Why "Life is Strange" is an Amazing Game
- theSuhChef
- Aug 6, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 9, 2020
"Life is Strange" is a 2015 "choice-based" video game, developed by Dontnod Entertainment and released by SquareEnix. The story develops a "butterfly effect" over the course of 5 episodes, where choices made by the player affects the turn of events and the fate of the characters. Following the footsteps of Max Caulfield and her close friend Chloe Price, "Life is Strange" dips into the adventures and hardships of teenage life, along with the dangers associated with the clash of adulthood and youthfulness.
>> "Life is Strange" is currently going up on my YouTube Channel! Check out my playthrough of the game from 2016 here:
(The purpose of this article is to raise awareness of this beautiful game that depicted the problems of society very well. There are no spoilers in this article, so please read ahead with no worries. The game is on STEAM or you can watch a playthrough using the link above or below.)
In my memory, high school was a turbulent time of excitement and worries. It overlaps with the moment of your life where you begin to build your identity and hatch out of your youthfulness to enter the scary world of adulthood. High school is essentially a bubble, where you are a member of a tight community of students, teachers, mentors, and adversaries; however, as high school ends, the community you grow fond of eventually disappears and scatters all over the world, where many head off to college and others pursue an early career. High school and graduating from that institution is an important milestone that we often forget about in the midst of various other successes, such as graduating from college/university or finding a first job with a salary paycheck.
"Life is Strange" depicts the good and horrible experiences of life in the eyes of 18-year-old Max Caulfield, who is an avid photography student. She returns to her old hometown of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, where she attends Blackwell Academy and finds out that she has a unique gift of rewinding time through photographs, bringing her back to that exact moment in time captured in the photograph. She reunites with her old friend Chloe Price and they endeavour through this turbulent high school life using this unique gift of her's. But "Life is Strange" doesn't depict the roses and rainbows of high school life and instead aims to give the player the taste of real high school and the struggles teenage students deal with on a common basis.
The game does a splendid job in hitting the taboos of society: mental health issues, suicide, sexual harassment, adults taking advantage of young children, the lack of coherent and fair rules of an education institution to halt such bad deeds, broken families, parents having poor mental health, exploration of sexual orientation, and lack of a support network. The player is taken on an adventure where they have the power to make things right, to give hope to other characters and say that things will be all right. There are numerous times, where the player has to sit and think about the decisions they need to make, critical decisions that could lead them down a marvelous or treacherous path, hence why the "butterfly effect" is so important in this game. The game slaps the player in the face with the tough question of: what would you do in this situation? Testing morals and emotional compassion, the game really makes one wonder why society is so broken and times and why individual power can often times bring the light in such a gloomy world.
Personally, I think "Life is Strange" is a splendid game that many should turn back to today. Given how broken society is, I notice many people wondering why their lives and the state of their country is so broken. Well, as many media programs and reports have shown, those problems were always there to begin with and the world has just "brushed them under the rug" and disregarded to fix them right there and then. "Life is Strange" was a wake-up call, and yet 5 years later, it still serves the exact same purpose of being a wake-up call for people today.
Watch my "Life is Strange" playthrough here (Playthrough from 2016): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiXm3v6zbTMt2EgXBj9MDz1y-VxNSVIQ
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