No, no changes on my side. I did some googling & it appears that several people have had this problem - no save game at all (I only played the one session and never had to reload a save before), and worse, I don’t really see any certified solutions.
try this.
go here:
C:\Users%userprofile%\Documents\My Games
right click the “life is strange” folder, and choose “restore previous versions”. see if anything is there. you never know…
That directory is not there. It doesn’t exist. I did move MyGames directory to my D: drive (a long time ago). I wonder if the devs hard-coded “C:”
weird :( did you try doing “restore previous versions” on the “my games” directory? it’ll let you browse so you don’t have to restore the whole thing. sorry if i am teaching you to suck eggs here.
Finally wrapped this up last night, played the final episode and needed a bit of time to process the whole thing. I get it now, why Enidigm and a bunch of other folks are calling this their game of the year. It’s a powerful experience, in addition to being a fun game (if you have patience with that whole point-n-click kind of experience). It further bears out my initial impression of Lynchian storytelling, and the final episode really has a kind of Black Lodge feel in its nightmarish locations. The whole thing didn’t click, there was a really terrible stealth section in that last episode that really didn’t sit well with me. But to offset that, there’s this great detective work puzzle late in the fourth episode that reminded me of the great puzzle toward the end of Gabriel Knight 3 that really made me think a bit. And the characters and their relationships felt really authentic, which really gave Max’s decisions some added weight. I’m really glad I played this, definitely one of the best game playing experiences I have had in some time.
Annnnnnd finished. After a series of marathon sessions, I completed all 5 Episodes. Yes, this was a wonderful experience. I feel there were a few mis-steps with the characters (Does anyone say “hella” anymore?) but it’s quite an achievement to get me to care about the choices I had to make. I think it’s because it feels like it came from an honest place. Unlike the David Cage stuff which generally feel false and forced, I walked away from Life is Strange feeling like I really know these characters. And despite the core mechanic of time manipulation, I was really pleased that the story was more or less grounded in reality. I got a “Heathers” / “Donnie Darko” vibe from the whole thing.
Enidigm, thank you so much for posting so passionately about this game. I would have passed on it had you not.
Don’t Nod don’t care about customer support. I’ve posted on every single support website / contact page there is and no one is even bothering to answer.
I’m really bummed b/c I’d love to play, but I need saves to function.
Glad you liked it!
I bought the game sight unseen because of my appreciation of Remember Me. DONTNOD made a game had an interesting and very Gallic sci-fi aesthetic, had a fantastic soundtrack, and used new gameplay ideas. Remember Me also had a hilariously odd twist and a few missteps; mainly, that it was only a mediocre fighting game and over 50% of the game was about fighting. When they announced Life is Strange, that was an adventure game about two girls who are best friends in high school, without any combat at all, and it was as if they were using the Bechdel Test as their inspiration and I loved that they didn’t back down on their very understated but very present progressive ideals. I’ve been trying to support the creation of games women can relate to and enjoy playing for some time. The huge number of women playing LiS show that they certainly succeeded in that respect here.
So I purchased a season pass for Life is Strange (twice, actually) but never got around to playing it until the last episode, and I never took part in the community that grew up around it. I did fire it up for a moment in June or July just to get a taste and was immediately struck by the music and opening menu. “Oh no”, I thought to myself, listening to that instrumental guitar and watching wind whip through trees over an idyllic small town, “this is going to be one of those Reminiscence of Things Past, sort of bittersweet and melancholy games, aren’t you, LiS?” I shut it off and didn’t get back to it until late October, at which point I was prepared for the emotional shock (or perhaps, needed to be) the game was ready to provide.
If this had been the equivalent of some sort of teenage adventure game it still would have been pretty good. TV shows like Pretty Little Liars or Gossip Girl seem to share some DNA with LiS. And had that been all that the game was, I wouldn’t be recommending it here though it would have been just fine for what that would have been. And if you look at the opening episode that’s exactly what the game seems to be. But by Episode 5 players are asking themselves wait, wasn’t this a TV drama? What’s going on? What’s this game about? Isn’t solving the high school’s problems the point of the game? No, reddit and tumblr users, that’s not the theme at all. That surprisingly mature core theme is what elevates the game into GOTY worthy material, along with how most of the characters in the game are more authentic from a mere handful of lines, than almost any other game I’ve played.
