Paved With Good Intentions: A Series Review of ‘Life is Strange 2’
Life is Strange 2 is an awkwardly paced adventure game developed by Dontnod, a spiritual successor and sequel to the original Life is Strange, which fails to improve on nearly anything that made the first game special. Throughout the episodic release cycle of this game’s five episodes, I felt the excitement of my pre-order descend into cynicism as each episode became another disappointment. The final episode delivered some powerful scenes with compelling writing, but considering the drudgerous journey of the Diaz brothers in a broader context, Life is Strange 2 is mostly forgettable.
The problem with Life is Strange 2 is that it’s billed as a sequel to the original game. Life is Strange was so compelling because it was a game centered around choice with a central mechanic of time travel. Being able to rewind through your choices and explore dialogue trees with their consequences in real time enlivened the adventure game genre in the way that Daniel’s telekinetic powers never quite did in Life is Strange 2. Even if time travel is written off as a gimmick from the first game, the sequel never offers enough to properly replace it. If Life is Strange 2 released without the baggage of being constantly compared to the original, I think there’s a lot of potential here. As it stands, Life is Strange 2 does not live up to the legacy of its predecessor.
To its credit, the story of Life is Strange 2 has a unique premise within the mainstream gaming space. We are introduced to a family of Mexican heritage, where Sean and Daniel Diaz live with their father. Their mother left suddenly and mysteriously years ago, leaving the burden of raising these two boys to their father alone. Yet, almost as soon as we meet him, their father is shot dead by a police officer. The boys’ lives are thrown into turmoil as Daniel uses enraged supernatural powers to fight back, killing the officer, and forcing the brothers to run off into hiding to seek a new life.
The relationship between Sean and Daniel is at the center of the narrative, and the game frequently puts you in positions where your decision serves as an example for Daniel to follow. You choose whether to accept certain behaviors like swearing and taking revenge. The easy way out of a tough situation is often something that will one day backfire. Within each episode, however, these choices rarely carry the same gravity that choices in the original Life is Strange did. Instead, the game often wastes your time with superficial choices and inconsequential actions. The lack of time travel to experiment with the consequences of your choices also cheapens the feeling every time Life is Strange 2 presents one of these moral dilemmas.
Another missed opportunity is the decision to take the control of supernatural powers away from the playable character in Life is Strange 2. In the first game, the player had the prerogative to rewind time at any moment during gameplay, and could experiment with how the world reacted to your choices. In Life is Strange 2, however, the game gives the supernatural powers to Daniel, Sean’s younger brother who you cannot play, and only allows you to influence and choose how he uses telekinesis at specifically planned narrative moments. There are a few tiny scenes where the game teases at the possibility that Sean will have powers of his own, but the game never actually delivers on that possibility. Instead, you play the morality police vicariously through Daniel’s non-playable character. Part of what made the original Life is Strange special was the agency that the supernatural power gave the player, and that magic is almost entirely missing here in the sequel.
Life is Strange 2 carries heavy handed themes of racism in American politics throughout its story, but that theme is often lost in the background throughout the main story beats. In my experience, the political themes present in Life is Strange 2 – even when I agreed with them – felt like set dressing rather than vehicles for character and plot development. The game has a chance to meaningfully engage with the struggle of homeless youth who encounter exploitative and violently racist treatment. When the game does deliver, like when Sean is pulled from his car and beaten senseless in “Faith,” the game stirred my anger and indignation, building a feeling of empathy for his character. Regrettably, the game instead tells about these themes more often than it shows them. Amidst these missed opportunities, it’s easy to ignore the social and political themes until the climactic moments of the story.
Each episode becomes a roulette wheel of new characters that are introduced and never seen again. It’s difficult to know who to care about as the story unfolds. The quality of the writing suffers as a result of having no stable characters for Sean and Daniel to interact with, and the moral gravity of your available choices suffers from the knowledge that you will probably be free of any current characters by the next episode. Most of the meaningful character development results from moments where the brothers encounter danger throughout the story, where you have a moment to direct the kind of characters that you want Sean and Daniel to become.
