Life is Strange (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, February 16, 2015, 17:23 (3359 days ago)

Somebody needs to give me 30 million dollars so I can show everybody how you should do interactive fiction.

Life is Strange was kind of interesting, and it proclaims that your choices matter. But then it undermines that constantly.

1. The game has a time rewind mechanic. This means your choices aren't permanent. If you regret your choice, you can do it again. What's the point of making your choices ostensibly matter - meaning that they have consequences - if you don't have to live with the consequences?! If you want player choices to matter, they need to be permanent, so that the player actually has to weigh what to do!

2. If you choose 'wrong', the game chastises you and suggests you rewind time to get a better outcome. How about letting the story roll with my choice? Why even bother making me choose if you are going to tell me what the "better" choice is? The game should just be designed with all those contingencies in mind.

3. The choices are binary rather than organic. Remember in Beyond Two Souls how you can just choose to nope out of the bar to avoid being sexually assaulted? No prompt, no script, just you deciding to turn around and walk through the door. Remember how you can choose to just shoot and kill Ana Navare in Deus Ex? Just point and shoot like any enemy. This game has none of that. Every choice is clearly marked as a choice, rather than having them arise organically from the game's possible actions.

The camera is also uncomfortably close to the main character.

These types of games are getting better, but I see the same mistakes over and over again.

1. Forced actions. I realize there has to be SOME restrictions on actions in order for a story to happen at all, but in the beginning, I just wanted to leave without washing my face. A major event happens in the bathroom, which is why you have to do it. The game should be set up so that if I choose not to go to the bathroom, the story is jump started in some other way, or better yet, take a completely different direction now that a major event was hidden from me.

2. Lip sync. The lip sync was awful, and ruined immersion quite a bit. Why is this so hard to get right? Lip sync has been convincing since 2004 in HL2. Why is every game not spot on? This makes no sense at all.

3. Voice acting. It's decent, but it needs to be better. Beyond Two Souls was great because it had actual actors, however the lines themselves were often painful. This game had the opposite problem: decently written (could be way better though), but with mediocre performances.

4. Actions don't matter enough. A corollary to 1, I feel as if these games don't change enough based on your actions. It should be possible to get two COMPLETELY different stories if you make significantly different choices early enough. I know that's a lot to write and to think about, but that's why you have testers try to undermine your narrative early, figure out what they'd want to do, and write around that. A big job, but do it and you'll have an amazing experience.

Maybe someone will get it totally right in the next 15 years. But oh yeah, the game is worth buying.