Life Is Strange Review

The rewind is the whole design. Max can wind back a conversation, hear the other branch, and pick again, which sounds like it should drain the tension out of a choice driven story and instead concentrates it. Knowing both outcomes does not tell you which one you can live with, and the game keeps building situations where the information is the burden. Arcadia Bay is the other achievement, a Pacific Northwest town rendered in visible brushstrokes and scored with licensed folk that Dontnod uses to slow the pace rather than fill it, and the long sequences where Max simply sits somewhere and thinks are the scenes people still quote.

The writing is uneven in a way ten years of parody has not let anyone forget, the animation and lip sync were behind the curve even on release, and the finale narrows into a binary that many players found unequal to the five episodes in front of it. None of that undid the reach. This is the game that made episodic teen drama a viable commercial format and gave a generation of players their first serious argument about an ending.