“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall…”
In Remember Me, Dontnod Entertainment’s debut title, Memory Remixing was an original and intriguing gameplay mechanic: rearrange someone’s memories so that, once their memories have been rearranged, they will act in the way that Nilin, Remember Me’s memorist protagonist, needed them to. Although it was a mechanic on which much of Remember Me’s marketing was based, it was underutilised in the game itself.
The mechanical gimmick of Life is Strange is not dissimilar to the memory remixing mechanic of Remember Me. Max Caulfield (a hipster whose vociferous name dropping of authors strangely does not include J.D. Salinger) discovers she possesses the ability to rewind time. This ability is, unfortunately, effectively a rewind button in the most literal sense. Rather than being the mechanical foundation of puzzles, it is often the solution to the puzzles themselves. Indeed, because the rewind mechanic only alters certain events which are visually represented on the rewind-HUD, rewinding often gives away the solution to a puzzle if rewinding is not the solution itself. There is a puzzle in episode one where rewinding is used more spontaneously, but that puzzle is entirely optional…
“Nature always wears the colours of the spirit.”
Puzzles, however, are old hat in adventure games nowadays, so Max spends most of her time chatting with her classmates at the ominously-named Blackwell Academy. Dontnod are French, and their vision of an American campus is identifiably un-American: some of the students and faculty staff are obese, but not necessarily American stereotypes of the obese, and the skinny girls—whilst still being pastiches of American stereotypes—are, at times, almost believable.
Remember Me demonstrated that Dontnod have genuine talent when it comes to creating an aesthetic, and the more impressionistic, metaphysical moments of Life is Strange are every bit as engrossing and sensual as the technochratic world of Remember Me, but the naturalism juxtaposed with the impressionism is generally little more than a very twee interpretation of Twin Peaks and middl[e]ing America[na], devoid of any genuine sense of character or place.
“There was a star riding through the clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘Consume me’.”
The decisions that must be made when interacting with other characters or the world lose some of their impact and tension because of the rewind mechanic. There are a few decisions that cannot be undone by rewinding, but most decisions can, and this results in most decisions losing any sense of immediacy and consequence. However, if in later episodes the way that these decisions fit together becomes intricate and complex, then the rewind mechanic could be conducive to a more engrossing and strategic composition of narrative branches than those offered in other modern adventure games wherein player agency is merely a well-maintained illusion.
Max’s former BFF, Chloe, more than any of the characters in Life is Strange, has the potential to carry later episodes. She is, interestingly, the only character in episode one who is successfully immersed in the narrative not only as a plot device, but also as a fictional person with tangible feelings. Hopefully she doesn’t get run over by a train before the series ends.