A massive loss of depth from the first Life is Strange is the absence of stable and memorable characters like David, Joyce, Victoria, Nathan, and so forth – characters whose presence sustained themselves throughout the entire series. The premise of Life is Strange 2 obviously doesn’t allow for this level of familiarity and connection, as the Diaz brothers run from city to city in their quest towards Mexico. But I think of Brody from the first episode, a journalist who ends up saving the Diaz brothers early on, and for some reason never shows back up again. Or when episode two introduces the brothers’ grandparents, who are loving but stern and austerely religious, but cover for the boys as they escape the police. I wonder why we never see them make contact again. Even Cassidy, one of the love interests that the game introduces, becomes all but an afterthought found in letters and a post-game photograph if you attain one of the game’s less common endings. So much of this game is lost in a cycle of characters that never come back around to mean anything significant to the plot of the story. Each episode ultimately drags the main plot points behind itself like a can tied to the back of a car.
Though the story promises that you will make choices that drastically affect the outcome of the story, I never felt like choices mattered until the final episode. There are indeed an impressive variety of endings, all of which are distinct in nature. But as with so many adventure games, most intermittent choices lead back to a scripted main path. I contrast this experience with the original Life is Strange, which has an unforgettable moment in its second episode where your actions can be the difference between a character committing suicide or choosing to survive. The urgency that moment created in me early on in the series has no equivalent in Life is Strange 2, even though it clearly attempts to recreate the feeling in the player with Chris’ fate in “Rules.” Even though each post-episode breaks down your choices in comparison to other players, I looked at the menu of what I could have done and rarely felt inclined to go back and experience the alternative path.
Music is one of the aspects that solidified the original Life is Strange as one of my favorites of all time, and that is somewhat present here. Life is Strange 2 steers away from licensed music almost entirely, which is disappointing but reasonable considering fussy copyright concerns with content creators. (I have fallen victim to muted VODs and copyright claimed videos more than once with the series.) Even in the absence of the “playlist” feeling that Life is Strange provided, Life is Strange 2’s instrumental music is always excellent. Every time I have written an article about Life is Strange 2, I have turned on the soundtrack. Doing so helps me return to the headspace that I find within the game, and it does this in a way that many soundtracks do not.
Moments where the game allows Sean to go off on his own are some of the highlights of my playthrough. When Sean sat outside, smoking a cigarette at night in “Rules,” and the ambient music allowed the scene to breathe, I felt that I was understanding Sean’s burden for the first time. In “Wastelands,” where Sean and Daniel’s relationship splits apart a bit and he begins to experiment with parts of his identity, I felt like I was playing a complex and original character. Every time the game gets out of its own way by setting up these pensive and reflective scenes, especially in between major story beats, the game opens up. But these moments don’t come often enough to alleviate the pacing of the overarching game.
The story in Life is Strange 2 has a heart, but it rarely ever touched mine. When it did, I was able to relax into a mostly believable headspace where I was protecting my younger brother and navigating a complex and challenging world. Throughout the duration of my experience, however, most of the Diaz brothers’ story felt like a badly paced waste of time. The ending was satisfying but the journey to get there was not.
Life is Strange 2 means well as it advocates for its two main characters, but every episode strikes out as a missed opportunity. To its credit, I have never seen themes of child homelessness and racism towards Mexicans explored in a game before, but those themes delivered too infrequently for me to feel like I’ve learned anything empathically valuable about that human experience. Instead, the game often navel gazes with its bland gameplay loop, occasionally patting itself on the back for engaging with societal problems – all while relegating those topics to climactic cutscenes instead of integrating them within its overall narrative.
Good intentions are not enough to carry an entire game. No matter how self-aggrandizing Life is Strange 2 appears at times, it is at best an average experience.
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