Life is Strange: Tween Peaks

[Danielle]

Episode four spoilers:

 

Oh, he just moved on up - to the top of my shit list.

 

Oh, that was masterful, Smart Jason.

 

Ep 4 spoilers, as well:

 

 I've streamed the entire series so far, and I've been saying from the first scene that he was up to No Good. No good at all.

[richardco]

https://www.youtube.com/user/GeekRemix

 

This channel's Life is Strange videos make me really appreciate the game's writing. The dialogue is one thing (and it honestly never bothered me that much), but the fact that it can stand up to pretty rigorous analysis--and that such rigorous analysis actually cued the analyzers into the true motivations of

Mr. Jefferson FOUR MONTHS AGO

is something.

 

Really hoping the final chapter involves Max replacing her Arm with Chloe's and hijacking a Metal Gear to launch a nuclear attack on Blackwell.

 

 

And as a side note, I just really love Max as a player character. It's so nice being able to play as someone who genuinely feels like a good person that cares about other people. 

[malkav11]

And as a side note, I just really love Max as a player character. It's so nice being able to play as someone who genuinely feels like a good person that cares about other people. 

 

I just wish it were more consistent. There are times when Max is bitchy about someone I've already seen enough to conclude is not as bad as Max seems to think, or where your choices are, for example, "side with your best friend" or "side with this other character that means well and cares but is bad at showing it" and I didn't want to side with -either- of them because neither of them are wrong. I wanted to sit them both down and say "look, calm the fuck down." Instead you have to pick a side, and if you go with your friend, you just go off on the other person, and if you don't, it's this huge betrayal that she'll probably harp on forever. Bleh.

[Tanukitsune]

I just beat episode 2 and it the episode was riddles which glitches for me, three times I had to reload from a checkpoint because suddenly the rewinding stopped working. I really hope the rest are less glitchy, because it actually made it harder to enjoy the game.

 

At the junkyard (where I had TWO glitches), is the deer supposed to look all glitchy see-though?

 

As for the story so far:

 

Rachel disappeared at a Vortex Party where Kate was probably drugged? The drug dealer has Rachel's bracelet and the security guard seems to have photos of Rachel?

 

I'm not sure if I should think it's all connected or that one or more is red herring.

[Ninety-Three]

At the junkyard (where I had TWO glitches), is the deer supposed to look all glitchy see-though?

 

Spoiler, but it's information from ep 2:

Yes. It's a ghooooooost, when you take a photo of it the photo contains no deer. Apparently Max never looks at the photo because she doesn't remark upon it.

 

Rachel disappeared at a Vortex Party where Kate was probably drugged? The drug dealer has Rachel's bracelet and the security guard seems to have photos of Rachel?

 

I'm not sure if I should think it's all connected or that one or more is red herring.

 

Rachel's been gone for a while, the thing with Kate is implied to be quite recent (I'm not sure they ever say exactly, I got the impression it was not yesterday, but single digit days).

[Erkki]

So I finally also started playing this game and finished Episode 2 today. It kind of feels ok in this game to be able to rewind and redo some choices. Overall it has a more exploratory feel than Telltale's games, in which it felt best to play so that you never load and always live with your choices. But something is bothering me in how this Bad Thing at the end of Ep. 2 was handled:

 

At first I thought: ok, maybe they took away the powers because they don't want to trivialize a suicide (attempt), I can dig that. And maybe I can't even save her and that's why they didn't let me fail again and again? But when the credits rolled and I saw that most people had saved her... And there is a way of going back and redoing it anyway... I don't know, I think that is worse than just letting us treat the suicide attempt as any other event you can play with using your rewind powers. But I think I'll stay with my consequences as I already accepted it before the stats were displayed.

 

PS. I concur with the wish that you could take your own photos since this game is so much about the photography. It's been well done before e.g. in Beyond Good & Evil. Of course it may have complicated things here or destroyed the pacing if you would just keep shooting everything, but it would have made so much narrative sense.

[Tanukitsune]

I just finished episode 3 and...

GAH! What have I done?! NO NO NO!

I had a thought, what if all the weird things happening are caused by Max's powers?

I'm not sure, but I assume Max will try to undo everything, is this even an option? I'm really curious to see what episode 4 will bring.

[Ninety-Three]

Finished the final chapter. Zero out of ten, would not recommend.

