot of Life is Strange. Do not read if you don’t want it to be spoiled.
Our emotional state can significantly influence how we think, and it is easier for our emotions to dictate our thoughts than it is for our thoughts to govern our emotions. In other words, you may make a bad decision when upset, but conversely in the same state will find it much harder to rationalise yourself into calmness.
That is one of the satisfying components of narrative catharsis. A story cleanses us of negative mental states by taking us on an emotional journey. We come out of it better equipped to take on life, whether through lessons learned, because we feel inspired, or we’re simply happier.
I believe those two principles are core to the success of Life is Strange. The game delivers a beautiful and pure emotional experience through its inspired and accomplished arrangement of story, visuals, and mechanics.
Setting a Scene
From the second the title boots, its setting embraces the audience.
The Dontnod logo stylised as a sketch, the peaceful guitar strumming in the background, birds chirping and the sound of the wind in the trees all set the scene. The sound effect for pressing start is the sound of a camera going off. The UI for choosing a save slot consists of notebook scraps.
The game hasn’t started, and the audience is already immersed in the atmosphere of Arcadia Bay and Max’s life at Blackwell Academy.
The intro of the game presents its flip side. It opens on the storm; chaos, raw and violent nature, and the mystical deer that is seen throughout the story.
Each scene in the game is densely crafted and lovingly executed.
The warm side of this world makes the player care. It is inviting, it is loving, and something clearly worth preserving. The cold side of the world is a clear threat to be overcome, a learning opportunity, and a challenge. The concept is as old as storytelling, but Life is Strange does several things to make it stand out.
The setup and experiences are often highly relatable to anyone who ever was a teenager. When Max props herself against a wall and puts in her headphones, we can see how she finds sanctuary in the music. As the song from her headphones becomes the game’s soundtrack, we walk along the hallway being introduced to part of her world and it at once tells us about Max, but is also likely relatable on a personal level. It is an examination of that mundane moment of walking down a high school corridor, or any corridor for that matter, as an outsider, using music as a retreat — an experience that probably a lot of people are familiar with.
Feelings are unfiltered. Golden hours are more like golden days in Life is Strange, because landscapes suffused in sunlight evoke warm feelings and make everything feel cosy, safe, like home. When things get bad, they get really bad, thunderstorms and all. It’s not that the game doesn’t know shades of grey, but it cares more about communicating the intended feeling than dealing in ambiguity. It’s a careful examination of raw emotion.
But it’s not raw emotion alone that drives a story.
Saving the Day
Life is Strange’s core mechanic of rewinding time is a clever spin on the choice-based narrative game, because it eliminates FOMO for the most part. You can explore either option and decide which you like the best, without wondering what the direct consequences of the other path look like.
But it’s not just a gimmick, as the power itself allows Max to explore places and learn more about the people around her and herself than she otherwise would have.
Somewhat ironically, one of the central messages of the game is how short our time on this planet is. Whether a character’s fate is tragic, or they are just held back by their own inner demons, Max largely uses her power to expose those layers and affect some positive change. It is not without reason that the photography contest Max is supposed to submit a picture for revolves around the theme of an Everyday Hero.
Moments such as Max saving a bird because she saw it smash into a window before rewinding and opening the window, preventing a football from hitting a class mate, or telling Victoria how her insecurities are unnecessary and harmful are just as integral to the game as the big story events.
To illustrate why I think the game succeeds in spite its shortcomings, let’s look at the finale of Episode 2, Kate Marsh on the rooftop.
The scene itself is characteristically well set up. Jefferson’s class room is generally calm and subuded, Max is locked into her seat, it’s just Jefferson talking under low light with little ambient noise. Another student bursts in and announces that something crazy is going on, and the entire class shuffles outside, where the scene shifts.
It’s raining heavily outside, people are running and screaming. Then Max freezes time. The students in the courtyard look like a sculpture garden. The soundscape is ominous. Max is bleeding from the nose and struggling — her powers are faltering. She makes it to the rooftop before Kate jumps, but the game makes clear that she cannot rewind this time. She only has one chance to save Kate.
Again, we have a highly emotional set up, in the narrative, the art, and the design of the scene.
When Max is up on the roof with Kate, it’s almost as though the writing doesn’t care about being organic. Max will blatantly tell a fragile Kate someone wrote the link to the video that drove her up to the roof in the first place on the girl’s bathroom mirror, but use the fact that she wiped it off as evidence that she cares. Kate will acknowledge “I’m glad to hear you worry about me… That makes me feel better…”, which is one step away from the UI displaying “Kate’s trust +5”.
The narrative legos don’t always quite fit. One moment Kate will tell Max how much she appreciates that she always listens, the next she might lament how Max never listens.
But it doesn’t matter, because the emotional beats are powerful.
We care about Kate. We care about Max and how she feels in that moment. We care about our interactions and how they affect the scene, and therefore having blatant call-outs feels satisfying.
Our brains aren’t naturally wired to think deep, and at the speed at which a narrative proceeds, our emotional reaction to the moment is all we have, even if we could unearth issues if spending some time to think deeper.
In Life is Strange, those emotional beats are paramount. It matters little if the deeper truth sometimes doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Back to the Beginning
Depending on the ending, we go all the way back to the beginning of the story. Few to none of our choices persist.
The narrative rewinds but then branches off in a significant way because of the experience Max has gone through.
But more importantly, Max keeps her knowledge and growth, now equipped to take on the world as a different person. Someone with the courage to be honest, build up and inspire others as she has done in the alternate timeline.
The sledgehammer might not make for a great quill, but if it communicates to players how powerful honesty or how cathartic emotions can be, and if those players can take those values with them even after the game has ended, that is a far greater achievement than a beautifully, subtly written scene no one remembers a week later.
