It’s hard to dissect without getting specific, but suffice to say if I ignore a person most of the time they are going through a rough patch, I don’t understand why I would be in the situation at the end, although the concerned hero types will definitely feel satisfied.
LIFE IS STRANGE 2 REVIEW FULL
This comes full circle at the end of the episode but given spoilers I’ll just say that this was the first instance where I learned that Dontnod is willing to etch the game to my decisions, but it isn’t going to let me avoid watching the side effects. It was even more odd that while you could be different degrees of concerned, you couldn’t be dismissive.
You are the center of your universe as a high school senior so someone’s downfall or emotional distress is either viewed as something you’d like to avoid or competition with your problems (or both), but never a call to action. I may be crazy here, but I’m betting it doesn’t usually work that way with teenage girls in real life and it definitely didn’t work for this teenage boy in his life. On the other hand, it also puts you in an odd position depending on how you treated this character in the first episode because regardless of whether you were friendly, her protector, or just plain apathetic towards her you are suddenly appointed to closer friend and protector given this new news.
LIFE IS STRANGE 2 REVIEW PLUS
The plus side to this sudden new turn of events is it gives Dontnod excuses to have you speaking with people you know well and seemingly just caught up with in the first episode, which does come with it all that teenage angst, hypocrisy, and childlike behavior that I enjoyed from the first episode. A new side story is introduced that is so mainstream to these characters you have to take a moment and wonder if you missed this plot point in the first episode – I checked by replaying just before I started on this one, it’s not there.
In a predictable but thankful way the first half of the episode is rather mundane, although the basic functions of getting started with your day and dropping by dorm mates had some surprising depth. When we pick up with Max, a lot has been dropped on our plate at the end of the first episode. I wish I could say Life is Strange overcomes this potential hitch, but it does appear that like most of the others it just doesn’t quite pack the punch of the first. It’s also important to note that almost universally the second episode is hit with the largest amount of criticism and negative feedback, if only because it’s a focused burst of reality on the high hopes of the first episode, but also because it’s an awkward in-between time for the plot. Typically the second outing, especially in the case of episodic titles, give us a much better feeling of what the overall title is going to be like and allows us to gauge how effectively or ineffectively the unwinding story and gameplay goals are executing. In fact, much of the first episode was probably how the game was pitched for development.
I was quite taken with my initial impressions of Life is Strange, the episodic game that’s part modern adventure and part Choose Your Own Adventure, but there’s a part of me that acknowledged many works have started with fantastic openings and fall short at the end.
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