With the announcement that Life Is Strange is getting a sequel (what, why), commentators I respect (though mostly just Angus) have brought the strangely positive critical echo of now to bear on the original impressions of then. Specifically, the idea that now, we seem to think better of LiS than we did at the time, and that maybe that’s for a good reason.
One thing I’ve found unifying the commentary and reaction to Life Is Strange is ‘I really liked it, but it had problems,’ a meme that most writers seemed to arrive at independently when they weren’t rendering other forms of Hot Take upon the work or using lenses of queer theory to broaden what the game Wasn’t Really Actually Saying Because The Authors Are Dead But Also The Living People In Question Are Sort Of Ninnies.
Anyway, with this in mind I realised if I wanted to show people what I thought of Life Is Strange I’d need to link them to four articles, which was inefficient when I could link them to one article, now, here, and have the links to those articles within, just like with my Hotline Miami series. And so:
Initial Review
Deeper Look 1: Themes Are Hard
Deeper Look 2: Endings Are Hard
Deeper Look 3: Meaning Is Hard
If you’re interested in seeing more of this kind of writing, driven more by a desire to help you connect to work you like from a critical perspective, and to examine things for their own sake than by an urge to sell units, I don’t know, maybe tell me sometime if you liked it, or how.