# cynically cloning gone home in life is strange > pg-rated lesbians in a bottom-tier netflix miniseries-worthy story about the pacific northwest by people who've never been to the pacific northwest > ~ liz ryerson on life is strange consider how "life is strange" could appear as a parody of 'an indie garme' without an original - and 'lite' puzzles life is strange by square enix attempts to heavily-handedly construct its bizarre (corporate) notion of 'strange' shamelessly ripping off slightly better experiments like gone home in an attempt to display that authentic(tm) 'edgy' hand-made corporate 'aaa-indie' vibe firstly the title brings to mind "life is beautiful" - specifically zizek's thoughts on such movies // video here *puts headphones on - must be an angsty independently minded loner harbouring a dark(r) secret / sensitive soul* who is the mis-perceived demographic for life is strange: moody hormonal adolescents who overrated donnie darko? players who forced themselves to find depth and hard-won suburban wisdom in juno? it's like your dad spent an hour lurking on tumblr before deciding to write a high school drama as though designed-by-committee for maximum fun ticking off all the necessary boxes it thinks signifies 'cool' - predict a ludonautical frenzy over this one parsing teh garme's description taken from the official website > life is strange is an episodic narrative driven adventure garme (..) **+** episodic: the ability to profit more by splitting up and padding out what does 'narrative driven' mean? the narrative being generated here by square enix seems to be that "this is a honest heartfelt and emo_tional garming experience deliberately targeted at er.. book lovers people who enjoy windy autumn walks and mom's home backed (faintly lynchian) apple pie > which tells the compelling story of max; a senior photography student who suddenly discovers they is able to rewind time > (..) and every girl goes through a photography phase like horses you know dumb pictures of your feet.. > ~ charlotte from lost in translation > they uses ir power to save the life of chloe ir childhood friend whom they has not seen in five years **+** does not answer the (sometimes) useful 'who are these people and why should we care' question. "goly gee guess we'll have to play to find out!" (why not question ir motivations and make for a more compelling dramatic conceit instead?) > for chloe it's been a turbulent time and ey's been drifting off course since ir father's tragic death **+** convenient and cliched that is > the reunion will turn ir lives upside down (..) **+** ouch. didn't see that coming. hopefully ir faith in amerika will cure that > as increasingly strange events plague the small town of arcadia bay (..) alan wake was here. as for 'arcadia bay' - as if > both teenagers find themselves involved in a grim investigation into the mysterious disappearance of a high school student nancy drew was also here - arriving direct from the uncanny valley ****update patch**: time for another gimmick** over at errant signal christopher franklin attempts a more rounded and nuanced view of teh garme // video here franklin is also wrong. if one asks "why does this garme exist?" or more specifically "what does its central mechanic say it tells us about our own lives" the imagined answer might be a lot more interesting than the reasons the developers would like players to imagine (?? -robert what) teh garme's central idea of being able able to directly manipulate time feels entirely arbitrary. life is strange does not 'explore the possibility space of interaction' but merely seems to exploit the whole embarrassingly useless / cheesy sci-fi notion of time manipulation to explore its own dominance of this particular hip sector of the so-called art garmes market that is it could have bypassed the cheap rewind time gimmick entirely and instead simply focused on 'character' development simply using the love of amateur photography as a troubled metaphor for (literally) framing time. as it is the developer's decidedly non committal choices though not without minimally meaningful or immediate consequence feel so generally vapid as to question the need for any interaction on the player's part that is life is strange is so 'hella' offensively non-offensive so deliberately and casually vague and warm pastel toned - "hand painted murals faded by years in the sun" (gimmie a break) - it could easily pass for an accidental parody of itself by default // images here // republic of bob