Hera disappointed.
The first time I played Life is Strange was in 2015, five times in ten months. The game’s first release in episodic format rivaled other narrative adventure games of the era, such as Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Years after the format fell out of favor, the latest game in the series, Life is Strange: True Colors, was released in his one complete package. This change of context is something I often thought about while revisiting the original Life Is His Strange. A series of episodes spanning a week revealed many previously unnoticed issues.
Life is Strange follows Max Corfield, a teenage girl who recently returned to her hometown of Arcadia Bay to finish high school. Upon her arrival, she reunites with her childhood friend, Chloe, and discovers that she has the uncanny ability to rewind time and change the past.As Max attempts to reintegrate into Chloe’s life, she Arcade receives visions of a future where her bay is destined to be wiped out by a terrifying storm. That future seems just days away.
It’s a Your Choices Matter™ narrative adventure game, so naturally the story is at the forefront, but there’s a lot that didn’t captivate me this time around like it used to.It is now a common feeling that your choice is not For real It’s a problem for a game that tries to make a relatively linear story like this, but I was surprised to discover that sometimes Life is Strange doesn’t even bother to pretend. bully Nathan Prescott shoots and kills Chloe, but she apparently rewinds to prevent it. Max is then confronted by the principal, who suspects she is hiding something.
At this point, I remembered how this choice was made in my first playthrough seven years ago. I told the principal that I saw Nathan with a gun. The principal later shielded Nathan from any consequences, and Nathan found out in the process that I had met him, and continued to blackmail Max in an attempt to shut her up. Feigning ignorance, he claimed to the principal that nothing was wrong. He was still suspicious of Max, but there was no way for Nathan to know I had seen him.An hour later we reached the scene where Nathan threatened Max in the first playthrough But Nathan noticed I saw him and was surprised he was still threatening me. Not only was my choice “not important”, but the game didn’t seem to know what to do after I made the “wrong” choice.
This was literally the first major decision in the game and set the tone for things as Max’s Rewind ability became more relevant to gameplay. I can do it. Once the conversation is complete, you can rewind time and try different answers. I often find that the various dialogue options got the exact same reaction from everyone I spoke to, in a couple of examples Max himself said the same thing between two different options There was even. This is so common in games with dialogue trees that in some games it’s not even worth mentioning, but in Life is Strange you can rewind and try different options right away, so Illusions don’t last to the end. of your first playthrough; collapses on the game’s first dialogue.
The story itself has many issues apart from the big decisions you make that I was completely unaware of in 2015 when I had months to forget the details between episodes. It’s a huge amount of filler that fills each episode. It’s very common for characters to explicitly state that they should only do the following for odd problems or obstacles. Even going to Max’s dorm room to get his USB flash drive takes him a quarter of the first episode’s running time. Away from the front door, once inside, the roommate actually lent a flash drive to the girl down the hall, who is currently blocking the room door, because the aforementioned bully tricked them into fighting. I understand. You’ll need to sneak into the bully’s room, find evidence that she made it all up, and convince him to let you in and get your flash drive back.
Moments like this are all over the story, and it was hard to revisit even the actual character scenes that await at the end of the filler. It’s a relationship that rebuilds and tries to get out of the trauma Chloe had to deal with the year Max was gone. Unfortunately, that deep friendship has become much harder to accept these days. Without the months between episodes giving vague memories of the event a chance to romanticize things. There’s a lot I could say about the contrast between Chloe’s character and how sympathetic the game is to her compared to how unnecessarily hostile she is. hostile attitude.
As for how it works on Switch, it doesn’t get much better: the Arcadia Bay Collection port is based on a remaster released on other platforms earlier this year. Personally, I didn’t like a lot of the art style changes that were made in the remaster, but the Switch really struggled to run the updated version, often better than the original 2015 version. Load times that were near instant on the PS4 are now incredibly long, usually at least 30 seconds, and sometimes longer than a minute. The difference is one transitional cutscene at the beginning of episode 2, with three loading screens of him in the middle, going from 2:44 on PS4 to 4:28 on his Switch.
The look of the game is also affected considerably. Camera cuts frequently jerky between multiple frames before settling on the correct shot, and objects pop-in slow enough to be easily noticeable when you’re rolling the camera. The biggest visual problem is that the temporal anti-aliasing effect is poor and seems out of sync with the object you’re trying to smooth. The result is ugly smudges on anything that moves, and the faces of characters who aren’t close to the camera disappear into a jumble of pixels in his soup. Given that the Switch hardware could easily pass the 2015 edition of the recommended PC specs, choosing to port the remaster instead was likely the cause of many of these issues, and the game’s look. And feel significantly worse than before.
The weirdest part of all this is Before the Storm, a prequel story that appears as a completely separate app on the Switch’s home screen. Before the Storm doesn’t have most of the technical issues with the Switch version of Life is Strange. The messy bleed is completely gone and visual clarity is greatly improved. Visual glitches in camera cuts are gone, and load times are generally improved, averaging roughly 15 seconds (although he did time one loading screen that lasted 70 seconds, too). This is definitely a remastered port earlier this year, but somehow it feels like a completely different port. For some reason paying $40 for a collection of two games and it makes no sense without playing the first he only wants to play the second game, I think this port is pretty good.
It was quite a disappointment to return to Arcadia Bay. The magic I felt from the 2015 game is gone as its shortcomings become even more apparent as you play episode after episode. Not sure if I’d recommend the best port of this game right now, but my feelings for the Switch version aren’t particularly mixed. This is not a very good port and the baffling quality difference between the original game and its prequel only makes it more blatant. If I could rewind time I would go back and play this port You can live with the positive memories of the original rather than facing the deep disappointment that the remaster turned out to be.