Life Is Strange (2015) by Dontnod Entertainment

Life Is Strange does a lot of things really well, the strongest of which is the game's commitment to its 'vibe', for lack of a better word. It's at its absolute best during its quiet moments; moments in which the tedium of its gameplay and its wonky, cringeworthy, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids dialogue are relegated to the backseat and no longer permitted to ruin the experience. Sitting on the swing in Chloe's parents' backyard as the neighborhood dogs bark and the children play in the background. Lying on Chloe's bed with light rock music twanging along in the background. Walking through a massive party as the grooving, ambient club music plays and the red lights flicker. These are by far my favorite portions of Life Is Strange; the parts where it sucked me right in and made me want to do nothing but stand around and take in its atmosphere.

Unfortunately, actually playing the game is more often a chore than not. Its gimmicky time-rewind mechanic is something which, on paper, is a fantastic fit for this sort of adventure/RPG game, but its actual, practical use in Life Is Strange is so limited that it's barely ever used interestingly, and never even comes close to living up to its full potential. It's at its most tedious during fast-paced action and suspense sequences—which ought to be when it's at its best. Instead of allowing the player to search for creative solutions to the problems at hand, they're left mostly fumbling around looking for the correct HUD pop-up out of several in order to properly progress the scene, which often leaves you failing the game's scenarios repeatedly and continuously rewinding until you've found the option the game deems 'correct'. It's a clumsy, obtuse, tedious experience which requires zero creative problem-solving from the player. Ironically, all you need to progress through these sequences is time.

There are a couple of moments in Life Is Strange in which this mechanic is used well, particularly a conversation with my favorite character in the game, Frank, in Episode 4. This conversation is focused mostly on dialogue options and does a phenomenal job of incorporating past decisions the player has made in prior chapters. I found using rewinds to be thrilling and compelling in this particular scene, and I really enjoyed the way the game factored in my previous decisions into the outcome of this particular conflict, while allowing the player to have an open-ended progress state (for the most part—there is still one outcome in the conversation which leads to a forced rewind, which I hated). I spent a significant portion of time rewinding, trying different approaches with both Frank and Chloe, and being pleasantly shocked at the amount of differing outcomes that were possible. I didn't feel nearly as much tedium when free to take my time and progress the conversation as I did when it was an action sequence, and the game was rushing me to click different options, despite having infinite rewinds and ultimately being able to arrive at the correct one through sheer trial-and-error since, in contrast with the Frank conversation, there was only one outcome in these action sequences which would progress the game. The rewind mechanic is far more enthralling when you're free to progress the story with whichever outcome you deem appropriate (or, perhaps more appropriately, the best outcome you can manage given prior decisions, or the best one you can find), and I wish the game had used its gimmick like this more frequently than it does.

The characters are probably the most engaging part of Life Is Strange's writing, though they're frequently hampered with awful, cheesy dialogue which always ends up sounding embarrassingly like a 40 year old man trying his best to write 18 year old girls. I didn't jive with Max, the main character, very much, nor did I find Chloe to be much more than a whiny, entitled brat. But some of the side characters have some real texture to them that I quite liked. Nathan and Victoria are excellently written and grow as the series progresses. David and Frank, likewise, seem initially to be rather one-dimensional, before sprouting into dynamic, well-rounded people with engaging histories and clear motivations. Life Is Strange does its best work when it allows its characters to be human and fallible and gives them real motivation for being why they are, but it tends to let its most one-dimensional, least engaging characters occupy the majority of the spotlight, which was a shame.

Life Is Strange will probably appeal to folks depending on how strongly they can relate to its main characters. I found them to be whiny and I thought the game was trying a bit too hard, and I found the plot to be a bit contrived in certain circumstances—as if the writers knew where they wanted to go, but were at odds with exactly how to get their story and their characters properly in-place. Ultimately, what sinks the game for me is its tedious, dry, and grinding moment-to-moment gameplay, and I wish the developers had chucked out the majority of this and chosen to rely more, instead, on polishing Life Is Strange's plot and characters, because that's where I feel the majority of the impact is.

