With a release date of 2015, Life Is Strange is another one of those games that’s kind of pushing it in terms of the “retro” designation, although if you’ve ever seen the game in action, graphics aren’t the strong suit and Life Is Strange certainly looks like it could come from an earlier era. Of course, the art style isn’t really the point. The story is. The five-episode adventure game follows the teenage Max as she returns to Arcadia Bay, finding evidence of disturbing crime all around her. In her Boss Fight book, Kaitlin Tremblay also has a novel take on the nostalgia aesthetic of retro gaming, likening Max and other characters to her own experiences as a teenage girl. Albeit a cooler one than the typical author of a Boss Fight book, as she would go to parties and drink booze.
I’m a little reluctant to discuss the plot of Life Is Strange in too much detail here because even relative to other Boss Fight books, Tremblay’s tome really hinges on the reader having some experience with the game. This is mainly because Life Is Strange’s gameplay revolves entirely around choices. As Max, the player has to decide the best choice of action to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s not often obvious which choice is the right one and, as Tremblay notes, kind of the point of the game is that, as in life, there really isn’t such a thing as a “right” choice. There are always unintended consequences. And even the game’s time travel mechanic allowing you to pick different choices doesn’t help as much as you’d think.
Tremblay’s analysis delves a lot into the narrative purpose of choice in games, noting that it’s not something you can easily graft onto any random story. Her argument that Life Is Strange represents a uniquely effective utilization of choice mechanics is backed up, not just by her descriptions of the choices, but even the game’s own Steam statistics. You can find out how many players did what in their own playthroughs, and the numbers are likely to be closer to fifty percent than you’d think. This even applies to the notorious “Bae or Bay” choice that closes out the game, which itself is an excellent demonstration of other narrative arguments that Tremblay makes in regard to whether we care about characters or settings in a game.
For all this, Tremblay does have a foot firmly planted in the real world. The opening where Tremblay discusses her party girl lifestyle isn’t bragging, it’s to set up an anecdote about that time some creepy guy she didn’t know kept calling her at home, and it took a disturbingly long time to get him to stop. Assuming anyone even did get him to stop, as opposed to his just stopping on his own. The police were useless. To paraphrase another classic game, the lesson Tremblay took from this was to only trust her friends, the police will never help her.
And that’s why she (and plenty of other gamers) identified so strongly with Life Is Strange. Fundamentally, this is a game about how awkward and weird it can be to be a teenage girl. Which makes it kind of funny that apparently Life Is Strange was made by a bunch of French white guys. There’s a strong social justice bend throughout the book, as might be expected, although it feels surprisingly archaic given that the book came out earlier this year. A big reason for this is just that most Life Is Strange discourse happened several years ago, and this discourse is always changing. Although at the same time, some of Tremblay’s sources can be a bit arcane. I’m not even sure how she found this video by Shareef Jackson, which only has a few hundred views.
But all of the material Tremblay cites is interesting and relevant. Life Is Strange is a game that allowed her to understand herself better, both on a personal level and in terms of her own work as a narrative designer. But just on a broader philosophical level, this book has quite a bit to say about how the choices we make in games are, or should be, more about us than about the games themselves.
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