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Essays 05 October 2020, 01:24

Life is Strange. Video Games With the Best Stories

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INFORMATION

  1. Genre: narrative adventure game
  2. What's good beyond the plot: the cool mechanic of reversing time, enabling us to instantly check how the other characters will react to our actions.

If a devteam debuts by creating a mediocre game, we're not really expecting their next project to be a masterpiece. That's why nobody had high expectations from Life Is Strange by the French studio Dontnod, which had previously developed Remember me (ironically, pretty much completely forgotten by now). No one was expecting anything special. Meanwhile, we got the best narrative adventure game since the first season of Walking Dead, undefeated to this very day.

Life Is Strange is set in the sleepy fishing town of Arcadia Bay, home to an elite school. The main character, Max, had moved out of Arcadia a few years earlier, leaving her best friend, Chloe in the town. The return gives her a chance to reconnect, and she succeeds, albeit in dramatic circumstances. More importantly, however, these events cause Max to discover an extraordinary power within herself – she is able to go back in time.

Strong inspirations from The Butterfly Effect in Life Is Strange were used to create a coming-of-age story that, in Dontnod's interpretation, tells of accepting that not everything in life is under our control and certain things must be accepted. But before this knowledge is eventually absorbed, larger dramas are intertwined with ordinary human problems and incredibly atmospheric moments of everyday chillout. Thanks to them, LIS allows its characters to fully resonate, enables us to form a stronger bond with them, and builds an atmosphere we won't find in any action-packed competitive production. All of this to break our hearts even more, putting us before the final dilemma.

  1. More about Life is Strange 2

Michael Grygorcewicz

Michael Grygorcewicz

He first worked as a co-worker at GRYOnline.pl. In 2023 he became the head of the Paid Products department. He has been creating articles about games for over twenty years. He started with amateur websites, which he coded himself in HTML, then he moved on to increasingly larger portals. A computer engineer, but he was always more drawn to writing than programming, and he decided to tie his future with the former. In games, he primarily looks for stories, emotions, and immersion that no other medium can provide - hence, among his favorite titles, are games focusing on narration. Believes that NieR: Automata is the best game ever made.

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