"Life is Strange: True Colors"

Shouldn't it be "Life is Strange: True Colours" in the PAL market?

 

Spoilers, for the entire Life is Strange series, obviously.

 

Anyway, I've always intended to publish a review of the original Life is Strange, one of my favourite story games (or pieces of interactive fiction) of the last decade. Yes, there's very little challenging gameplay, and the ending feels a bit rushed, and some of the dialogue reads like what middle-aged French men think American teenage girls talk like, but it has great atmosphere, strong voice acting and likeable characters. Some people don't like Chloe and I always found Max more relatable, but ultimately I thought that Life is Strange was moving and a lot of fun. That being said, I completely understand the school of thought that says that a huge part of the game's appeal is that it's a kind of "emotional intimacy simulator" above anything else which is why it has such a cult following and weirdly large fanbase of adult men. Nonetheless, having played the first game and enjoyed it as much as I did, naturally I played the sequel (by the same developers) and the prequel (by different developers), and now it's time for True Colors, the not-quite-second-sequel, developed by the developers of the prequel and featuring one of their characters.

True Colors, developer Deck Nine's second foray into the Life is Strange franchise, has the same strengths that I think form a big part of the series' appeal overall: nice atmosphere, good voice acting, and strong characters. It also has the same problem that their previous entry, the prequel Before the Storm, had, namely that it feels a bit unfulfilled and leaves you wanting more, the latter not necessarily being a bad thing, but like Before the Storm it feels like it could have been bigger. It's almost certainly the nicest-looking of the series so far, although given the tiny budgets of the original game and Before the Storm that isn't too surprising, but I still think lighting, environment and music-wise the original game had the best atmosphere.

A lot of reviews I've read have already pointed out the same things that I was feeling about the game: that it looks nice, that the characters are good but it feels like we don't spend enough time with them, that the gameplay is pretty simplistic, that the twist is stupendously obvious and predictable, and that the game feels very eager to evoke the beloved original game. It certainly feels like the game is trying to be conspicuously unlike Life is Strange 2, with that game's child protagonists, rotating cast of secondary characters, and heavy representation of American racial politics. In True Colors you stay in one place, the small cast of supporting characters is entirely consistent from the first to the last chapter, you play as an adult and you can romance one of your friends. The most political message in the game is the uncontroversial "big ruthless mining corporations are bad". The community in which the game is set is very "liberal" as Americans like to put it, with a local marijuana dispensary and and seemingly a pretty clear acceptance of LGBTQIA people, but that seems to have finally reached the point in at least some parts of America where it's no longer questioned by the average person. You play as a young woman of Asian heritage, but this scarcely comes up; it's almost completely confined to the background. And all in all, for better or worse, it feels rather safe, not interested in evoking anything like the divisive second game.

And to focus on the negatives first, I think the biggest problem with True Colors is that it's trying to feel like Life is Strange the original, without that much of its own identity. You're a young woman who is an outsider but with connections in an atmospheric small town with a dark secret under the surface. There's a murder, and you try to investigate. One thing True Colors seems to try to expand upon is Life is Strange's nascent theme of corporate greed and ruthlessness, the dangling plot thread of the original game's malevolent Prescott Foundation here replaced by the payoff-and-coverup-happy Typhon Mining Company. And the theme of governmental corruption is present here as it was in Before the Storm with the police and town council under the thumb of the criminally negligent corporation.

All this probably wouldn't matter if it weren't for the fact that, as I've said, we just don't get to spend as much time with the characters as might be beneficial. To be fair, I don't have a huge amount of patience for long, story-driven games if I'm not engaged with the characters and story, and I rarely am, but the thing that has always separated Life is Strange from other narrative-heavy games in the market is that, apart from the element of one character typically having some kind of supernatural power, and some sort of mystery or crime to investigate, they're all fairly grounded in real-world slice-of-life stuff which, as a boring overeducated man in my thirties, I find entirely more interesting than fantasy and science fiction adventures.

