"Life is Strange: Wavelengths"

 

In my review of Life is Strange: True Colors I complained (as many people have) that, as someone who comes to Life is Strange significantly for the slice-of-life (is strange) stuff, I would have liked more of that and less plot-driven investigation of the game's central mystery. I guess maybe this was intentional because it feels like a huge chunk of that element was reserved for the additional Wavelengths DLC, which was released a few weeks after the main game.

In Wavelengths, you play as Steph, fan favourite character from Life is Strange: Before the Storm and supporting protagonist of True Colors, over the course of her life working at the Haven Springs record store, Rocky Mountain Record Traders, and its attached local radio station, KRCT. Even though it's set in 2018, Wavelengths feels like the ultimate game for the pandemic lockdown era; in the course of its three-to-four-ish-hour runtime you, as Steph, spend your entire time in said radio station and record store. With the exception of the ending cutscene, you see and interact with absolutely no-one in person, all of your human contact occurring via phone calls, text messaging, dating apps and a video chat. Time, lockdown and and budgetary limitations aside (it's a bit weird that you never serve customers in the game), this is all strongly tied to the game's central exploration of the self-perpetuating effects of loneliness and the causes of self-destructive behaviour, as encapsulated in the character of Steph and her tendency to run away from any situation in life which risks becoming too serious, permanent, or intimate. I've heard it rumoured that at some point in the development there were going to be more face-to-face interactions and/or scenes outside the store and booth, but the lockdown made this impossible; if that's true, I don't think the game really suffered from lacking those elements, and is probably actually stronger as a result of it.

On the surface, Wavelengths is your usual Life is Strange fare: you wander around your environment, interact with objects to hear the player character's thoughts on them, communicate with characters (in this case purely electronically), solve simple puzzles and make choices which shape your experience of the story. And yet in some respects Wavelengths really invests in how this kind of gameplay evokes the experience of undertaking routine, predictable tasks as you perform these actions in order for Steph to do her job. This isn't exactly something new in video games, but it uses it to really capture the slice-of-life element to which I referred in my opening. Ever imagined what it would be like to run a local radio station? Well, a lot of it involves queuing music, reading boring ad copy and sitting in a small room waiting for time to pass.

I have to admit that Wavelengths, and Steph's presence in the main game, were two of the things that motivated my interest in True Colors, and I thought it was a sensible choice to take a beloved but relatively fringe character from one of the spinoffs and elevate her to a bigger role. Being able to actually play as Steph and get inside her head is better still, as the game deliberately takes what we knew about her and complicates it. Before the Storm presents her as an imaginative student, wise beyond her years with a variety of interests and a big heart. True Colors presents her as charismatic and confident, to the extent that I almost felt that the Steph of True Colors was difficult to recognise as the same character from Before the Storm. So Wavelengths really goes into examining how Steph changed over the nine years between when those two games take place, and how her struggles to deal with the experience of loss shaped her approach to life.

Initially, I expected Wavelengths to just be a humorous "here are a few days in the life of Steph" thing where you hung out at the radio station, listened to indie music and said silly stuff on the air. But it actually goes into a lot more than that about what it's like to feel unsure of yourself and your life's direction, to push people away, and to carry around unresolved grief. I really didn't expect this relatively short piece of DLC to have as much emotional weight as it did, but I honestly found it quite powerful, perhaps moreso than the main game, in which the central drama was so totally foregrounded in the marketing.

A bit like Before the Storm's "Farewell" DLC, Wavelengths differs from the main game in that there's no mystery and the narrative is pushed forward not by any kind of plot contrivance but rather by the characters' own trajectory. In this case, it takes the shape of understanding why Steph is who she is, in a way tied into the original Life is Strange (a game in which Steph didn't actually feature, as she hadn't been invented yet when that game was made). The game begins by asking if you've played the original, and if so whether you chose to save the town or not. I've obviously played the original multiple times and chosen both endings at least once, but originally decided to go with the "didn't save the town" (i.e., saved Chloe) ending, and I certainly did not expect that to feature the way it did, with Steph in that decision's course of events dealing with the death of her mother in the storm implicitly caused by Max Caulfield's use of time travel in the original game. The second time I went with "saved the town", in which Steph's trauma is instead the murders of Rachel and Chloe.

I think the first option I chose was a pretty clever move on the part of the developers because one advantage the "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" ending has always had is that it doesn't really show you significant consequences for Max's choice. It's implied that everyone in the town was killed (and Life is Strange 2 confirmed that very many of them were) but you never really saw the consequences of that unless you played Life is Strange 2 or now; here I was transposed from the shoes of Max, sacrificing the town to save Chloe's life, in the original, to Steph's, dealing for years afterwards with the thought of her mother having been killed in the freak weather event of the original game.

As a way of exploring more from the original game's narrative I really think this was a pretty decent move on Deck Nine's part, as you find Steph scared of getting close to anyone for fear that she will lose them unexpectedly like she did her mother (or Rachel and Chloe, but more on that below), and with even her friend Mikey from Before the Storm being pushed away. We see via text message that Steph does socialise with Gabe, Ryan and Charlotte from True Colors, but by setting the entire game inside the record store we get the sense that that's where she spends a lot of her time, shut away from everyone, keeping them at a distance, on the other side of the glass, caught between staying in Haven Springs as part of some seemingly half-hearted effort to get a new start and feeling the pull to again run away and do something new (which moving to Haven seems to have been in the first place).

