Fandom: Life is Strange (video game)

anandrine recommended the game Life is Strange yesterday, and after making sure it wasn't majority first person camera, which I can't play because it triggers vertigo, I bought it, thinking it would be a fun little game to relax with before bed. And then the next thing I knew, it was near dawn. Whoops.

The description on Steam: Life Is Strange is a five part episodic game that sets out to revolutionise story based choice and consequence games.

And the blurb from the wiki: Welcome to the Life Is Strange Wiki, an encyclopedia maintained by fans of DONTNOD's episodic video game, Life Is Strange. Available on PS3, PS4, PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Life Is Strange aims to revolutionize choice-based games by allowing the player to manipulate time. The protagonist is Max, a photography senior who discovers she can manipulate time after rewinding it to save her old best friend, Chloe Price. As Max uses her new ability and gets premonitions of a storm coming to Arcadia Bay, she and Chloe try to find out what happened to Rachel Amber, who mysteriously disappeared.

This game is already the most fun I've had playing a game in YEARS, and I love gaming. Max is a ridiculous, adorable playable character, and her reunion with Chloe Price is the best. Max and Chloe are smart and sharp and funny, and I ship them so, so, so hard. SO HARD. Along with the missing Rachel Amber, who Chloe adores and Max mourns ever being like.

The game play is straightforward and fairly easy, though some of the walking + player-controlled camera movement is close enough to first person that I have to be careful not to do too much of it at one time. The visuals are beautiful, and most of the interactions with NPCs smooth and believable.

What really drives it home for me is the story, though, and the characters. Max and Chloe are the most adorable, all their talk about superheroes and sidekicks, all their flirting and fighting, trying to deal with the changes in their lives and the fact that Max left and didn't call for five years. They are complicated and flawed and wonderful.

Like I said, I ship them SO HARD, and I think this may be one of my Yuletide fandoms this year, because there are a ton of places where fic could be worked into the story, even though the final episode isn't available yet. (For example, there's a cut scene in a pool that had me pretty much shouting JUST KISS already.) It's so sweet, and so fun, and so beautiful.

Content: Obviously, there are plenty of story options I haven't found yet, but so far, the story contains: teen on teen bullying, adult on teen bullying, domestic violence, suicide, non-explicit rape and sexual assault, drugs, and a student trying to start a student-teacher relationship.