True Colors at its best maintains this; some of the most enjoyable parts of the game, in my view, are simple things like showing the local bar proprietor that, despite your lack of experience, you've got what it takes to check on the regular patrons; or hanging out in your apartment playing foosball with your friends; or rocking out at the annual town festival. All of this stuff, along with an extended Live Action Roleplay sequence, are where the game really shines, and I can't help but find myself wondering whether a Life is Strange game really needs a central mystery (murder or otherwise) or even too much of a supernatural element. Before the Storm certainly downplayed the latter, with vague suggestions of Rachel Amber having some supernatural potency, and Chloe's intense and disturbing dreams, being the only intrusion of the otherworldly into a fairly grounded narrative. I find myself wondering whether True Colors would have been better if it had just been the story of Alex Chen's life in Haven Springs, Colorado, and what that was like after ten or more years in the foster care system.

That brings us to the details of the game proper, which I've avoided going in depth with in my ruminations to this point, namely that in the game you play as Alex Chen, orphan and supernatural empath, who is reunited with her brother Gabe after eight years of separation, in the paradisal town of Haven Springs, Colorado. Gabe has lived in the town for a few years while growing up and trying to find Alex; he spent years in juvenile detention after stealing a car in his teens, which caused them to be separated. On Alex's first day in town, however, Gabe is killed in a landslide caused by mining blasting while they're trying to rescue his girlfriend's son, Ethan, and Alex spends the remainder of the game trying to determine why the blasting happened even after Gabe had called in to stop the detonation.

The problem with all this is that it's very predictable. And a story doesn't have to surprise me to be good; of course not. But the fact is that yes, the mining corporation was negligent, because they were desperate to cover up another accident that happened twelve years prior before the inspectors arrive, an accident which involved your (and formerly Gabe's) boss/landlord, town hero Jed Lucan, who was blatantly obvious even from the first trailer of the game as being the main culprit. When I played the original Life is Strange, as predictable as it is in hindsight, I was completely blindsided by the revelation that the affable but allegedly somewhat unprofessional photography teacher Mark Jefferson was the true villain, to the extent that I recall audibly saying "Oh, shit," when he was revealed at the end of the penultimate episode as the culprit. With this in mind, it was all too obvious starting True Colors that Jed was in a similar position to Jefferson: the seemingly trustworthy, warm, welcoming figure who turns out to have a dark secret made all the more obvious by how personable and nice they are. And I kept saying, out loud, as I was playing, "There was a mining accident," "Jed is the real killer", "Jed's behind it", and of course I turned out to more or less be right.

The reason I spell all these spoilers out is not to rag on the game, because I still really enjoyed it. The problem is that I think we needed more of this "normal life" stuff and less of the mystery, because, and I hate to say it, it's not that interesting. Arguably, Alex needs closure over why Gabe was killed, but other than that it's not particularly intriguing. It's already clear that the mining company is negligent and desperate to present itself as a positive force in the community despite that. The game shows us, as others have pointed out, images of things like Alex spending time with her new friends Steph and Ryan (Steph having been a fan favourite side character in Before the Storm) and other goings-on around town, and like many others I found myself wishing that I'd had the opportunity to see those moments rather than focusing, as episode two does for instance, on the investigation into the misdeeds of Typhon. Maybe that would have turned the game, as some have argued, into a "dating sim", but who cares? Even though probably the main theme of the games tends to be about what motivates us to use power, and what is really meant by the idea of using power "for good", I think the appeal of Life is Strange has almost always been its atmosphere and representation of real life relationships to a much greater extent than the mysteries. That being said, I understand that in the past, when Life is Strange games were released episodically, there was much fan speculation about what was going to happen next in the plot, which drove enthusiasm for the series; I only came to it after the original, the sequel and the prequel were all fully released, and thus I was able to play them all sequentially without waiting. So that's never been something I've expected of the series, and in any event it seems like players are almost always disappointed when they spend months speculating and the plot resolution typically ends up being something a lot less intricate and grandiose than they were anticipating.

