Immersive Storytelling in Life is Strange.

Life is Strange is an episodic adventure game released in 2015 from developers Dontnot Entertainment. I just recently played through this game and found myself very drawn into its world and characters. While I often find video games very immersive for their settings and environments, very rarely do I feel like I inhabit the main character. Life is Strange, I feel, excels at this. Other games try to get you to inhabit their protagonists by making the protagonist silent and allowing you to choose their dialogue options. Max isn’t silent, she talks quiet a bit. She has her own personality and opinions, which may differ from your own. She has her own past, and goals for the future. But in the present that is the game, you become her*. I wanted to take a look at how LIS accomplishes this, at least for me.

 

I’m going to go into some major spoilers for the entire game, so be warned if you haven’t played it yet.  This entry probably wont make a lot of sense unless you have played the entire game anyways, so you should go play it, its lots of fun and not that expensive nowadays.