10 Video Games That Made You Face Your Own Worst Nightmares
4. Life Is Strange
Life is Strange is divisive. If you have an innate fear of
all games turning into slow-walking point and click adventures a-la The Walking
Dead then… well, you don’t need to worry about that anymore as Telltale Games
sadly died. But even if that was something that worried you, Life is Strange is
a different beast entirely and doesn’t deserve to be thought of as ‘just
another game that happened that was a cookie cutter copy of Telltale’s model’.
It is, at once, a power fantasy that doubles as a humbling look at just how inconsequential our actions can be. It gives you, as teenager Max, special, time-rewinding abilities, and tasks you with using them in order to save your best friend, the other children at your school, and, eventually, the whole area of Arcadia Bay.
The thing is, it’s all for nothing. Sure, you can solve a murder and, sure, you can watch a skater kid lose his deck six times in a row, but can you actually affect change? Can you rewind time when it matters? Can you stop a peer from killing herself at the last second, or is the damage already done? Can you save the victims of Mr Jefferson before or even after he has exacted his cruelties on them?
No, not really. Life is Strange is a meditation on the futility of good intentions. A dour look at just how unimportant we are in the grand-scheme of things, even if we have magic, time-bending abilities.
Killer soundtrack, though.