It feels like much of the filling-in about character backstories is fleshed out through unlockable diary entries linked to the collectible character memories, which, as I elaborate upon further below, I didn't even realise were in the game until near the end of my second playthrough. I knew the memories were recorded, but not that you could click on them to get diary entries about them. I wonder if this was intended to be in the game proper but they didn't have the time or money to do cutscenes or interactive sequences for them, or if they were always intended to simply sit in the background because the developers couldn't figure out how to fit them into the game. 

True Colors also sells itself, as so many modern adventure games in the interactive fiction mold do now, of having "choices"; it's always been the complaint that in Life is Strange the choices that you make don't really shape the plot much, they just sort of affect your relationships with the game's characters to a certain extent. And I think that's fine because back in the original Life is Strange I felt that your inability to really shape events beyond your relationships with the characters was kind of the point; Max could change time, but she couldn't change people, only exploit her abilities to manipulate them in a way about which she clearly feels guilty. But that's the thing; Life is Strange the first's mechanic was time travel, an element which none of the subsequent games have had. So there's no reason in subsequent games for player choice to be such a big deal. In the original the whole point was you could agitate over your choices depending on what you thought was the best outcome, second guess yourself and revert them, only for the game to show you that it often didn't really matter, or that often there was no "good" outcome, just one set of consequences or another, and that the only real power Max needed was the ability to accept the consequences of her decisions.

In True Colors, Alex's power is that she can see and experience the emotions of others, to the extent that if they're felt strongly enough she's effectively able to read their thoughts, and become overwhelmed by other people's feelings. Obviously, a bit like Max's ability to see what the consequences of her decisions will be and then go back, Alex's ability to clearly identify what others are feeling and why potentially gives her the power to manipulate people. And yet one of my most satisfying parts of the game was when I was offered the choice to either take away the overwhelming anger of Gabe's grieving girlfriend Charlotte or leave her to deal with her grief, and of course I chose the latter, because it seemed to me that is was neither Alex's responsibility nor her right to take Charlotte's feelings away from her. That was a choice that I felt made sense because it related to how Alex used her powers. It seemed to be saying that often the best way to use power is to not use it at all. On the other hand, taking Deputy Pike's fear away from him in the fourth chapter works out for the best; is it supposed to be that his fear is holding him back, while Charlotte's anger is a necessary part of her grief? I'm unsure. In any event, at many other times the "important" choices aren't related to this and seem like they'd fit more in the original time-travel-driven storytelling of the first Life is Strange, because they didn't tie into Alex's power. Life is Strange 2, by contrast, worked in having choices because it so substantially affected the relationship between Sean and Daniel. The choices in Before the Storm always felt the most pointless to me because we know ultimately that they won't avert anything that happens in the original game. But the idea of a game about "player choice" and its consequences still seems so tied to the original game's grounding in time travel that it seems to be presented as an important gameplay mechanic and narrative device in all subsequent games, including this one, simply because "that's what Life is Strange games have" and not because it tied into the first game's wider themes and techniques. And I can't hold Deck Nine, developers of True Colors and Before the Storm, solely guilty of this, because Dontnod did it too in Life is Strange 2, and they were the developers of the original game. The artifice is particularly obvious in this game which, unlike all of the three previous, was released in one go, with the effect that the chapter divisions, featuring a page comparing the player's choices to that of others as a percentage, feels arbitrary, and almost like the game was divided up into five chapters simply because "Life is Strange games are in five bits with a choice breakdown at the end of each" even though this game didn't have an episodic release schedule.

