Review 04 · Narrative adventure · Square Enix

Life is Strange — the one where you can take the sentence back

A story about choices with a mechanic that lets you unmake them. It is the slowest game on this site and the one that most rewards a long sitting.

Character scene in Life is Strange — A conversation scene. Image from the game's official Google Play listing.

The rewind

You can wind time back a short way and replay a conversation knowing how it went. It sounds as though it would remove all tension, and for the first hour it does. Then the game starts using it against you: some consequences appear episodes later, long past the point where rewinding is possible, and a decision that seemed harmless turns out to have set something in motion.

That is the whole design. The rewind is not a safety net, it is a way of making you complicit — you cannot claim you did not know, because you were allowed to check.

Pace

Slow, deliberately. Long stretches are spent walking around a room looking at things, and the game rewards it with observations that are not available otherwise. Anyone expecting incident every few minutes will find it dull; anyone willing to sit with it gets the strongest writing of the four games here.

On a phone

The port is competent rather than remarkable. Touch controls handle movement and interaction adequately, though the fixed camera occasionally fights the swipe. The real friction is loading — chapter transitions take noticeably longer on the older test handset, and there is a lot of them.

Once installed it runs offline in full, which suits a game meant to be played in long, undisturbed sittings.

Environment in Life is Strange — Environments are built for looking at rather than moving through quickly. Image from the official listing.

Structure and pricing

The story is split into episodes. The first is free, the rest are bought — either individually or together. This makes it the easiest game here to try before committing, and we would suggest doing exactly that: the first episode is a fair sample of the pace, and if the pace does not suit you, nothing later will change it.

Prices, taxes and fees are only shown in the store at checkout.

Where it dates

Dialogue in places, and animation throughout. Facial work in particular has not aged well and there is a lip-sync mismatch that is hard to unsee. The story survives this; some individual scenes do not.

Content and who it suits

The game deals with serious themes including bullying, self-harm and death, and carries a higher age rating that varies by country — check the store listing. It suits a reader more than a player: someone who wants fifteen hours of story and will give it undivided attention.

Our rating: 4,2 / 5. Our opinion after finishing the series, not a measurement.

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