Die hard readers may remember last month when I reviewed the first episode of Life Is Strange. I wasn’t incredibly impressed by it, as it contained a few pitfalls that the developer DONTNOD’s previous title, Remember Me, fell down.
That said, I was engaged by the story, and more than willing to carry it forward.
Episode 2 of the series picks up the day after the first, having the heroine Max wake up after her struggles the day before. However, since this is a sci-fi based around a high school, we need to get into the high school drama first. Stories that were hinted to in the first episode, mainly the ones surrounding Kate Marsh, the shy, lonely and heavily religious girl in Max’s class. Kate tends to take the main spotlight in this episode as a viral video depicting her in a less than pious light is released school wide, and Max can choose to take it upon herself to ensure the video and its perpetrators are taken down.
All of this happens. whilst working alongside her ex-best friend Chloe to try to make sense of her new-found time control powers. Unlike many works of fiction where the super hero finds their strength and immediately proceeds to kick ass with it, Max actually starts to struggle to control her powers as she starts suffering from nose bleeds, headaches and blackouts due to her powers.
I actually like this approach, it annoys me greatly when stories portray the transition from average Jane to Super Girl so effortlessly. You do not wake up knowing everything there is to know about time after watching the Back To The Future trilogy, as much as I wish you could. So that fact that Max actually sees complications from her sudden power spike is actually a step in the right direction in my opinion. However, the true complications and limitations of her power only really show up towards the end of the episode. Right up until a certain point, you can rewind as long as you want (as long as you’re not in a cut scene!) and it makes little to no difference. For example, there was a short clip at the end of the last episode spoiling that Chloe would get trapped on a train track just as the train was showing up. Unfortunately, due to the fact the player can just rewind time and the train back and forward like a yo-yo, any tension or panic that the scene tries to set up is quickly lost.
Which brings me to my second point, the pacing. The pacing in Life Is Strange is very slow, from the cut scenes, to exploring the environment and even the soundtrack. There’s very few high-octane moments to break it up, and when those moments get around, to me, they seemed underwhelming. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying a slow pace is bad, it can easily set up some really great suspense and anticipation for the next scene, but I didn’t really feel that impact in Life Is Strange. If anything, playing the game at such a slow pace, and without any skip function between playthroughs, made the game more of a chore than something to pass the time, and that wasn’t helped at all by the seemingly MMO style tasks you were given between scenes. Most of Episode 2 involved grabbing so many bottles or memorising a specific number of coins in someone’s pocket. Essentially it turned into “Bring me X amount of X”, which really only works in MMO’s because… well, I don’t even know why it works there. Any WoW heads that want to clarify the appeal can leave their answers in the comments.
In short, it just didn’t amuse me, and I felt like the game was both pushing me to find more story and punishing me for something i did wrong in the story at every turn. And trust me, there are many points where your choices in the previous episode will come back to bite you in the ass. And when I say your previous choices, I don’t just mean the big choices where the game clearly tells you that this will have consequences. There’s one point in episode 2 where the entire story will take a depressing down turn depending on simply whether or not you erased a white board in the first episode.
That’s an interesting idea, and lends itself quite well to the butterfly effect vibe that Life Is Strange is trying to achieve, but it also makes you paranoid as a player because a lot of these little things your supposed to do are not obvious. As I said in the last episodes review, a lot of small choices that they give you, like saving a bird from hitting a window, or writing on a dirty van, were missed completely by a majority of players. When you go back to find these things, they’re tucked away in a corner that you literally will not see unless you’re trained into studying every nook and cranny of the scene, which again, makes the game feel more like a chore, and takes you out of the story. Add to that, the list of collectible photographs that can only be taken in a specific part of the story that you cannot return to and you end up with a hyper alert player, who really isn’t paying attention to the story while it’s happening.
So, so far I haven’t really enjoyed Episode 2, but hey, it’s not all that bad, I’m sure I can still get a good ending here. Except that I can’t because of a huge oversight that I mentioned in my last review. The goddamn photographic proof. There is a scene where you can either choose to step in and defend our dear Kate Marsh from a bully, or snap a photo of it as proof, in episode 1. The game had already explained to me that I keep items between time travel. Taking that photo and then going back to help Kate shouldn’t be an issue. However, so much of Episode 2’s story depends on that choice, that a fully happy ending is pretty much impossible to get unless you somehow have photographic evidence and comfort Kate by stepping in to help. It’s a lose/lose situation that just seems to smack the player in the face regardless of their decisions.
It’s possible I’m over reacting, we’re only at episode 2 out of 5, so there’s plenty of time for the story to either teach me a stern lesson about changing fate, or wrap up to give me a happy ending that I feel I deserve after so much paranoid snooping through every scene, but it just doesn’t feel rewarding for me to have played this episode.
We’ll have to see if the game can redeem itself next time, because regardless of my current opinion, I intend to see this one through to the end. If you want to formulate your own opinions and let me know, Life is Strange is available now on Xbox One, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Playstation 4 and Steam.
Is it too late to go back in time? 4/10
