Victory Game Center

http://lifeisstrange.com/
Launch trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YznXuKwJtMg

Review - http://victorygamecenter.com/life-is-strange-review/

By the way, I'm not claiming to have any special knowledge of the internal development of this game. According to Wikipedia, the game "was born out of the idea for the game mechanic".

I am only calling it a "dev mechanic" because that's what it is to me. And of course it affected a great deal of the design work. But from my perspective, it's only scaffolding. And scaffolding isn't fun to play with.

Just finished Episode 2: Out of Time.

You know, Chloe is probably the last person I'd want to help get in on the ground floor of a superpower like this. Her first thoughts on how to use it jump straightaway to "banging" indiscriminately. And not long after, her ambition is to have the whole world "bow" before her.

But I liked how Max is jealous of the relationship Chloe and Rachel had. How she thinks about how that could have been her. And when she sees the friendship bracelets, she's "hurt" by it. That felt real.

So hey, do you want to rummage through a junkyard looking for 5 random beer bottles? I know I did. And this episode heartily delivered such a tried and true scavenger hunt. And remember all those great puzzles from the first episode that had you reaching for something up high, only for you to mess things up and have to rewind? Guess what? They're back!

I don't like rewinding, but the game continues to insist that you do so. Every puzzle is crafted around that central idea, many of which are tiresome. But really, the best parts are instead spent trying to figure out what to do during the critical decision points. Those moments where aesthetics and mechanics collide full force, merging into one another. And those have nothing to do with rewinding anything (that is, unless you have no confidence in what you've just chosen).

Even the game itself cheekily toys with the idea by eventually saying, "Oh be careful, Max! Who knows when we'll take your rewind power away!" The final scene seemed to imply that you couldn't rewind during it, but I don't know if that's true, since I never tried.

I've seen people arguing over the train sequence, as if there were no tension there, and you were free to leisurely take your time saving Chloe with all your unlimited rewinds. But that's certainly not my impression of the scene. Although to be honest, that was my initial thought. But then you hear Chloe crying out on the tracks, and at that point it's hard not to think of her as a person in dire need of rescue. I did not want that train to hit her. Not even once. I just couldn't let that happen. Because at that moment, her life mattered. And for any developer to create a moment like that is an accomplishment.

So I don't know what these kids are talking about when they say that this scene was ridiculous. It wasn't. It was so tense, that even though I had multiple solutions to the problem within my grasp, I rushed for the one that would free her the fastest and the surest way possible. In fact, I'd say this scene was even more well-done than the episode's finale.

I mentioned in the Bloodborne thread that the reviewers that gave the game such glowing reviews ended up mostly reviewing the genre rather than the actual game itself. There's no question that the same thing is happening with these games too.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/21/845767 ... ge-suicide

Laura Dale wrote: The second episode of Life is Strange put a huge emotional burden on my shoulders that caused me to walk away deeply distressed, and the game completely failed to understand the implications of what it had done. It gave me agency over a deeply tragic moment, then very quickly introduced traditional video game scoring elements that ranked my failure against other players. Tragedy had become gamified.

Yes. The leaderboards at the end really do trivialize everything prior. And if you're whole aim is to treat heavy subjects with the seriousness that they're due, this is one of the worst things you can do.

COGWATCH 5: Life is Strange - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuK3ABXVtlI

Quintin Smith also recognizes that the greatest merit to the time-rewind mechanic is in how it affected the designers, and when he's actually playing the game, he uses it as little as possible.

Loaded up the third episode the other day and was so immediately bored by its opening that I had to turn it off. It's hard not to notice all the different ways in which the environment's been designed to easily accommodate whatever possible endings there were in the previous episode. It hit me so strongly, I nearly uninstalled the whole thing then and there, never to look back. But at the last moment, I decided I'd give it a second chance, and play it again some other time when I'm less likely to be so hard on it.

The time travel mechanic is a product of the gameplay curse.