Life is Strange: True Colors

This is a tough one to talk about. I seem to be in the minority that thought LiS2 was fantastic and I was looking forward to this franchise continuing to grow in that direction. Compared to LiS2 this feels a little safe, but overall I enjoyed myself. 

I think the characters are charming and the drama hard hitting enough to pull you into the story. I was honor-bound to make sure Alex Chen made it out of this story safe and sound and happy. The choice for superpower and the mechanic was cool enough.  

Mystery returns as an important element of this game, much as it was in the first LiS and in Deck Nines other title BtS. I think this is something fans were missing — and I get it, I love a good mystery — but I don’t think this is a particular strong point of this game. The answers were pretty obvious, the threat ill-defined, and it felt almost disconnected from everything that’s happening until the end. 

I think the bigger picture problem is that this game screams that it’s a practice in frugality. This new engine looks great! Art design is fabulous. But there are very few characters and locations and even fewer that are actually important. The power is a good match for a choice based adventure, but you are given few characters with which to interact and few opportunities to use your power. And when you do use your power, most of the time you are told directly what your objective is and how to best get what you need to push the story forward. If you were hoping the empathy power would lead to a deep dialogue tree and player choice, it doesn’t really come close. All in all it translated to less game and less agency over the direction the story is headed, which is unfortunate. I feel like a few tweaks and this could’ve been great as I was really invested in the characters. For now it’s a cool little game that came out. 

Also, I apologize to all my fellow gays but I’m Team Ryan. Literally fight me.