Life is Strange review: The other side of tough choices

Not sure I want to know what you mean by that...

The teenage condition is like the continuous drunkenness that you've convinced yourself is passable as sober. You can see and hear yourself making horrible mistakes. Your friends and family may even unequivocally tell you that you're making mistakes. And yet you will continue to make them, knowing that even as you do, you'll be apologizing to someone for something later.

"Teenager," then, is the perfect setting for a game like Life is Strange. The beauty of the game is that it gives you an out for all those teenage mistakes. This manifests itself in protagonist Max Caulfield’s inexplicable ability to reverse time. Any decision you make—any choice of words, any way you handle a situation—can be reversed within a scene at the literal push of a button. And because that power is (very nearly) always with you, you will always be tempted to use it and convince yourself that the other option is the better one.

Like Telltale Games' wildly successful licensed adventure games—The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, etc.—Life is Strange is an adventure game told in five acts (the last of which just came out this week). It also apes Telltale’s way of having in-game choices determine relationships with other characters and alter light in-world details.

Unlike Telltale's works, though, in Life is Strange, acceptance isn't born out of convenience. To go back and redo decisions in The Walking Dead or Mass Effect requires investing time into dozens of hours of story again and again to see every routine. Most of us will just take a long mull over a particularly tough decision here and there and move on.

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