No two people’s formative years as a teenager are quite alike, a time of your life which brings huge physical and psychological changes on the way to reaching maturity, and it’s only made more difficult to deal with by upheaval in the world around you. That can cut both ways though, as Max Caulfield discovers when she returns to the small town of Arcadia Bay, having had to move away five years previously.
That return puts her as a kind of stranger in her own land – lending the player some common ground with the protagonist – knowing the town, the school that she returns to in order to continue as a Senior photography student, but not really knowing anyone there and having lost many of the ties that she once had. Except perhaps to her childhood friend, Chloe, now with dyed blue hair and a distinctly more rebellious outlook on life. Max wasn’t just uprooted from her own life, but was simultaneously torn out of Chloe’s life and at a time when she needed support from those around her the most, there was nobody to turn to.
It’s a potentially fractious relationship which will doubtless be a cornerstone of the game’s story, as you try to unravel the mysterious disappearance of a fellow high school student, Rachel Amber. It’s a story that’s told by your own hand, as an episodic adventure game in the more modern sense of the genre. Dontnod – who you might recall made Remember Me – is taking more inspiration from the likes of The Walking Dead and Heavy Rain, in which character development is the focal point and the decisions you make as you play have ramifications and see the story diverge from beginning to end.
The demonstration, already several scenes into the game, saw Max visit Chloe’s house, in order to borrow the tools to try and fix her camera. It’s brought to life by a lovely art style, with a lazy autumnal-feeling sun casting Chloe’s room in light, and the clean and stylised graphics that can be reminiscent of Team Fortress 2’s phong shading, while interactive items are highlighted by the kind of idle sketches you might see in a schoolkid’s notebook and handwritten text. As you play, certain events and decisions had taken place which coloured the dialogue between the two teens, but there was also that element of rediscovery, of trying to catch up and find out what they had missed from each other’s lives.
A girl’s disappearance is not the only unusual thing to have occurred in Arcadia Bay in recent times though, and Max soon discovers her own latent ability to manipulate the very fabric of time. It’s this that looks to provide the primary gameplay hook, and also seems like it will have a quite profound impact on how people will play the game.
On the one hand it will affect some of the puzzles, as Max remembers what happened in each time line as well as you do. As she heads down to the garage to dig around and try to find the screwdrivers she needs, she eventually finds them, but can only knock them down in such a way that they fall under a workbench and can’t be reached. Rewinding time and pushing a cardboard sheet underneath to catch them as they fall does the trick quite nicely.
However, it also means that you can rewind the story itself, so that where you might have met each decision point in The Walking Dead with trepidation, struggling to pick between a few unclear options, this will really allow you to experiment with the plot and how certain events can unfold without needing to play the game another time. It’s a little like sticking fingers between pages so that you can backtrack in a ‘choose your own adventure’ book.
As Chloe’s step dad returns home, shouting angrily about how she’s playing loud music – he’s an abrasive character, to say the least – what follows shows a surprisingly deep number of options and possible outcomes for what is really just a single conversation tree. Chloe stalls for time so that you can try to hide, but you can fail to hide and be found as soon as her step dad comes into the room. Either way, the degree to which you snooped around and left a noticeable trail in the garage could come into the argument, with Chloe taking the brunt of the blame whether you’re hidden or not.
Yet it branches further as he finds a smoked joint and the argument takes another twist. With the several permutations already in play, Max can potentially take the blame and temporarily absolve Chloe, flatly and honestly deny that it’s hers, or simply continue hiding in the closet.
The immediate aftermath of the argument can see several outcomes, with Max and Chloe either closer together and more trusting or pushed further apart, but the trick is that the spiralling number of decisions made along the way might seem like a good decision in the short term could have long running effects much later in the game, leaning on the idea of the butterfly effect, and with five episodes planned to be around 90-120 minutes each, some of those effects could be quite profound. Already, some of the decisions made prior to this scene had come into play and could return later on.
There has always been that lingering feeling that I want to see the different outcomes in other similar adventure games, but there’s not the will to go back through and methodically pick different choices. How these complex decisions and their rippling repurcusions manifest themselves within Life is Strange and what feels like a rather grounded and relatable story will be fascinating to see.
Avenger
This looks and sounds brilliant, and with a PS3 version as well so I have the option. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.
TSBonyman
Sounds good, the rewind mechanic was interesting in Remember Me and this sounds a bit more advanced.
Phizzy
I cannot parse that headline at all.