 

This chapter wanted to be a movie. It dropped all feelings of openness and interactivity to funnel you down a linear series of cutscene-filled corridors. And the movie it was trying to be was awful. Pacing is weird, plot threads (like the ghost deer) go unresolved, characters become certain of of things they could only know if they read the game's script, and unlike the great moment in Chapter 2, none of your choices have consequences beyond a "Hey, remember when you made that choice? You sure made it. Moving on." shoutout.

 

But worst of all, most of the last part of the chapter is spent in a dream sequence where nothing makes sense and nothing matters because it's a dream, and it drags on for half an hour. Half an hour! Thirty entire minutes trapped in a constantly-shifting dream logic world (complete with obnoxious stealth section)! How did anyone at Dontnod think that was okay? How did enough people to get it approved think that was okay?

 

Eighteen hundred FUCKING SECONDS!

[Twig]

Beat the game.

 

All of it was good.

 

Yay!

[twmac]

Finished the final chapter. Zero out of ten, would not recommend.

 

This chapter wanted to be a movie. It dropped all feelings of openness and interactivity to funnel you down a linear series of cutscene-filled corridors. And the movie it was trying to be was awful. Pacing is weird, plot threads (like the ghost deer) go unresolved, characters become certain of of things they could only know if they read the game's script, and unlike the great moment in Chapter 2, none of your choices have consequences beyond a "Hey, remember when you made that choice? You sure made it. Moving on." shoutout.

 

But worst of all, most of the last part of the chapter is spent in a dream sequence where nothing makes sense and nothing matters because it's a dream, and it drags on for half an hour. Half an hour! Thirty entire minutes trapped in a constantly-shifting dream logic world (complete with obnoxious stealth section)! How did anyone at Dontnod think that was okay? How did enough people to get it approved think that was okay?

 

Eighteen hundred FUCKING SECONDS!

 

Wouldn't give it 0 out of 10 but I pretty much agree with most of what you wrote. The game felt like it came close to its conclusion in Chapter 4 and then had nothing to say or do in chapter 5, outside of the final 5 minutes.

 

It was an unfortunate ending to an otherwise really enjoyable deviation from the TellTale formula.

 

I would be interested, in spoiler tags, in hearing what people chose to do.

[Ninety-Three]

Wouldn't give it 0 out of 10 but I pretty much agree with most of what you wrote. The game felt like it came close to its conclusion in Chapter 4 and then had nothing to say or do in chapter 5, outside of the final 5 minutes.

 

Zero out of ten was more a comment on chapter 5 than the game as a whole, to be clear. The first three chapters felt like a story about nothing (slice of life, I think they call it), and then the fourth chapter was the payoff where all these characters and backstories we've been establishing do something interesting.

 

In chapter 5, even the open areas like the gallery felt less... open. I wanted to push a button to eat the food, to kick the villain when they were down, have an actual conversation with someone rather than a "click to inspect" dialogue. Little pointless things that would have contributed to a feeling of agency. Given that chapter 5's deadline had already slipped pretty far, I wonder if the whole thing was a rush job, Dontnod feeling like they couldn't delay it another month. Given how often episodic games miss deadlines (or in the case of something like Dreamfall, ship buggy episodes just to get something out), I wonder if the model is actually harmful.

 

It kills me that they ended up not giving any consequences to most of your decisions. The scene on the roof in ch 2 was a brilliant solution to the problem of "We want player choice to matter, but creating branching content takes a lot of work". They had multiple choices feed into the event and ultimately influence a binary outcome, solving the problem that n choices create 2^n content branches. Apparently they stumbled onto that brilliant solution by accident and without realizing it, because the idea is never touched again.

 

By the end I was furious at the dream sequence and the way the characters magically knew how to stop the storm (seriously, they have literally no evidence!), I'd been taken out of the story. I saved Chloe because it seemed like it'd be the more interesting choice, not because I cared about her. It's not interesting, they might as well fade to black upon you choosing, for all they show you afterwards.

 

I was very surprised that ~50% saved her, it's an act of mass murder I only committed because I was too annoyed with the game to care. It's especially surprising given that the playerbase seem to be following an actual moral compass, rather than the "lol, dark side points" of most videogаmes (only 5% of players chose not to warn Victoria, for instance). Maybe a lot of people were angry at the game and/or didn't buy the magical explanation that killing Chloe would make anything better.

