Life is Strange - Square Enix, Remember Me, rewinding time

Square-Enix is a big publisher, so that’s only a small benefit for them. As a developer of episodic games, the main benefit is that you get multiple engagement points, multiple hype spikes, and several opportunities for the community build as it talks and speculates about the game between episodes. That requires a certain critical mass of players, though, and it seems like fans took a wait-and-see approach with Life Is Strange 2, and the slightly more drawn out release schedule hasn’t helped either.

Episode 4 trailer:

Wrapping it all up, the final trailer:

I’ll be happy to play the complete season when I can. Loved the first games of the series so I’m happy to have things coming to a close and will definitely watch for more.

For everyone who has been waiting for the full season to be available, today is the day!

Sweet, I’m waiting for episode five to get released on Game Pass so I can just plow through the whole thing.

And bought.

I don’t have the time to play it right now but I held off as long as I wanted to get the complete package so that, when I do play, I can do the whole story at once.

I just started playing this last night, I didn’t realize the game was set in Seattle. I think the Diaz family even lives in my general neighborhood. But it’s kind of startling how quickly the game sets up one premier and then just blows it up. I’m curious to see where this goes.

I fired it up last night intending to begin on Chapter 4, but got sidelined by the download for an update (presumably Chapter 5) and ended up just playing Kentucky Route Zero instead. I’ll get back into it tonight.

Jesus Christ, this game is intense! This has been a game of severe highs and lows - I guess I’ll steer clear of details since so many folks don’t seem to be playing, or at least not discussing. But this is a serious game with some pretty serious points to make. I’m up to the last episode, hopefully play that tomorrow, and man I am just curious how this all gets wrapped up. Big thumbs up so far though.

I have yet to play the last episode, but I will be playing (and recording for YouTube) the episode soon, I hope. I agree, it gets pretty intense!

So is the sequel worth it? There doesn’t seem to be as much discussion online about it compared to be the original so I assumed it wasn’t as good but I feel like I’m in the mood for a good adventure game right about now…

The sequel is definitely worth it. Not as heavy nor an emotionally impactful as the first, but definitely a must-play for those that enjoyed Life is Strange.

Life is Strange, for what it’s worth, is one of my top ten of the last decade. It’s that good.

Without spoilers, I thought the ending to the first game a disappointment in terms of gameplay and execution of the narrative. Does the second finish up more successfully?

Holy crap, I could not disagree more emphatically. I just played the final episode and man, this one blew me away. I liked the first game, really liked it, but this one is a much heavier hitter to me, emotionally speaking I guess. And I have to add, the cameo of the character from the first game completely flew over my head until I visited his camper and looked at the photograph on his refrigerator - it floored me to see them together and figure that out.

I do think the second game really sticks the landing, and really gives you a series of strong characters that you care about a lot. Sure, there are some throwaway racist characters that exist just to be villains, but mostly in every case you can see where they’re coming from even if you disagree with them. And it’s hard not to get invested in Sean and Daniel’s southward journey. I didn’t expect to enjoy this as much as I did, I definitely recommend trying it out. Especially if you have Game Pass and can try it out for free.

Whoops, I was thinking of ‘Life is Strange: Before the Storm’ as the second game (hence a sequel) but really it’s the prequel and is the one I was referring to in my post. I own, but have not yet played, #2. Sorry!

Well actually I guess Before the Storm is the second game, I just kind of forgot about it I guess. I liked it ok but yeah, not as much as the first.

I’ll probably need a little time to process but I think Life Is Strange 2 is the best of them.

This confusion brought to you by Qt3’s reluctance to make new threads. I have no idea why Before the Storm and Life is Strange 2 don’t have their own threads. I’ve only played through 2 episodes of the first game, and I can only assume this laziness is because the sequels aren’t good enough to warrant their own threads.

I don’t believe laziness has anything to do with it, in fact I respect the economy of merging three games into one thread. We only have 278 (ok, guess this is 279) posts for all games, breaking it across more threads doesn’t seem terribly useful. We could probably use a better shorthand for describing which game we’re talking about at any given time though.

I put off resuming this initially because I there was a big patch. And now it turns out it hadn’t even downloaded the next episode. Guess it’ll wait a bit longer to resume.