Life is Strange. Video Games With the Best Stories
Table of Contents
INFORMATION
- Genre: narrative adventure game
- What's good beyond the plot: the cool mechanic of reversing time, enabling us to instantly check how the other characters will react to our actions.
If a devteam debuts by creating a mediocre game, we're not really expecting their next project to be a masterpiece. That's why nobody had high expectations from Life Is Strange by the French studio Dontnod, which had previously developed Remember me (ironically, pretty much completely forgotten by now). No one was expecting anything special. Meanwhile, we got the best narrative adventure game since the first season of Walking Dead, undefeated to this very day.
Life Is Strange is set in the sleepy fishing town of Arcadia Bay, home to an elite school. The main character, Max, had moved out of Arcadia a few years earlier, leaving her best friend, Chloe in the town. The return gives her a chance to reconnect, and she succeeds, albeit in dramatic circumstances. More importantly, however, these events cause Max to discover an extraordinary power within herself – she is able to go back in time.
Strong inspirations from The Butterfly Effect in Life Is Strange were used to create a coming-of-age story that, in Dontnod's interpretation, tells of accepting that not everything in life is under our control and certain things must be accepted. But before this knowledge is eventually absorbed, larger dramas are intertwined with ordinary human problems and incredibly atmospheric moments of everyday chillout. Thanks to them, LIS allows its characters to fully resonate, enables us to form a stronger bond with them, and builds an atmosphere we won't find in any action-packed competitive production. All of this to break our hearts even more, putting us before the final dilemma.
