Life is Strange is a game borne of fantasy — not epic fantasy, a la Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, but the kind of small fantasy most of us have every single day. It is the fantasy of being able to take it back. To be able to take back a slip of the tongue or a whiff of the bat, to be able to take back the small actions and words that we instantly regret and replace them with what we wish we would have said. It is the ability to have the purest sort of foresight, to know without a shadow of a doubt what will happen if you make a given decision and then to be able to decide whether you can live with that decision.

Episode one of Life is Strange is subtitled Chrysalis, and the symbolism is immediate and obvious. Max(ine) Caulfield is a teenage student at a prestigious photography school, trying to find her way in a world she doesn’t quite seem to fit into. We first meet Max in the middle of a dream that involves a lighthouse and a massive, catastrophic tornado. The immediate sense of peril is quickly replaced, however, by the sort of discomfort that anyone who has dozed off in class can relate with, the discomfort of many pairs of eyes centered exactly where they don’t belong.

All eyes are on Max, and at that point, all she can do is squirm.

As she wanders glumly into the ladies room post-embarrassment, she accidentally becomes witness to a tragedy of a much smaller scale (albeit no less shocking): the shooting of a fellow student. After a few seconds of panic, though, she is back in her classroom, exactly as before, except that now she has the power to manipulate time.

It is through this mechanic that most of the actual gameplay presents itself. Aside from the typical point-‘n’-click puzzles and occasional decision making that, say, Telltale has made the norm for this sort of game through episodic adventures like The Walking Dead and its revival of the classic Sam and Max, there are the moments when it becomes desirable, or even necessary, to rewind time and change a future that Max has already seen. The puzzles that need to be passed in order to progress the story all hinge on the ability to change time, and at least for this first episode, those puzzles are relatively straightforward. There is only enough challenge here to put the player in Max’s shoes to an extent that goes slightly beyond reading a story or watching a movie…which seems about right for what developer DONTNOD was going for.

So far, Life is Strange is extremely slowly-paced, with much time spent on the minutiae of a student’s day-to-day life, but the plots that are set up are interesting ones; by the time Max’s once-best-friend Chloe shows up, we actually are interested in Max’s life and are hoping for a positive outcome to…whatever is going on here.

As such, if you have room in your life for a second ongoing episodic adventure (because let’s not forget, the geniuses at Telltale remain the masters of this sort of thing, and they’re in the middle of Game of Thrones right now), you could do worse than Life is Strange. It remains to be seen just how the many decisions that are made over the course of this episode affect events down the road, so hindsight is bound to influence how we feel about it by this time next year. For now, though, the setup is strong enough to draw us in, and the cliffhanger is big enough (if a bit painfully predictable) to make us want to see where it’s all going. You can’t ask for much more.

Notes:

– The visuals here are…odd. There’s a shine to everything that gives a hyperreal tint to the world, which seems intentional, but also gives it the look of a game from a generation or two ago.

– The lip sync job here is also often way off. It’s as if every bit of the presentation wants to keep us at arms length from reality.

– Max’s too-cool-for-school routine is cute in the way it’s cute to watch an actual teenager who feels as though they are above everything. Shout-outs to various bands and movies are all over the place, and it’s a little hilarious when she rolls her eyes at another student for quoting Gandhi, and she goes and quotes Edgar Allen Poe not five minutes later. Best of all, though, is the shout-out to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Yes, this is a Square Enix game after all.

Score: 7.4

 

Mike Schiller was provided a FREE copy for review on another outlet.