Moments of Life Is Strange do continue to stand out for me, but I can't recommend it just due to how much I hated the act of actually playing the game. There's lots of "walking simulator" criticism out there today, but I'd much rather a walking simulator with good dialogue options than the ineffective time-rewind gameplay that was jammed into Life Is Strange as "gameplay". No gameplay at all is a much better option than bad gameplay, in my book, especially with a game that aspires to quality storytelling as much as Life Is Strange does. Just look at games like Disco Elysium for a solid example of how to chuck out sub par systems and lean heavily into things like story, character, worldbuilding, and dialogue. Life Is Strange is not that, of course, and likely never would have been. But all the same, it could've been a far better game if its developers had chosen to trim some of its fat and rely more heavily on what it does well.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 27 hours

The Forgotten City (2021) by Modern Storyteller

I was pretty underwhelmed by The Forgotten City.

I love narrative- and character-driven games, but The Forgotten City just didn't do it to me. The premise of time-warping back to an Ancient Roman city is perfectly in-line with my tastes, but the setting was far too fantasy-based for me and not nearly as historically based as I'd have liked. The setting did not feel like a "city" to me whatsoever; more like a very limited arena in which to interact with a select few NPCs.

The game's pacing felt terribly off to me. On arrival I felt a bit overwhelmed with all of the people I was sent to speak with, and did not feel the strong pull of any narrative hook investing me in any of their struggles. As I grinded through and dug a bit deeper I began to feel more invested, but this took several hours of running around and clicking through dialogue that I didn't find very interesting. It was a struggle to get through the game's opening hours, as I was simply wandering around, talking to NPCs, with no real investment as to why I was even in this artificial-feeling place, with these artificial-feeling NPCs. This problem compounded when proceeding through one of the game's "dungeons", in which you first begin to engage with the game's combat system. To put it simply; it's not good. The developers do their best to work in creative solutions to being confronted with enemies, but in the end, it's a relatively simple bow mechanic, enemies which react in very few ways, and corridors which don't divert very far. There are also some brief platforming sections which I found horribly tedious and unengaging. I believe this would be a far, far better game if there was no combat whatsoever and it relied more on better execution of dialogue and characters.

Before my purchase I had heard a great deal about how great the character writing is, but unfortunately I can't agree. The effort is there, but the characters feel far more like video game characters than real people. Most of them will have a very obvious quirk, and little else aside from that. I wasn't really touched or motivated by any of their needs or desires, and the way the game tasks you with speaking to them all right off the bat felt a bit clumsy and unnatural to me. Rather than entering a real city, I felt overwhelmingly like I was entering a staged video game world where each of the characters was a cardboard cut-out, spitting lines at me. One character is a stoic, and quotes regularly from famous stoics. One character is a gladiator, and is predictably brutish and reliant on violence. A few are Christians. A couple are homosexuals. One's a humble, down to earth farmer. One young woman is relatively stuck-up and arrogant. On paper, all of these are fine, but they ought to be treated just as starting points for putting interesting twists on these characters and challenging them; pushing them further toward change. However these facets are really all there are to these characters, rendering them rather token and uninteresting, so I left The Forgotten City a bit puzzled as to how the character writing garnered so much praise. Maybe I'm missing something.

The most intriguing the game gets is in how it facilitates the player's freedom in solving its problems and experimenting with new attempted solutions. It must have been a real pain to try and program these quests, many of which intersect with one another, and may be done in any order. I give the developers lots of respect for that. The game worked perfectly for me: No broken quest flags or bugs, and that's significant.

I hate crapping on indie games because I love the hard work indie developers put into creating things that new and unique like The Forgotten City, but this one just didn't connect with me for whatever reason. That being said, I don't regret the purchase and I'm happy to keep supporting indie ventures like this, and I do think the development team behind this game has interesting goals and motivations and I look forward to seeing what they do next.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 7 hours