Before the NYCC this week Square Enix hosted a preview night where they demoed a few select titles to the media. There were plenty of sequels and remakes on display but if you were patient enough to weather all that noise, there, tucked into a corner lovingly recreated to look like your high school room (or your high school girlfriend's), was Life Is Strange.
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The game feels out of place amidst the hustle and bustle of established properties. We are in the age of Brands and Branded Content, where terms like 'universes' are bandied about; a world where there are five new Assassin's Creed titles out within the same year. So to call Life Is Strange, well...strange, is an understatement. It's an outright anomaly. It also does the game a huge disservice. The strangeness is backed up with the promise of an exciting new title.
Jean-Maxine Moris, creative director for DontNod Entertainment, the game's developer was on hand alongside art director Michel Koch to take us through the nostalgic mystery of the game. The demo was played by Koch, with narration and a real-world assist from Moris (he held up photos, which was oddly effective) and is the same content shown off back in August during Gamescom in Cologne. Moris, looking a bit run down (he's been doing this all day) still sounded exicted for what he calls his 'AAA indie game'. If that sounds like an oxymoron, just wait. You will understand why.
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A group of journalists sat down in beanbag chairs and admired the attention to detail of the 'room'. The decorations in the demo space were key in helping connect the player (and in our case, viewer) to the events on screen. It made it real. Life Is Strange is a game that will draw you in, but it won't overwhelm you with bright lights and explosions. Being in the right frame of mind for a story that is just a little left of ordinary is key to the experience.
To achieve the desired effect, Koch and the 40-person team at Dontnod have been painting a lot of the photographs (which play a significant part to Max's character) by hand. "We are not using any photographs for the texture," Koch noted. "We really wanted the game to have this expressionistic rendering instead of realistic. Every texture is hand painted."
Each chapter should take around two hours to complete, according to Moris. However, the replayability factor is quite high on account of the webbed-like structure of the narrative. You can play one game through as a jerk or a saint, and see what happens. They hope to have you covered.
The first episode of Life Is Strange is scheduled to be released in early 2015 for all systems, except the Wii U. They hope to have the four additional chapters out approximately every six weeks after that. While they could not give out pricing information, they assured us that the price point will be "Telltale-esque". A season pass will be available, too.
Life Is Strange feels like an old photograph full of memories, a feeling I hope remains when we can get our hands on it. Though the direct experience of Max, that of a teenage girl, is one I never had, everyone has experienced the kind of isolation and uncertainty you get when you're someplace new; or someplace forgotten. You can feel the hormones coursing through the blood of the game, pumping it full of equal parts awkwardness and clarity. As Max rewound time, I wondered about the events in my life, the little choices and which of them, over ten years later, still affected me. Would I go back and change them if I could? I cannot say I ever had that feeling from a game before.
