"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.

The Endings of 'SKYHILL'

Lately I've been hooked on SKYHILL, the point and click survival indie game from Mandragora and published by Daedalic Entertainment. It's a simple but atmospheric game in which you play as a lone man, possibly named "Perry Jason", who is trying, apparently, to escape from the aftermath of a biological weapon attack which has transformed humanity into monsters. The twist is that you start the game in the VIP suite on the one hundredth floor of a hotel, and must fight your way down. As such, you reactivate lifts and, when injured or needing to improve your equipment, you must retreat upwards, returning to your place of sanctuary on the top floor. It plays with typical imagery of progress, in which upward motion is associated with achievement, success and escape. Here it's the opposite; you want to go down, and going up is going backward.

The gameplay is fairly simple. Everything bar a couple of "puzzles" is done with the mouse. You click on rooms that you want the character to walk into (one on either side of the central stairwell in two dimensions), fight monsters in turn-based battles by clicking on them, either generally or by selecting weak spots which have a reduced chance to hit, collect food, health items and gear, and craft with the material you collect. You can use this material to upgrade your VIP suite in various ways, primarily to cook better food in which the combined value is greater than the sum of the parts, and to build superior weapons. These range from the notionally conventional, like a blade strapped to a wooden mop to form an improvised spear, to the outright outlandish, like circular-saw-bladed axes, Japanese naginata and, at the top of the pile, an electric "chainsword" presumably influenced by Warhammer 40,000.

I highly prize simplicity in games, and SKYHILL engrossed me. I've played it for 16 hours - over ten times as long as I've played Dark Souls, which I bought recently out of an itching for RPG fantasy but struggled to find interesting. There's something about simple games that I find appealing, especially when they're laden with atmosphere. In this case SKYHILL seems to owe a fair bit to 2012's Lone Survivor as they both feature apartment-based 2D post-apocalyptic gameplay, although SKYHILL is a good deal more simple and has less immediate narrative.

It's the narrative I wanted to talk about primarily, its ambiguity being another connection to Lone Survivor, which featured multiple endings and which generally suggested that the post-apocalyptic scenario was a hallucination, dream or delusion. In SKYHILL, apart from an opening comic-book-style cinematic which shows the player character checking into his hotel and being protected by a "biological defence system" when the city is attacked, the narrative is presented through a series of collectibles and interactive experiences: a series of journal entries, a set of voice recordings, some mysterious electronic and written messages, and a torn photograph. The confusing thing is, these elements don't all correlate. 

The journal entries describe the state of the world in the near future, which seems to suggest both a plague and a severe nuclear weapons moratorium after Middle Eastern terrorists gain access to nuclear weapons. These two events are seemingly followed by the development instead of vicious biological weapons, and a failing political relationship between the West and an Asian super-state named the "Eastern Confederation". On the verge of losing a war against the United Nations, this Confederation has apparently launched last-ditch biological attacks against the West. This apparently explains the situation. It doesn't explain, however, any of the other components.

The recordings are presumably the musings of the player character, and feature his melancholy thoughts about living in the post-apocalyptic world, as well as increasing thoughts that his life is a dream, and confusion about his identity; he describes himself as an inhabitant of the post-apocalyptic world scavenging in the hotel, but he's come from outside after the disaster. He's very clearly not having the same experience as the player character in gameplay. References to a "fever" suggest that he is a deluded and possibly infected inhabitant of the ruined world who is simply dreaming that he lives in the VIP suite at the top of the hotel, and is actually following hallucinatory "whisperings" attributed to a dead relative, "Nikki", beckoning him upstairs. This person was killed in an explosion which toppled a billboard, leaving the player character as the only survivor. It's unclear as to whether this relates to the explosion presented in the opening cutscene. In this case the truth is the reverse of what the player experiences.

The interactive components, by contrast, including graffiti behind a hanged man and a computer message discerned by using a password taken from a website which can only be accessed using a web browser outside the game, a kind of modern equivalent of old games that asked players to use the phone, state that the world is unreal, and that the player character is in fact part of a virtual reality experiment testing the effects of a mutagenic virus and the possibilities of human survival through a computer simulation.

The photographs, finally, assemble a news article and statement describing the existence of a vicious serial killer dubbed 'The Mechanic' who uses improvised weaponry and who apparently believes that the world is inhabited by monsters who have infiltrated human society. They don't exactly fit together. Each one leads towards a different ending. Thus there are essentially four storylines:

1. The storyline on the surface: a man is trapped on the top floor of a one-hundred-storey hotel after "the end of the world" and is trying to fight his way out.

2. The "recording" storyline: the man is actually an inhabitant of the ruined world suffering from delusions which lead him to believe that he's in the first scenario; in actual fact he "lives" in the lobby and is climbing to the top of the hotel following a hallucinatory voice beckoning him upwards.

3. The "computer" storyline: the man is actually plugged into a virtual reality machine, being used as a human guinea pig to simulate and test human behaviour after a society has been destroyed by a mutagenic virus. Nothing in the game is real.

