Game review: Life Is Strange

Reviewed by Jody Harrison

Suppose you could rewind time. Not travel back decades and bonk a baby Pol Pot on the head before he could commit any genocides, but just slip back 20 minutes or so, forearmed with the knowledge you'd done it all before.

You could redo conversations, like your chance encounter with that cutie from accounts, and work out the right things to say to appear suave, sexy and, above all, not a dithering idiot. Or simply choose between two donuts, having had the leisure to sample both.

This is the power possessed by Max Caulfield, the central character of the episodic interactive adventure Life Is Strange, an 18-year-old who has returned to her home town of Arcadia Bay in the Pacific Northwest, half a decade after moving away.

Max has come back to study photography at the local Blackwell Academy, and she's a shy misfit of a girl, struggling to adapt to her new surroundings and dealing with usual teenage things, like boys and student life and reconnecting with her former best friend, Chloe.

How she gains the ability to skip about in time is a mystery to her as much as the player, and as we're only two episodes into the five instalments that make up this series, the source is yet to be revealed.

At first glance Life Is Strange appears to be a fairly standard teen drama. But there's some bad stuff going down at Blackwell, underneath the surface. There's a missing girl, and a dangerously unhinged student who also happens to be the scion of the most wealthy and influential family in town.

Another girl may have been drugged and date-raped, while the local security guard is secretly filming everyone on campus. And Max keeps seeing visions of an impending catastrophe whose origins are obscure.

The power to jump back in time flits in and out of this story, and is put to good - and not so good - effect. It crops up in puzzles, where Max has to memorize future events and relay them to someone in the past, or race to undo an oncoming disaster having already lived through it firsthand.

There's one charming running gag where Max repeatedly saves a dorky girl from flying objects such as footballs and scrunched-up paper, but time-travel works best when conversations and plot points crop up.

You can follow one path and then rewind back to see how things would have played out if you'd acted or spoken differently, before deciding on which direction to follow. But there's no going back once a course of action has been picked, and often there doesn't seem to be a right choice, while everything has consequences. Much like life.

Like the Telltale Games' Walking Dead series, Life Is Strange moves at a slow pace and lives and dies by the quality of its acting. Thankfully, this is excellent - and there's a tender poignancy to Max's rediscovered friendship with wild-child Chloe that grounds the mystery and fantasy.

The next episode is out in May, and I'm intrigued to see where this is going. I definitely want to follow the story to the end. I suppose I can change it, if I don't like it.

Episodes 1 & 2 of Life Is Strange are available for download, priced £3.99 each, at www.lifeisstrange.com