The Life of Art in LIFE IS STRANGE
This spoiler-free review is part of an ongoing series on reviewing things well after they're generally relevant or called for.
Even the only ever-so-slightly seasoned absorber of art and entertainment is likely to find that Life is Strange reverberates with familiarity. At first glance it’s in presentation and procedure a decision-based adventure a la Quantic Dream or Telltale Games. But it’s the Prince of Persian twist that allows you to rewind time – and thus redact said decisions – that sets the game apart from the rest of it’s genre. As a mechanic that previously became a staple hallmark of Ubisoft's popular Prince of Persia franchise with 2003’s The Sands of Time, developer DONTИOD Entertainment makes no bones about their effective copy-and-pasting of it into their interactive millennial drama by maintaining it’s left trigger implementation. For all the game’s merits (and also blemishes), it’s this kind of honesty with which the developers gave the game’s influences their due that (for better or worse) stood out the most to me in my experience playing it.
Apparently not a dry campus, but wet... with blood.
Life is Strange is a game steeped in influential references, the seeming majority of them rightfully accrediting another supernaturally undertoned and teen-oriented episodic mystery involving an absent girl in the American northwest, Twin Peaks. Said references are often so blatant (such as an in-game photo op featuring “FIRE WALK WITH ME” scrawled in all caps on a bathroom mirror) that one would have to know next to nothing about David Lynch’s prolifically popular series to mistake them as anything close to subtle. From Chloe’s “TWNPKS” license plate to an incidental email from one Dr. Jacoby, Life is Strange is in fact so riddled with such references one has to wonder if the abundance of open admiration was in response to gamemaker Hidetaka Suehiro aka Swery65’s alleged denial of the blatant influence Twin Peaks had on Rainy Woods – a game so clearly entrenched in it’s inspiration it spent three extra years in development becoming the still-really-obviously-Twin Peaks-inspired Deadly Premonition to appease the publisher’s fears of potential legal ramifications regarding a particular crime known as ripping off.
[I’m actually on the end of the drastically polarized spectrum that thinks Deadly Premonition is a great game. But coming from a writer/director who goes by a stylized pseudonym suspiciously similar to Suda51 and is recent founder of a new studio known as White Owls, Inc., it’s pretty clear that this particular owl is exactly as he seems...]
i.e. "Bob was here".
But the influences on Life is Strange and it’s references to such therein are naturally not exclusive to the above. Although in story and structure equally as indebted to the The Butterfly Effect (2004) and folks like Stieg Larsson, much of the game’s referential nature comes through via the banter between it’s pop-cultured cast of collegiate characters. The frequent direct or alluded citation of famous films and cult classics purveyed across in-game text and dialogue brings forth unto our collective subconscious the fact we’re all likely playing the game on a device via which we also watch Netflix.
"And maybe WE can 'sneak in' as many references to our favorite things as possible!"
It’s here that beyond all their occasional caricaturistic tropes the characters of Life is Strange represent its audience in its most accurate light; of life in the 21st century imitating the art of ‘90s independent cinema. All of us Quentin Smiths and Kevin Tarantinos; a whole generation of Clerks and Reservoir Dogs.
"I've always thought of you two as my dads." ~ Klaus Daimler, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
To this the catching and/or deciphering of such referential instances becomes almost like a minigame in itself, the latter specifically in regards to every license plate consisting of the consonants representative of an influencing movie or show. From True Detective to The Twilight Zone every plate is an easter egg, the two tied as my personal favorites being Robert Rodriguez’s criminally underrated high school horror The Faculty (1998) and one “LPHNT” I can only assume translates to Gus van Sant’s similarly set but drastically different high school horror Elephant (2003). But the references are of course not limited to movies and television or even always textual/verbal insinuation, as the most prominent literary reference is co-ed protagonist Max Caulfield sharing a surname with the main character of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye; a tidbit backed by a poster in her dorm room suspiciously reminiscent of the book’s most iconic cover.
Previously published as Grabber in the Wheat.
In short conclusive review I’ll be the first to admit I spent more time cringing at the often characteristically pigeon-holed dialogue in Life is Strange than I have at maybe anything else in any game I’ve ever bothered to finish. For all it’s merits it’s as mentioned not without its blemishes, but any others that stand out in remembrance after having just completed it only a few hours ago are either so generally inconsequential or ultimately subjective it’s safe they go unmentioned. All in all the good comfortably outweighs any bad, for just as often as I was cringing I was as prompted by tough timeline-related decision-making forced to introspect on small existential crises about what decisions different iterations of my actual self would make or have made in both playing the game and in real life. As such, Life is Strange is an experience worthy of at least your time if not also thereby your money, and thus is definitely recommended – especially to fans of the modern adventure genre as it’s an easily commendable installment somewhere between Heavy Rain and The Wolf Among Us.
A sequel is reportedly lined up at DONTИOD following the 2018 release of their third game Vampyr, a gothic action-adventure period piece set in Spanish flu-laden London.