[kickinthehead]

In chapter 5, even the open areas like the gallery felt less... open. I wanted to push a button to eat the food, to kick the villain when they were down, have an actual conversation with someone rather than a "click to inspect" dialogue. Little pointless things that would have contributed to a feeling of agency. Given that chapter 5's deadline had already slipped pretty far, I wonder if the whole thing was a rush job, Dontnod feeling like they couldn't delay it another month. Given how often episodic games miss deadlines (or in the case of something like Dreamfall, ship buggy episodes just to get something out), I wonder if the model is actually harmful.

 

From what I've read, episode 5 ran into time and production issues which is why one of the endings isn't as long as the other one. I'm guessing 5 was very ambitious but they ended up dialing a lot of it back in order to get it done. I think even with that in mind it took longer than the other episodes to come out.

 

My thoughts on the ending:

 

I'm fine with having the ending cutscene dictated by one last choice, and I don't think that it nullifies the choices that came before it. The reason is that I think of the story in terms of how the choices affected Max as a person. Yes, if I sacrificed Chloe and reset everything, Kate never killed herself. But in my game Max still experienced that moment, and it will be something she carries with her. The same for ending Chloe's life in episode 4, that still happened even if it's some alternate universe.

 

I think an interpretation of the game could be that even if you had the power to reset and redo things you regret, there's still no avoiding how they affect you. Someone more articulate than me could probably expound upon that idea.

 

Overall I loved it! Despite its flaws it genuinely affected me, and I loved the characters. One of my favorite games of the year!

[twmac]

The Polygon review/conversation/spoiler thread kind of nails a lot of my dissatisfaction with the final episode.

 

http://www.polygon.com/2015/10/21/9589174/life-is-strange-episode-5-review-polarized

 

The score is about what I would give it.

[Smart Jason]

A Dontnod writer confirmed in a French interview that they're working on a sequel. Cool.

[Twig]

Huh. Feel like a sequel, unless it's a sequel like true detective (quality of said sequel notwithstanding), will kind of defeat the purpose of the games message?

Even if...

[Ninety-Three]

Huh. Feel like a sequel, unless it's a sequel like true detective (quality of said sequel notwithstanding), will kind of defeat the purpose of the games message?

Even if...

 

They've said if they were to do a sequel, it'd probably be a whole new cast.

 

That said, I agree with you, given how they vaguely established time travel to work, it seems like they would have to come back to the same message in LiS2.

[Twig]

Very strange. Yeah I just don't get how they'll pull it off. New cast, at least, has potential.

 

I loved the game a lot, though, including the ending (unlike apparently everyone else here!), so I'll try to be optimistic!

[Bolegium]

I'm not reading any of the posts here (cos I've only finished episode 3 and don't want to get spoiled), but I'm posting here anyway because I just finished episode fucking 3.

 

The ending of episode 2 was already such an affecting experience, and things are just getting even more messy and deeply personal. At this stage I'm anticipating Life is Strange to end up being one of my favourite games of the year/in general.

 

Stray observations/opinions:

1. This is what I wanted Bioshock Infinite to do with its "multiple timelines twist", instead of the shit it actually did. It's a combination of the differing thematic priorities of each game as well as their execution, and maybe it's still to early for me to judge, but Life is Strange has me invested completely whereas B:I was alienating and boring and infuriatingly solipsistic.

 

2. I should probably rewatch Donnie Darko. I remember seeing it as a miserable teen/budding film geek, and being unfairly(?) dismissive of a movie mostly about miserable middle-class white dudes, and caring more than I should have about how undeservedly popular amongst my peers DD was, compared to the supposedly "better" and "less mainstream" films I preferred. Yuck. I'd like to think I've grown up enough to engage the movie on its on terms, though it seems like the general consensus on Richard Kelly's work isn't as positive as it used to be, so maybe I wasn't wrong after all? Looping this back to Life is Strange, feeling a lot of similarities between it and Donnie Darko at the moment, aside from the difference of me loving the game.

 

3. The main menu music is great and i've probably logged a few hours just having the game minimized in the background while doing something else. But I can't help associating it with like an acoustic version of 'Where is my mind' by The Pixies. It's borderline annoying that I keep subconsciously noticing vague similarities. I wish I could rewind time and never make that connection in the first place, but we all know how great that would turn out...

