#decknine

"Not without you"

Just a month ago they got their happy ending. My heart is full.

Life is Strange, there are no words to describe how much Max and Chloe and this game means to me. T_T

Guess who saw a bunch of Rachels in Nara 🧡🔥

Welcome back, Rachel Amber ☀️

which one is real? ¿ǝʞɐɟ sᴉ ǝuo ɥɔᴉɥʍ 

It’s been like six years and I don’t know why I still think back to this game even though I don’t like it now and I never really did.

But I realized earlier this year that I’m weirdly fascinated with Life Is Strange and everything around it from the critical perception given by games journalists, youtubers and consumers generally. I’m still talking about it now the same way movie critics are captivated by the likes of The Room and Cool Cat Saves The Kids. Recently, they announced they were remastering the original game to much fanfare.

DONTNOD’s desperation to recapture the success of their original game is like watching a car crash in slow motion except this time, the car keeps crashing into the same wall once a year in bizarrely different ways and the driver hasn’t learned their lesson. This sounds like I am desperately in favour of more Life Is Strange nonsense but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Don’t get it twisted; I absolutely loathe Life Is Strange and all of their games afterwards have been far worse in my opinion. But thing is that I love to hate Life Is Strange and that cannot be said for the others just because they’re just... too bad. So bad in fact, that they aren’t even worth commenting on. They’re just confused, directionless black holes.

i know it’s not exactly interesting or pertinent to say that Life Is Strange is silly, stupid and/or bad but I’ve had to ask myself some very pressing questions lately about it. Is there a side of me that secretly loves this game? I won’t deny that it’s not entertaining because it’s never a dull moment when you’re waiting for what ridiculous and out-of-touch thing that the game will come out with next and I’ve played it at least three times myself and watched playthroughs of it several different times and I always find fresh cringe hidden somewhere. It’s as though Life Is Strange is a fractal hive of nonsense that just never seems to really end.

What I’ve come around to is revelling in how much Life Is Strange annoys people and how embarrassingly funny the praise is for it. This game has fans who are essentially extraverted versions of Undertale fans who dish out obnoxious defending of the game of any minor criticisms whilst being so obsessive over it to almost criminal levels of madness. The game isn’t really all bad though because it obviously has it’s merits which can be found in places here and there. I don’t think I would be so interested in the phenomenon if everyone was so immediately  and unanimously dismissive of it.

I’ve realized something else as well that’s even more alarming. Life Is Strange has copied Telltale Games’ publishing model and outlived them. Guess what else. I would also argue that Life Is Strange trumps the lot.

It didn’t really take all that long for the ‘choices matter’ genre of branching narrative storytelling games to be bastardized in the generation just gone and, up until recently, I thought that DONTNOD’s Life Is Strange game was the catalyst for that but I was wrong. The grim reality is that they took the formula Telltale Games had maximised and improved on it to make a more grounded, relatable and “original” story that is close to a Dawson’s Creek (in terms of impact) for Generation Z.

Why DONTNOD’s recent games aren’t doing so well? The real answer is not that they are no longer doing Max ‘n’ Chloe stuff anymore. It’s actually because  they are incredibly boring games where nothing happens for hours on end. If you compare their first game under Square Enix to some of their more recent efforts, the newer games lack any kind of interesting mystery to get your hopes up about. LiS creates more of a feeling of the first series of Stranger Things where you feel like a universe is being built and a mystery is being slowly uncovered. I’m not even for a second trying to say that the two are anywhere near comparable but why they are both successful episodically is that they create sufficient hype and interest through a younger characters’ perspective.

The likes of Twin Mirror, which is just a poor man’s Heavy Rain, is just utterly dull and flavourless. Compare this screenshot to this screenshot from 2015′s Life Is Strange and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Retrospectively, the way they awkwardly and cheaply animate character models actually works in it’s favour to create an aesthetic that is more visually interesting and stylized. Sure, it isn’t great by any means and obviously they are limited by the much maligned Unity engine but it’s like they’ve misunderstood what made their own game marketable and successful and no, I’m not talking about the nugget of being able to roleplay a lesbian fantasy. They seem to think that if they include stories of minorities (Life Is Strange 2) and their struggles or the struggles of LGBT+ individuals (Tell Me Why), then it will just make their game good automatically. Whilst I applaud them for addressing these topics and others in video games, DONTNOD just think that that is all they have to do and it comes off as slightly disingenuous when it is combined with their weak narratives, plot structure and shoehorned-in variations of vague X-Men powers.

Life Is Strange: True Colo(u)rs looks like it might hit the spot and honestly, I hope it does because then maybe, we’ll be able to see DONTNOD’s real potential even if the best they can offer is average. I would rather average games were being made over... whatever Twin Mirror was supposed to be.

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Oh wait. It’s being made by Deck Nine...

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