This game packs an emotional punch and easily carries on the legacy of Life is Strange’s heavy themes and tenuous emotional choices.
life is strange
27 posts
In last week’s podcast, we talked a bit about agency and feelings of control when watching a movie or TV show versus feeling control while playing a game. Opinions varied, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week. I find that when I watch a movie or TV […]
I’ve been writing a lot the past couple weeks about metanarrativity and postmodernism, about how such things manifest themselves in games like The Magic Circle, like Until Dawn, like Pony Island. And I hope you’ll bear with me while I indulge myself in expanding on some of these ideas a […]
This week, I came across an article by E. McNeill called “History and Games” in which McNeill makes connections between the subject of history and the subject of video games. Indeed, McNeill engages in such a discussion even though, as he says, many “people seem to view history as dry […]
Episode 115: Life is…Weird: On Choice and Consequences in Life is Strange (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). This episode we sit down and talk about DONTNOD’s episodic game, Life is Strange. All of it, filled with spoilers, and pulling no punches. Join us […]
(No direct spoilers here for episode five, but instead just general discussion of narrative structure and larger considerations of the game as a whole.) Since the release of the first episode, my experience with Life Is Strange has been a series of ups and downs, but as the story has come […]
Since we’ve been discussing Her Story again lately, I went back and replayed the beginning. The game initially seeds the player with four videos tagged with the keyword “murder,” and since the gameplay is built solely from searching keywords, I catalogued all the major options in these early videos, omitting articles and […]
There’s an article that I’ve seen making the rounds on Facebook called “Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian, and the War on ‘Unlikable Women.'” And I read it, not because I necessarily have any strong feelings (in any direction) about Ariana Grande or Kim Kardashian but because I am struck by the […]
Episode 109: Games, Identification, and Culture: A Conversation with Adrienne Shaw (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). Not a milestone episode numerically, but what a shift: we added contributor Bianca Batti to the podcast crew (finally!) and were joined by our dear friend Kishonna Gray and […]
Update: Several of our readers have reached out to us about the title of this post, and I wanted to make sure that their voices are heard and that we take the opportunity to begin a conversation about it by addressing their concerns. Here is one such email we received, […]
The fourth episode of Life is Strange, a critically acclaimed interactive drama series developed by Dontnod Entertainment, released this week. This second-to-last installment is something fans have been perhaps not-so-patiently waiting for, for some time. But despite the ten week long gap between the release of the third episode and […]
It’s no secret that Journey is one of my all time favorite games, having extensively written about its brilliant use of silence and its characterization of landscapes. Though it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I find the entire experience to be relaxing and fulfilling. Whether it’s the cool blues of […]
Episode 106: This Ashly Burch Interview Is Strange (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes or Stitcher). Or maybe it’s just awesome! Who knows, really? What we do know is this: we talked Life Is Strange, Adventure Time, voice acting, writing, mental illness, and we even got to […]
We’ve been talking a lot about Tauriq Moosa’s recent Twitter hiatus, because of the far-reaching potential. Personally, I’m unable to equate my experience with Moosa’s experience because I’m a white female on the Internet and not a person of color. I can’t possibly understand his experience with blanket negativity and outrage culture, […]
When I look at the list of games introduced at this year’s E3, my eyes just sort of glaze over. I don’t care for a lot of the popular AAA games. When I do find a game I love, I often become obsessed with it and play it for hours […]
(Some spoilers for the first three episodes of Life is Strange here, but painted in broad strokes.) Now that we’re halfway through Life Is Strange, with two episodes to go, the game is shaping up to be quite the experience. While some of the major plot events are so heavily […]