[Dinosaursssssss]

Alright sorry I'm gonna sorta necro this thread a bit 'cause I just finished the game. First off! I liked the game a lot, even the ending. But that said

cutting the entire dream sequence thing would have improved it VASTLY. I can't even imagine how someone could play that and think it's acceptable from a narrative or mechanical standpoint. The stealth part is painful, the rest is cliched and adds nothing to the story. It actually makes me kinda furious 'cause I think the rest of the episode (and game in general!) is great.

 

I'm curious what people thought about the use of animals throughout the game. Obviously deer show up a lot and seem to represent Max somehow, and the butterfly seems to represent either (or both?) a 'butterfly effect' or perhaps Chloe specifically. Warren is constantly talking about going ape. Frank is all about dogs. Samuel talks to squirrels. Birds and whales both show up a lot (but don't seem to be related to specific characters).

 

But I didn't really see how the comparison with those animals added to my knowledge of the characters. The deer specifically shows up everywhere but doesn't impact anything, and I don't think the connection is ever explicitly acknowledged or used to drive the story. Are these just supposed to illustrate the personalities of the characters or does anyone think there's something more there?

[Ninety-Three]

I'm curious what people thought about the use of animals throughout the game. Obviously deer show up a lot and seem to represent Max somehow, and the butterfly seems to represent either (or both?) a 'butterfly effect' or perhaps Chloe specifically. Warren is constantly talking about going ape. Frank is all about dogs. Samuel talks to squirrels. Birds and whales both show up a lot (but don't seem to be related to specific characters).

 

But I didn't really see how the comparison with those animals added to my knowledge of the characters. The deer specifically shows up everywhere but doesn't impact anything, and I don't think the connection is ever explicitly acknowledged or used to drive the story. Are these just supposed to illustrate the personalities of the characters or does anyone think there's something more there?

 

"Going ape" is a reference to the fact that Warren's going to the Planet of the Ape movies. I think it might be an outright slogan of the showing event, though I don't recall. I didn't think whales showed up more than once (although it happens repeatedly, time travel being what it is).

 

The deer in particular I'm convinced is a dropped plot thread that they meant to do something with (the final episode was a bit rushed in terms of production so they probably didn't get in everything they wanted).

In one of the early episodes Max takes a photo of it (she explicitly notices the deer, but then doesn't notice the nature of the photo), and it doesn't show up in the photo, clearly indicating that it's some kind of ghost. I can't believe that they casually introduced a ghost deer, just because they thought it was cool, with no plans to explain it.

[Dinosaursssssss]

I don't think it's a dropped thread so much as an unspecific, inconclusive one; deer are a running theme throughout, with Max regularly wearing shirts with deer on them, and in the final episode a deer necklace. In one ending we also see deer walking through town, and a deer is on a sign with the towns name. I think Chloe's family also has a snowglobe with a deer in it.

 

edit: actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it might be the same snowglobe as the one with a lighthouse in it in the final episode.

 

edit2:

if we take for granted that the deer represents Max, then the ghost deer could possibly represent Max's in other timelines. That would fit with the deer in the storm near the lighthouse, since Max travels to it multiple times, as well as (sort of) the deer in the snowglobe that Max is sitting in at the end of e5, watching herself.

 

After she changes out of Rachels old clothes, she wears as shirt with a butterfly and skull on it. Depending on how you read the butterfly, that could either foreshadow Chloes death or act as a warning about the dangers of her time travel and its effects.

[Tanukitsune]

I just beat the game and... I can't help to compare it to Steins;Gate.

 

At first they both kinda play around with their time powers for a bit, they both discover a truer, but limited form of time travel (one though photos, one through cellphones), they both go through hell to try to save someone they love who they keep seeing die and in they end you both have to choose whether to undo everything or stay with them. 

 

The main difference is that in this case Steins;Gate makes you undo everything slower and notice how every small choice changed the world.

[Erkki]

Now I'm both suddenly curious about Steins;Gate and worried that I've been spoiled it.

[Ninety-Three]

Now I'm both suddenly curious about Steins;Gate and worried that I've been spoiled it.

 

A little bit, but it's not like it's a big "He was dead the whole time" twist, Steins;Gate becomes pretty clear about what it's doing as it introduces that element.

[Tanukitsune]

Maybe I should have labelled the spoiler for both games? I kinda expected it was obvious since I was comparing them. ;

 

But yeah, it's nothing too major or too specific. I'm kind glad I didn't give names now.