Most games with choices make you live with them. Life is Strange lets you take them back. Its heroine, Max Caulfield, is an 18-year-old photography student who finds that she can rewind time, so the player can hear how a conversation turns out, rewind and try a different answer. “It’s just like loading a backup save,” its co-creative director, Raoul Barbet, told Wireframe. “Max has the same knowledge as the player and reacts to the world accordingly.”
The power makes the game feel safe, and then it stops being safe. The story, told in five episodes through 2015, builds to a final choice that no rewind can soften. The French studio Dontnod made it for Square Enix, and it won the BAFTA for Story in 2016.
Fast facts
- Developer: Dontnod Entertainment, Paris.
- Publisher: Square Enix.
- Creative directors: Raoul Barbet and Michel Koch.
- Writers: Christian Divine and Jean-Luc Cano.
- Released: five episodes, January to October 2015, for Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
- Setting: Arcadia Bay, a small town in Oregon.
- Awards: BAFTA Games Award for Story, 2016.
The studio and the idea
Dontnod’s first game, Remember Me (2013), published by Capcom, was set in a future Paris where memories could be bought, sold and deleted. Life is Strange kept the interest in memory and brought it down to a teenager’s scale. In Arcadia Bay, Max meets her childhood friend Chloe Price again and is drawn into the disappearance of another girl, Rachel Amber.
Her camera mattered as much as her power. Max takes instant photographs, and Wireframe thought the Polaroid camera “perfectly complemented the rewind time function”, underlining “the game’s theme about the passing of time”.
Rewind
The rewind starts as a convenience. “Some guy called you a loser? Rewind time and impress him instead,” Wireframe wrote. “It doesn’t take long to realise that Max’s motivations are often childish.” Writer Jean-Luc Cano agreed: “Max is a character who doesn’t want to grow up.” Her power, he said, “is deeply linked to who she is”.
That is the point of the ending. However the player plays, the game returns to the lighthouse where it began and asks for one last decision, between saving the town and saving Chloe. Cano argued that the choice itself mattered less than having to make it, as a metaphor for growing up. Michel Koch, the other creative director, said that “everything we had in the game, every choice and consequence, was created to lead you to this point”. Barbet put it another way: “It’s not just about how we make choices, good or bad, selfish or not, but more how we live with those choices.”
Episodes
| Episode | Title | Released |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chrysalis | January 2015 |
| 2 | Out of Time | March 2015 |
| 3 | Chaos Theory | May 2015 |
| 4 | Dark Room | July 2015 |
| 5 | Polarized | October 2015 |
The gaps between episodes left players weeks to argue about what they had done. Looking back in 2022, Wireframe thought that the episodic release was “part of the original Life Is Strange game’s charm”, letting players “chew on all the emotional, timey-wimey decisions they had made” in the way The Walking Dead had done for Telltale.
Hard subjects
The game dealt with bullying and suicide; in one scene Max must try to talk a classmate, Kate Marsh, down from a rooftop. Koch said that Dontnod tackled such subjects on purpose. “I don’t want to spend three years of my life working on a project without trying to talk about subjects that are important to me,” he said in 2019. “There are a lot of different characters that I think are not represented enough, and it’s not just about minorities. Sometimes it’s about emotions, or state of mind, or the way they’re thinking.”
Success and the series
Life is Strange passed a million sales in July 2015, before its fourth episode was out. In April 2016 BAFTA gave it the award for Story, describing it as “an episodic adventure that set out to revolutionise story-based choice and consequence games”. Wireframe later called it “many-million selling”.
It became a series. Life is Strange: Before the Storm (2017), a prequel, was made by the American studio Deck Nine; Dontnod returned with Life is Strange 2, released in five episodes from September 2018 to December 2019 with new characters. Deck Nine’s Life is Strange: True Colors (2021) gave its heroine, Alex Chen, the power to see other people’s emotions, and Wireframe gave it 89 per cent. The original was remastered in 2022.
Sources
- Sean Martin, “Roads not taken: player choice and inevitability”, Wireframe issue 24, October 2019, pp. 19–21: Barbet on rewinding and “loading a backup save”; Cano on Max; the lighthouse and the final choice; Koch and Barbet on choices.
- Wireframe issue 25, October 2019, p. 14: Michel Koch on difficult subjects and representation.
- Wireframe issue 53, July 2021, p. 32: the Polaroid camera and the rewind.
- Wireframe issue 41, July 2020, pp. 14–15: Dontnod as the studio behind the “many-million selling” Life is Strange.
- Wireframe issue 66, September 2022, p. 20: the episodic release and Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
- Wireframe issue 57, November 2021, pp. 96–97: review of Life is Strange: True Colors (Deck Nine, Square Enix; Alex Chen). Issue 60, February 2022, p. 102: its 89 per cent.
- Edge issue 252, April 2013, p. 48, and issue 255, July 2013, p. 112: Remember Me (Dontnod of Paris; published by Capcom; memory in a future Paris).
- BAFTA, “Winners announced: British Academy Games Awards”, press release, 7 April 2016 (web): the Story award. https://static.bafta.org/uploads_pre_202411/baftagames1516winnersrelease.pdf
- “Life is Strange Episode 4 release date set”, Gematsu, 23 July 2015 (web, secondary): one million sales; episode 4 due on 28 July. https://www.gematsu.com/2015/07/life-is-strange-episode-4-release-date-set
- Gematsu, Life is Strange 2 release dates (web, secondary): episodes from 27 September 2018 to 3 December 2019. https://www.gematsu.com/games/life-is-strange
- Wikipedia, “Life Is Strange (video game)” (web, secondary): episode release dates; directors and writers; platforms; Max’s age; Chloe as her childhood friend; Kate Marsh; Before the Storm by Deck Nine (2017); the 2022 remaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Strange_(video_game)