Life Is Strange Episode 1 Review

For Max Caulfield, a photography student at the prestigious Blackwell Academy, life certainly is strange as she discovers that she has the ability to rewind time. In a game in which you are constantly faced with choices, from the menial to the fatal, this ability might be thought to undermine the meaning of the choices. If whenever you make a choice with a bad outcome you can just rewind time and pick the other option, then why even bother including choices in the first place, right? Well this game avoids it very nicely, with a limit on how far back in time you can travel, giving you the scope to take back the last 2 decisions you made. While most games including plot changing choices give you the consequences immediately, this game delays them so that your choices still come back to haunt you later on. Relatively early on, you can tell the Principal that someone had a gun in school, however the consequence to this action is not until right at the end of the episode. Furthermore, the episodic nature of the game leads you to wonder whether a seemingly insignificant choice at the time will turn into a key moment in the development of your story in the game.


Clearly, another benefit of the choices is replayability. Having finished Episode 1 within 4 hours, I find myself wanting to go back and see what happens if you make different choices, and what choices I failed to even see. This last point is another really interesting aspect of the game. Once you complete the episode, a screen shows displaying what other people chose in the situations you are faced with. These not only provide an intruiging perspective on how other people played the game, but it also reveals possibly hidden choices. For example, at one point Max was meant to hide from someone, and upon inspection there seemed to be nowhere, however when viewing the final screen and seeing that X% of people hid in that situation, it makes you want to work out how to do it.

The game focuses heavily on exploration for context, and you spend plenty of time walking around empty classrooms or garages snooping for pieces of information. In a way this is positive in that your exploration gives you more information on characters without the game forcing it down your throat with dialogue sequences literally telling you about people. Furthermore, the game does punish you for being too unsubtle - while in the room of another student you have the option to take the student's pregnancy test to look at it, and if you do so, she comes up to you and asks you to leave, chastising you for your nosiness. Another example of this is when in your friend Chloe's room, you can look in a box under the bed, and she will also accuse you of nosiness. However other times, you can literally stand at the back of a classroom for an hour and no one will bat an eyelid. While this is not exactly uncommon in games where scripted events only trigger within a certain range of a character, or upon approaching them, it would have been nice to see this implemented to aid the immersion.

The game also looks great. The way the art style of the game and the setting of it mesh together is fantastic. It is no coincedence that a game focused on a prestigious art academy looks so good, with some beautiful environments, and plenty of colour in every respect. You encounter blue hair dye, lush green clearings, sunlight streaming through a forest and (while the symbolism is probably a little tired now) a gorgeous blue butterfly. It's also interesting how although Max is a photography student, there is not a single 'real' photograph in the game, with drawings instead. This gives the impression that the game is not just hiding poor facial quality and a lack of textures behind its art style, but that it is intentionally designed in this way.

Overall then, a fantastic experience. Having not played a single Telltale game I cannot compare it to the genre which it seems to be most similar to, but this certainly makes me think I should give more games like this a shot - after I've played the other 4 episodes of Life is Strange that is!