Like all of the Life is Strange games it's testament to how well they engage with a certain kind of player (like myself) that I can have so much to say about a four hour piece of downloadable content, but the empathetic writing and the simultaneous presentation of what seems like an escape from reality with the less pleasant causes and consequences of that escape are more than powerful enough to make the experience worth contemplating. Wavelengths succeeds in this real-life stuff while also expanding upon what was only implicit in True Colors, namely that Steph was flaky and tended to drift from place to place, avoiding putting down roots. This explains why. And I wonder if this was set out from the start, and is why we were given less stuff about her backstory in the main game, or, if what I've heard is true, that the decision for the DLC to be about Steph's life was made later in the game's development, and that it's just a happy accident.

Wavelengths takes place over four seasons, starting in Spring shortly after Steph has decided to stay in Haven Springs and ending in winter on New Year's Eve of 2018, a few months before Alex's arrival in the main game, which is shown in the final cutscene. Each season is about thirty to sixty minutes of gameplay depending on how slowly you choose to take them, as you're free to wander around the record store, banter on the air and chat with the girls Steph rather futilely matches with on a dating app. It's all pretty mundane stuff, but that's what I'm here for. Spring is basically an intro to the radio station's mechanics: playing and queuing records, answering the station phone, helping people make decisions by rolling a D20 and reading ad copy, that Steph can choose to either take seriously or mock. Summer starts building upon the game's themes, with the last day of Pride Month causing Steph to reminisce about the experience of growing up as a gay woman in the northwest of the USA. Autumn (or Fall if you prefer) becomes much more somber, with a more direct representation of the consequences of Life is Strange the first on Steph's life. I have to say that the developers did a pretty good job here of demonstrating how the events of the first game might have impacted a character who hadn't been invented when the first game was developed, and I sure as hell felt bad for her. Finally, Winter concludes with Steph maybe finding a little solace after the rather difficult feelings brought up by the previous season, although still dwelling, appropriately, on the lonesome image of her popping champagne by herself at midnight, alone in the record store.

I like to play Life is Strange games slowly, one chapter or episode a day whenever I'm coming to one fresh or doing a replay, and while Wavelengths realistically is too short for this to be a sensible approach if you want a big hit of gameplay and/or of the character in one go, I did find it to be quite evocative of the "nostalgic" experience of life that the series has always captured so well, in which you know the ending is coming, and you want to see it, but at the same time you don't want it to end. I felt pretty deflated when Wavelengths did end, not because I didn't like it but rather because I enjoyed my time as Steph and wanted more, just like I did with True Colors proper. In fact, I think I probably enjoyed Wavelengths more than the main game given its slice-of-life focus and intensity of the kind of indie music that has always been so fundamental to the franchise's atmosphere. Being able to actually queue up the records every season and have them play in the background is great, and the official album or single artwork for each release is even rendered in the series' distinctive impressionist-watercolour art style. I would have liked more songs, especially in Spring where the auto-DJ defaults to crappy country and western library music, but I appreciate that that was kind of the point, and as the game goes on and Steph customises the playlist further, the automatic music becomes much more in keeping with her style.

Another significant feature of this DLC is the return of Steph's friend Mikey, also from Before the Storm, with whom she plays tabletop RPGs, this time over video chat, another pre-emptive retroactive nod to the years of lockdowns and working from home. It's good to see the character return and he's used effectively to demonstrate Steph's genuine and lasting friendships and how she doesn't always need to run away. There are also very, very brief voice cameos in Steph's recollections of Chloe and Rachel, both voiced by their Before the Storm voice actors, but this is pretty perfunctory, not that I really expected more. I think it's better to keep this stuff limited, especially as Steph is a character retconned into the story by the prequel; this implies that after Before the Storm she and Mikey would hang out with Chloe and Rachel sometimes but seemingly left before Rachel disappeared (and, depending on your choice, Chloe was murdered). It's a nice touch without going into too much detail if you haven't played the original game. I think either way it works, although the version in which she lost her mother to the storm is probably a little more believable than the loss of two friends with whom, by the time of the original game, she was presumably (had she been invented yet) no longer closely in touch.

I suppose Wavelengths gives True Colors the greater longevity and development of its secondary characters that I thought it needed, but despite featuring one of the same characters and taking place in part of the same setting it almost feels more like a separate experience in its own right, independent of the central game. I think it demonstrates a direction that the series could continue on further, i.e. focusing more on the day-to-day and exploring characters' lives in detail, and working that into a narrative in its own right. In the event that Deck Nine makes another Life is Strange game in a few years, I wouldn't object to it taking a healthy dose of inspiration from Wavelengths. I've played it through twice now, and I feel that there's probably still more optional dialogue I could unearth, but it kind of feels melancholy to think that now I really, truly have completed True Colors. I don't even want to finish writing this review because that means it's really over. Life is Strange is notorious for leaving its fans with that feeling, and this is no exception. I return to the same question I asked of True Colors: what do these games offer us that is missing in our own lives? And would we really be happier if we could be like Steph, feeling isolated and alone in a small-town radio station? What do we actually want, and where do we want life to take us? If something like Wavelengths has so much appeal, I think it speaks more powerfully than ever to the series' connection with the desire for what is simply a more emotional life, and a more emotionally experiential one, in which we can feel something, rather than just being.