And given that True Colors is notionally about our experience of emotions (fear, sadness, anger, joy), it feels like the game could have spent less time worrying about consequences (something far more relevant to the time-travelling Max of the original Life is Strange than the emotion-reading Alex) and done a lot more with exploring how our emotions define us; why is it okay for us to take Pike's fear but not Charlotte's grief? To what extent does Alex potentially manipulate Ryan or Steph into developing feelings for her by reading their emotions and then knowing exactly what to say (something Max's doppelganger accuses Max of doing through time travel in the first game, incidentally)? The idea that Jed is so in denial about what he did during the mining accident that his emotions are buried beneath Alex's notice is interesting, but worth exploring to a much greater extent. What's the connection between emotion and thought? There's a lot more that could be done here, and given that the Life is Strange series has thus far not shown an interest in direct sequels, it's a shame that we presumably won't see Alex's story explored further.

Once again all of this just seems like I'm ragging on True Colors or that I didn't like it, which isn't the case; rather, I'm frustrated, because I feel like this is a game with so much potential that just doesn't get completely fulfilled. As I've said, visually, the game is very impressive, the voice acting is top notch and the characters are really enjoyable to watch. As someone who essentially likes Before the Storm despite its numerous flaws, I was pleased to see the return of fan-favourite character Steph from that game and to see her used in a more substantial way. The other main supporting character, Ryan, is well-acted too, although I didn't connect with him as much after the first episode. Sometimes the consequences for the game's mandatory plot elements feel refreshingly realistic, like when Alex steals corporate data in Chapter 3 and then, appropriately, gets arrested for it at the end of Chapter 4. And I was also pleased to see that the game, as other recent-ish narrative games like Night in the Woods did, has games-within-games, for that element of skill-based challenge which these no-lose story-driven adventure games of the modern type (i.e. without inventory puzzles) otherwise usually lack.

I think the best parts of the game are when you're wandering around Alex's apartment above the bar and walking through the town of Haven Springs proper, getting to know the various residents and helping them out. Another standout moment is in the third chapter in which you cheer up Ethan by going LARPing with him, a logical extension of the amusing tabletop roleplaying segments in Before the Storm. A similar enjoyable sequence is when Alex and Steph perform the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun", as overplayed as it is, at the Spring Festival, because this is the stuff that the appeal of these games is made of, just like iconic scenes from the first game such as Max reminiscing at Chloe's house. That's what makes Life is Strange memorable, and this game certainly has its share. If only there were more.

One thing I noticed about this game is that it's arguably less surreal than the original or Before the Storm; its dream sequences, for instance, are much more like Sean's dreams about his father in Life is Strange 2, as Alex recalls her childhood and speaks to Gabe as if he were still alive. They're much more conventional than Chloe's bizarre and disturbing nightmares about her late father in Before the Storm, or the Lynchian dream sequence in the final episode of the original Life is Strange. That being said, another appealing moment was in the final chapter of the game in which Alex dreams that she's back in her psychiatrist's office from the beginning of the game, only for it to be revealed that the psychiatrist is just a tape recorder sitting in an empty office chair. There's also the amusing sequence in which, while LARPing with Ethan and tapping into his emotions, Alex sees the world through the eyes of a child's imagination, and they really are fantasy heroes on a quest in a magical land and not just running around the park wearing silly hats. I could have done with more moments like this in which the artifice of the world, reflective of the extent to which the mining company has clearly tried very intentionally to turn the town into an idyllic refuge, is made clear. The exploration in the final chapter of Alex's childhood is quite harrowing, but I think, as others have suggested, it might have worked better had those moments been interspersed throughout the game. I think it's very easy to miss, for instance, that it's implied as early as the first chapter that Gabe originally came to Haven Springs looking for their father, and that it's not pure coincidence, as it seemed to me at the time, that the late John Chen met his end in the very mining accident for which Jed was responsible. In fact, this is outright stated early in the game, but only in Riley's online memorial post for Gabe, and in the diary entries connected to Alex's unlockable memories which I only realised even existed as readable content at the end of my second playthrough. Anyway, In particular, I think the use of these dream sequences is a bit anticlimactic because the one about Alex's mother's death is captured much more neatly in the optional dialogue about the photograph in the first chapter of the game, and that the stuff about Alex's life in the orphanage, the climax of the dream sequence, is all stuff we already know if we've bothered to read the game's flavour text, i.e. that Alex was moved into foster care multiple times but always ended up back in the group home. Incidentally, I don't know how the foster care system works in the USA, but is it really realistic that Alex is still living in the group home at the age of 21? Don't people become adults at 18 in the States? Wouldn't she have been moved on? Anyway, it feels to me like the only really essential part of the flashback sequence is the scene revealing that Alex and Gabe were actually abandoned by their father, and that the rest was a little overdone.

