To date, there have been four Life is Strangegames - Life is Strange, Before the Storm, Life is Strange 2, and Life is Strange: True Colors. The series also has a cousin in Tell Me Why, and a second cousin twice removed in Twin Mirror. In many ways, the first game is the worst of all of them, with the exception of Twin Mirror, whose protracted development cycle and late shift from the episodic formula resulted in a mangled final product.
But despite the first game being built upon by almost everything that followed it, it receives way more press and cultural impact than the others combined. As the remastered edition launches, it might be time to look at why that is.
Some of it comes down to opinion, of course. Not everyone will agree that Life is Strange is the weakest of the series. But there’s more to it. Even though I consider it the weakest, I still hold it up as my favourite entry; partly because as the first it helped set the tone, partly because its ending surprised me the most, and partly because of Chloe Price. In 2015 when the game first launched, I was still figuring my sexuality and identity, and Chloe played a major role in that. Three years later, as brave and well woven as Life is Strange 2 was, it was still much easier for me to relate to a white girl struggling with her sense of self, as I don’t have the same lived experience as its protagonists, who are caught in circumstances driven by racial divisions.
Perhaps it is just that - white people have an outsized influence when it comes to shaping the critical conversation, and we find two sweet, cis, white queer girls more palatable than a Mexican-American kid confronting the violence and hatred that he has to endure simply to exist. Life is Strange 2 is a far braver, more ambitious game, and less problematic too - some feat considering how many delicate situations around race relations and the border wall it has to circumnavigate.
Life is Strange, by comparison, is relatively safe - yet it still manages to land with a thud. Decisions in the series have gotten softer and more realistic, which is why Life is Strange: True Colors is the best constructed game of the lot. But back in the first game, everything was taken to extremes, including a choice around euthanasia. Chloe, a quadriplegic after a car wreck, knows her healthcare is causing huge stress and financial ruin for her parents, and so begs Max to put her to sleep. This is a choice the player has to make, and the worst part is it barely matters.
If this had been a story about a disabled character, about righteous rage or self-loathing, told in a sensitive, knowing way by actual disabled people, then a character worrying everyone would be better off without them could be powerful and heartbreaking. Instead, this is an able-bodied character, who goes through the entire canon timeline as able-bodied. We meet her in an alternate timeline where she’s disabled, and she quickly comes to the conclusion that dying is better than life in a wheelchair. There’s no tragedy in the decision, it’s just mean-spirited.
I love Life is Strange. The alternate timeline is a major flaw, but I still count it amongst my all-time favourite games. LiS2 and LiS:TC are better games both narratively and technically, and as a trans person I can relate to TMW more, but the first game has the authority of being the originator, not just of the series, but of a new style for this genre. I speak to a lot of devs in this genre, and although Telltale’s The Walking Dead launched first, Life is Strange is far more frequently cited as an inspiration.
If you don’t think too hard about the message behind certain decisions in Life is Strange, nor analyse the fact its two direct follow ups were led by people of colour and were all-round better games yet received a fraction of the press or cultural impact, Life is Strange is still a great game. It seems odd to say it about a game so many would derisively categorise as ‘woke’, but it’s a product of its time.
Video game storytelling has developed rapidly over the last decade, but it’s still only equipped to tell certain types of stories. Promising Young Woman, for example, would not fly in the world of video games. Life is Strange might have been the pinnacle of our medium back then, but we have moved on since and we still have a lot of moving to do. As the remastered edition launches, it’s important to note that the flaws have always been flaws - it’s just some of us are only noticing them now.