4. The "photograph" storyline: the man is actually a hallucinating lunatic termed 'The Mechanic' who sees the innocent people around him as dangerous monsters and is murdering them; he's not really escaping from the hotel but rather rampaging down from the VIP room slaying the other inhabitants; the premise is essentially an elaborate, violent fantasy.

SKYHILL has three endings, and I'll describe them in the order they appear in the game's cutscene menu.

ENDING 1:

Named the  "Secret Ending" in the game's achievements, in this one a point-of-view character wakes up in some kind of scientific facility being observed by two people. One of them is pleased with the "data" they have collected and tells the other to "dispose" of the person from whose point of view the player experiences the scene. That's it. It follows on from the "computer" storyline.

ENDING 2:

This is the default ending, and it follows from the "recording" storyline, but is achieved regardless. The player character bursts out not from the front doors of the hotel on the ground, but rather the door on the roof of the hotel, high above the city, calling out for "Nikki" and finding out that she is not there. He climbs onto the edge of the roof and looks down, presumably preparing to jump, a reference to one of the recordings in which he considers whether his life is a dream and muses that death supposedly ends dreams.

ENDING 3:

Dubbed the "Alternate Ending" in the achievements, in this one the player character wearily emerges from the hotel's lobby, a bloody axe in hand and a dead mutant behind him, only to discover a brightly-lit, functioning city, and the hotel surrounded by armed police telling him to put down his weapon. As he warns them of further monsters, they shoot him, and he dies in confusion, unaware of his hallucination, the final shot showing that the dead "mutant" behind him is in fact the murdered body of the hotel's receptionist.

Thus the odd thing about SKYHILL is that it has three different storylines, none of which wholly relate to the others, and the only one that apparently isn't true is what I've termed the "storyline on the surface" above. The only thing that the player knows for sure is that what they are observing is, in one way or another, not the truth, at least not wholly. The mutants might not be real, or the progression of the game might not be real, or the entire thing may not be real.

On the one hand it's an interesting narrative exercise if nothing else. To what extent do we trust what we are presented with in a text? In what way can a video game have an "unreliable narrator"? This also leads to the question of whether one of the multiple narratives is "more true" than the others. The default ending resolves one of the narrative strands to the same extent as the others, but requires none of the luck required for the "alternate ending" (as the photograph fragments do not necessarily appear on a particular playthrough, at least not in accessible places) and does not require the arguable puzzle-solving ability of the "secret ending", which relies on the player, unless like I did they discover it through the internet, realising that the mysterious password file on one of the interactive computers in the game is the address of a real website which can provide them with the password used at the end of the game to access the "secret ending". Does this mean that Ending 2 is the "least true"? Ending 3 relies on luck, while Ending 1 uses both luck (the computer with the password file does not always appear) and puzzle-solving ability. Does that make Ending 1 the "most true" ending as it arguably involves the most challenge? In the end, however, the character is deluded any way you slice it, and perhaps the point of SKYHILL ultimately is to question the idea of "multiple endings" and whether they really mean anything.

Multiple endings are typically presented as a "reward" for conscientious players. They typically give different levels of closure, with the most difficult to attain being the most satisfying, as in Lone Survivor. SKYHILL reverses this situation by turning it on its end: none of the endings offer any real closure. If Ending 1 is true, what's the meaning of all the material about 'The Mechanic'? Was that part of the simulation? If Ending 3 is true, what is the meaning of all the information about the war, or the computer in the lobby? If Ending 2 is true, who was "Nikki" and why was the player character so confused about what he was doing? You might be able to fold some of it together; Ending 1 lists the test subject as an unknown agent who might conceivably be 'The Mechanic', but it's hardly clear.

In this way SKYHILL also interrogates typical gameplay experiences. Ending 1 presents the game as a data-collecting exercise which gives no benefit to the player whatsoever, a possible commentary on game experiences in general. Ending 2 questions the reality of what a player is presented with in-game, arguing that graphical representations are nothing more than that - up might really be down and a penthouse might really be a lobby, and we're none the wiser. Ending 3 to an extent goes down a familiar route of criticising the routine violence of video games, presenting it as deranged, but it also mocks the current obsession with "crafting" in the indie game survival scene, portraying the questionable combinations used to produce new items in such games as the imaginings of a deluded mind.

On the other hand, SKYHILL might be seen as a cop-out, a game that foists upon its players three vague storylines, fed in an arbitrary fashion, to avoid composing a single robust narrative. The "simulation" ending in particular is hardly original, and there are certainly precedents for the "Mechanic" ending as well. As a result, ultimately, my favourite was actually the default ending: the idea that all this progress has been no progress at all, that the inversion of typical goals was itself being inverted, and that there is nothing, really, to discover. Perhaps that's the point, and the "harder to attain" endings are formulaic deliberately to subvert our expectations. In that case, almost as an exercise in futility, SKYHILL succeeds.

All that remains is to consider this archetype of the "man alone", alienated in a world in which there is no meaning, and how the game's various narratives engage with this. I'd argue that the game essentially presents them as interchangeable and focused on a single concept: our utterly limited comprehension of what constitutes reality, and how modernity and its artificiality has brought this, so long avoided, to our notice.