The Geek Remix girls were great about not only how involved they became when playing but also how they picked up on some of the smallest things. I’m torn about linking to Let’s Plays but at least the Geek Remix girls went all in on their emotional investment.
Geek Remix links
[spoiler]
(Episode 4)Watch this one till about 5:10 for their strong reaction to a fluff letter. Watch the whole thing for a very emotional and personal revelation to a powerful scene in the game.
(Episode 3)Their take on the pool scene. Didn’t catch a lot of the cues they did.
(Episode 3)Watch for reading the emails on the computer. Notice how they pick up on very subtle word choice.[/spoiler]
I just blew through every episode in the past few days and wow.
Ending
Except the ending, where they get hung up on one my most hated storytelling conventions. I let Arcadia get erased off the map not because I had to save Chloe - I mean I wanted to but not at the cost of the town - but because I fucking hate the very idea of fate.
thoughts
[spoiler]That’s how i felt at first, for a good couple of weeks. But Chloe’s death isn’t so much fate but Fact; she dies in front of Max in Episode 1. Everything past that moment in the ‘real’ world is borrowed time in the ‘unreal’ world of rewinding and supernatural stuff. By focusing on the logic of the tornado - admittedly because it’s sitting right there in front of you and is the driving force behind the decision - players are forgetting that in the ‘real’ world you can’t rewind time. So the choice, which seems at first between an dickish universe that wants its virgin sacrifice or it offs the town, is really about accepting the truth of past events. This is foreshadowed by Max being unable to figure out how to save Chloe’s dad without killing Chloe inadvertedly - the only option is to let things be.
I’ll still Sacrifice Arcadia Bay, I just know that narratively it’s wrong and misses the point.
A lot of players wanted a third option, a Sacrifice Max option - Max takes a bullet for the team. Chloe wears a bullet necklace with three bullets, which represent the three times she will be shot during the game. Around the middle of Episode 5, Max picks up and puts on the necklace, as Chloe is dead at that point, so that she can save Chloe “for the last time”; was she supposed to be symbolically taking on the burden of Chloe’s deaths herself at this moment? Fans have also discovered references to a hospital scene that was unused but intended to be part of the ending. It’s entirely possible, though completely speculative, that this was intended to be an option on the cliff at the end, for Max to rewind to the bathroom and take a bullet for Chloe. Presumably she would have lived and everyone gets a happy ending. So of course that’s why that ending, if it ever existed, was taken out - it would let players be the hero the game has been working to hard to prevent and invalidate all the other endings as inferior. But fans always have “head canon”.[/spoiler]
ending
There’s no “accepting the truth of past events”, though. If you save the town, you are going back and changing things again, and from what I understand, Max goes and stops Jefferson, etc. It’s not a complete reset back to what would have happened without Max getting powers. It’s also not true that “the only option is to let things be”. It’s just that making changes has consequences, and Max has to be willing to commit to those consequences. With Chloe’s dad, she wasn’t.
comments
[spoiler]Right, but the consequences of letting things go forward at that point is the death of everybody else (implied but not confirmed). Because the Sacrifice Chloe ending relies on ‘postcards’ instead of gameplay it’s hard to tell what happens, but the postcards imply that Nathan is arrested and then confesses to his crimes, implicating Jefferson. In other words Max’s previous knowledge she carried forward is no longer necessary, the timeline would have worked itself out. The only thing going back did for Max was her growth as a person and her experiences with Chloe. Lots of fans wonder how Max doesn’t just have a complete breakdown and spend her days staring at a wall after what she’s been through if she sacrifices Chloe, and it does seem in that ending Max is unusually strong about Chloe’s death.
OTOH I do think your conclusion is valid, and it might well be what they were going for. I think fans have a hard time squaring personal growth and accepting your decisions with letting everybody in town die.[/spoiler]
about the ending
[spoiler]I went with sacrificing Chloe too, and I think that medicine is made easier by the fact that Chloe herself has reached acceptance. Max has moved heaven and earth multiple times to keep her friend alive, and whether it’s fate or phenomenal bad luck, the universe just seems to want Chloe dead in the worst way. So to reach a point that Max is willing to let her die, she has to be convinced by Chloe that this is the only way it works. And you have to wonder if what would have happened to their relationship somewhere down the road, when it settles for both of them that Chloe’s life was bought at the expense of the lives of everyone in an entire town.
