Life is Slow

User Rating: 6 | Life is Strange PC

I really enjoy the "walking simulator" type games, so I figured this was right up my alley. While I finished the game and never felt like I wanted to quit, I was never really enjoying this game all that much.

The story is full of odd plot holes, especially the ending, which genuinely makes no sense no matter what choice you pick at the end. I felt like the game was rising to a crescendo where all my questions would be answered, but instead I was left feeling like the game had no answers and made nonsensical conclusions to end the game. I also really disliked all of the quests that required me to "pick up 5 bottles" or near the end where you are essentially playing a stealth game, which this game was NOT designed for and it doesn't work at all.

The saving grace, and the reason I gave it a 6, was because the characters were interesting. I liked the photography theme, and I enjoyed getting to know a lot of the characters throughout, who were mostly interesting and thoughtful, despite being general stereotypes of high school kids. I also enjoyed the ability to take pictures of certain things that happened throughout the game and use that in the story. I thought it was cool that you could go back and change your choices, and that would genuinely impact the outcome of the game or the storyline.

However, everything in this game is S-L-O-W. You can't skip dialogue for no apparent reason. You walk slow and can barely run. The talking it slow, the repeated scenes are slow, and even rewinding time to change your actions is slow. It's frustrating to have to change time and listen to dialogue over and over again and it just feels never-ending. I did not like the controls or the sidequests at all, despite the interesting storyline. I also don't like some of the dialogue options, where you're just supposed to know certain things without the game every explaining to you how you would know that or why that makes sense. For example, you confront a guy with his dog in front of a trailer, and you're offered several options to try and appease him. You've stolen lots of things from his trailer without him knowing, so you would think mentioning one of them would cause him to become upset. Instead, you're supposed to pick one of the random 3 things you found in his trailer when you broke in to confront him; any other option ends in tragedy. There's no specific puzzle reason why this option is the only one; it makes no sense to me and it frustrates me when games do crap like this.

At the end of the day, I finished the game, but I wouldn't play it again or recommend it to anyone who doesn't absolutely love this type of game. I feel like this game is the definition of overrated considering other games like Edith Finch were leaps and bounds better than this.

6/10