This discourse is becoming very long, so let's finally talk about endings. Life is Strange had two endings. Before the Storm really only had one with very minor differences depending on your final choice, but that was arguably appropriate given that it was a prequel. Life is Strange 2 had multiple endings depending on how the player had driven Sean's relationship with Daniel; I must admit that when I played it I got an ending I didn't expect (Daniel helped Sean escape to Mexico and then turned himself in to the authorities). In any event, I could see that True Colors was going to go the way of having a fairly unambiguously happy ending (although I kind of wondered if the game was going to pull the rug out from under me at the last minute, but it didn't). It all depends on whether you choose to stay in Haven Springs or leave, and if you chose to be with Steph, Ryan or neither. In my first playthrough, being the Before the Storm apologist that I am, I naturally chose to get close to Steph throughout the game and, given that I didn't think Alex would much fancy living in the town where both her father and brother had been killed, at the end she and Steph left for a life of adventure. Seemed sensible enough. The only shortcoming was that Ryan was left alone, but given that I didn't connect with him that much anyway I didn't see that as too great a loss. So the ending felt a little insignificant. In my second play-through, I chose to stay in Haven (still with Steph) and there wasn't much more to see than what Gabe's memory describes to you in the flash-forward you see before the choice is offered. Even though you can fail to convince the local community that Jed tried to kill you, you can't fail to cause Jed to confess, which seemed really odd to me, because this is something that does actually relate to how the game explores emotions, with Alex unpacking all of Jed's feelings about the accident. So at the end of the day, the conspiracy between Jed and Typhon is revealed and justice is more or less served. At least Steph sticks up for you no matter what. It kind of feels like the True Colors developers, having had such success with the fans with Steph in Before the Storm, didn't want you to ever see her in a bad light, but as I've said I don't think choices ever actually need to be that important in the game except where they relate to the game's central premise, so I thought that was fine.

But I'm left at the end of this thinking: what is it that Life is Strange games offer their fans and is that what they set out to achieve? Are they intended to be mystery dramas offering some kind of meditation on the consequences of our choices and how we manage and utilise anything about ourselves that might be extraordinary? Or are they slice-of-life emotional intimacy simulators that appeal because so many of us are so starved for, or unable to see, the depth and beauty that might exist in our real lives? And is the former what their developers want them to be, while the latter is what they've become? Is it really the fault of the game if it leaves us with a sense of longing because for a little while it was so good at allowing us to pretend that we were another person with a stranger (and more emotionally connected) life than our own? Surely in that regard it's a success.

Indeed, I suppose it's testament to my appreciation of True Colors that the first thing I did after finishing it was to play it again; you can easily get close to thirty hours of gameplay out of two complete run-throughs if you take your time, and given how much dialogue there is that can only be seen on one play-through or another this definitely pays off. That was more or less what I did with both the original Life is Strange and Before the Storm as well, although I've only played Life is Strange 2 through once; I found it too dark to want to repeat. The game almost certainly is too expensive for the amount of "content" in it, and the fact that the Steph DLC (unreleased at time of writing) requires an additional payment. But while I don't expect a Life is Strange game to offer the "40 hours of gameplay" that seems to have become de rigueur among a lot of AAA video game players, I do wonder if it's time for the franchise to step up into a more 25-ish hour base game experience with more of the slice-of-life stuff that clearly a very large part of its target market is in for. I don't know, really. A lot of story-based games aren't actually that long. Is True Colors really as short as people are saying, or does time just fly when you're getting to pretend that you have feelings?