Life is Strange

[BoringSupreez]

Did you really expect something radically different from Telltale's games?

I'm honestly surprised more people haven't grown weary of the Telltale formula yet; but then again, Assassin's Creed (and all the other Ubi games using that same basic formula) still sell millions every year.

[Pulsar_t]

Did you really expect something radically different from Telltale's games?

I'm honestly surprised more people haven't grown weary of the Telltale formula yet; but then again, Assassin's Creed (and all the other Ubi games using that same basic formula) still sell millions every year.

Interactive movies have been around for.. is it 25 years now? I enjoy "playing" them, especially if they tell a good story. Hell Kojima's Psychonauts was practically a visual novel and I enjoyed the shit out of clicking on every nook and cranny.

As for Asscreed, isn't the main series taking a break this year? About damn time.. I got tired by the time III came about. The thing I like about interactive movies is that they don't have open-world settings with silly fetch quests as filler.

[Erik_Twice]

Hell Kojima's Psychonauts

I would play that

[Pulsar_t]

Oh damn, Jungian flip Speaking of whom..



This game has annoyed me so much that it actually taught me a thing or two about myself, inadvertently :O

[Flake]

Did you really expect something radically different from Telltale's games?

Let's take a look at the game's description on its own website:

Life Is Strange is a five part episodic game that sets out to revolutionise story based choice and consequence games by allowing the player to rewind time and affect the past, present and future.

Did this lead me to expect something that was more than "choose a wrong answer in conversation, rewind, choose the right answer that wasn't available before, repeat".

Yes.

[Pulsar_t]

Oh man you should read some of the shit they advertise on Greenlight I'm not defending the marketing blurb of course, they didn't need to word it BS-style in order to sell this game.

[Reprise]

Not to be a dick, but I didn't read that literally. I read that that was the theme of the game, within the confines of still being a video game.

Edit: As for my opinions of the game, I thought Episode 1 was "just ok" and did well at setting up the game. Episodes 2 - 3 were really good, great even. But it really started to fall apart in episodes 4 and 5. I wasn't a fan of the last two episodes much.

[Pulsar_t]

Yea the middle of the game was the best imho. Films like Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run and The Butterfly Effect were responsible for popularising this alternate realities/chaos theory storytelling formula, but I'm struggling to recall the first movie that really made this mainstream scifi.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

I just finished watching/experiencing Episode 4. The "teen" is wearing on me a bit but, I think this episode had dialog that was more strongly... flavored that way. The story got incredibly intense there and that cliffhanger is killing me.

As LiS plays out it's becoming more clear to me that this game is at least equal with Until Dawn in terms of its awareness of past events and how that affects the future. That's really cool.

Super spoiler warnings if you haven't seen episode 4 yet, but here's a flow chart of things that influence one of the conversations in that ep. http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengin ... wchart.jpg

Did this lead me to expect something that was more than "choose a wrong answer in conversation, rewind, choose the right answer that wasn't available before, repeat".

Yes, there are a few situations that lead to forced rewinds but whether you choose to rewind or not most of the time is strictly your decision. The early parts of the game do indeed include more of the forced stuff as a tutorial of sorts but later on it pretty well lets you make the choices you want. If you didn't like the decision YOU made with the information you had at the time you make it and decide to rewind that's your call and I don't think it's a fair complaint to make against a game where the core gameplay and narrative mechanic is being able to play with time at will. People have made similar complaints about these types of games for a long time, and I've seen many people whine that they had to reload their save to rescue X character or get Y result because that's the best result and anything but that is unacceptable! This is one of the few games that let's people do that without having to save-scum or reload entire episodes which frankly seems more like a positive to me, especially for the general gamer.

On that note I think these kinds of games may have struggles in becoming even more open ended beyond technical factors. I think it's simply counter intuitive to the average gamer to be satisfied with anything less than the "good" outcomes. I can't think of any game genre outside of these that can encourage less than "S rank" results. It's fascinating. What other medium could and does encourage you to accept you'll miss some, perhaps key, story, character, and world elements?

Obviously Life is Strange has pretty strong narrative justification for letting you get some re-dos. I really want one of these games to just tell the gamer to screw off though. I want one of these with forced Ironman for the first playthrough. Save after every action. If you mess up, deal with it. I think that could really make things super intense.

Enough rambling. Time for bed. I can barely keep my eyes open.

[Anapan]

My niece is really loving it. It's impressive, but the teen drama chafes me the wrong way...