Life is Strange - Just Wow.

[sXeth]

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The time rewinding mechanic is an interesting one, if a tad repetitive. Though it allows redoing your choices and fixing mistakes, that's almost everything it is used for. I liked the few puzzles where I had to use the rewind, but would've wanted them to be a tad more challenging. Perhaps now, after the introductions, players can be given something a tad more complicated to solve?

One BIG improvement I'd like to see made though is the dialogue. You don't need to inject teenage slang into it to make it believable. Believe me, namedropping Kickstarter out of nowhere doesn't enhance the immersion, it breaks it. Just write everyone as characters, persons, and not teens.

My main problem with the rewinds was that it kept almost nagging you to use it after every choice. Which in turn kind of made an organic decision seem like the "wrong" way to play it, with Max basically acting as the dev yelling in your ear to use the feature. Most of the "puzzles" felt similarly forced. Once rewound, it was generally incredibly obvious, and before the rewind, the object you needed to interact with to avoid the problem wasn't even active, meaning you could never actually solve them before failing and rewinding.

I'd agree that a lot of the internet-hip references kind of seem on overload, and many will probably date the game. Its also got some of the Japan's Vision of America weirdness going on in terms of culture stereotyping. One major instance being that its very unclear what the school is even supposed to be (the characters are high school age, the school seems to be a private college with dorms and the like, etc)

 

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My favorite game of the year so far and i do believe im the only person on the planet who enjoys episodic game releases. to me it feels like tuning in to catch a favorite tv show