It’s funny, I found myself kind of role playing a bit through these episodes, not wanting to overuse the rewind power even though there are no obvious costs to doing so, I just feared from very early on that there would be unintended consequences. They hit that butterfly effect motif often and hard. So for instance, when we negotiated with the drug dealer to get the rosetta stone for his ledger, I ended up saying ‘good enough’ when we got out with a knife wound to the leg. Looking at the final stats, it’s apparently possible to get out with no injuries, but I never shot for perfection. More of a kind of minimal intervention. It just felt more right to me somehow.[/spoiler]
I laugh how this thread is now Spoiler Thread Central; page after page of hidden comments. haha!
thoughts
[spoiler]In the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series moments of sacrifice were far less emotionally impactful and morally challenging. In DA did it really matter to me, really, if I sacrificed my character or Alister in the end? Did I lose sleep over it? In Mass Effect did I wander around in a daze regarding Mordin, the Salarian doctor? Did I really care, really, if the kid in DA was possessed by a demon or not? What the hell is even going on in Dragon Age Inquisition? In most of these kinds of roleplaying games what is the good decision, the “blue” dialog-choice decision, the ethically and morally correct decision, is always clear. Whether you choose that has little to do with your own investment with these characters and more the sort of “roleplaying” you’re in the mindset of playing. “I shot Mordin because I’m playing an asshole Shepard!” the player says to themselves, not because they’re the sort of person to shoot Mordin in real life but because they’re pretending to be.
At the end of Life is Strange, I knew that I had to sacrifice Chloe and I didn’t want to do it. Not Max, not the character, not the “roleplaying” me, I mean me personally, the guy behind the screen. I actually cared. I almost always pick the good choice the first time through a game, and I simply couldn’t do it here. Not in my history gaming have I ever felt genuinely conflicted about the morality of my choice in a game, where I knew what had to be done but simply, desperately didn’t want to do it. I was shocked at myself. I was eager to find a hundred excuses and rationalities not to do it, where I wanted to tear the narrative apart and look for some clause, some forgotten hint, any sort of contradiction, where I could point at the game and say “Objection! Caught you red handed, game! Chloe’s not dying today!”
And I can write and explain here in exhausting detail exactly why Sacrificing Chloe the correct ending and i’m still not sure I can pick it. I mean, I’ve seen the other ending on YouTube, I know what it is. I can “pick” it in the game, you know, but do I want to yet? I still emotionally want to find something, anything to latch onto, some gnarled and twisted root of plot logic with which to spare me from the horror of that abyss I don’t want to confront; not just of loss, but of unfulfillment, of missed chances, of regret. Let’s live in the fantasy together, just a little while longer.[/spoiler]
I played Episode 2 for a few hours today. Man, this game’s choices feel really stressful to choose between. Has anyone else felt that? Maybe it’s because of the ability to rewind time. In The Walking Dead, I always felt like I would make the best decision I could and accept it, but with the ability to rewind time and change your mind comes a greater sense of dread and responsibility.
I did feel stress with my decisions, but I don’t think it was because I could rewind time. There were multiple times I would make a choice, rewind time and make the other choice. I then felt stress whether I should go back to the original or keep the one I just made. In The Walking Dead I would just sit and agonize over a choice (as long as it wasn’t timed) - man I hated the timed choices.
And you’ve only just started. The choices get more and more loaded.
Let us know how you feel at episode 5.
Diego
Hello Enidigm,
“Life is Strange Limited…” has shipped.
Got my Limited Edition coming in tomorrow, with “Developers’ Commentary”. I’m curious to see what that is.
So they decided to release the Director’s Commentary as free to everyone… and then decided to block it off from PlayStation owners until the 26th. Um. Why did I buy the Limited Edition again? The Art Book is basically about 20 pages of the in game scrapbook without game text, more or less. Does have fully licensed CD soundtrack.
I do like supporting them though…