The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (3DS)

Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series is one of its longest lasting, most beloved & successful franchises and for a good reason. They have offered a lot of memorable adventures and often been on the forefront of imaginative adventure games pushing the envelope. The series isn't without its few missteps, but there's a reason why so few games have risen up to par or even close to the quality & success of the Zelda franchise. My favorite Zelda has always been A Link to the Past and I was very excited when Nintendo announced this sequel, although I only got the chance to play the game now, in 2015, almost 1,5 years after its release. Fortunately, the wait has mostly been worth it.

Not the same but the same
A Link Between Worlds takes place in the same Hyrule as A Link to the Past, only six generations has gone by. Hence, the Link we play as now isn't the same as the Link in ALTTP. Much like A Link to the Past, this game features a dual-world with one being the sunny Hyrule and the other a darker, more corrupt alternative, which is called Lorule this time, with alternative versions of people like Zelda (called Hilda) living in the kingdom. While Lorule isn't technically the same thing as the Dark World in A Link to the Past, it looks and feels very much the same, though with similar kind of differences to the Dark World of ALTTP as ALBW's Hyrule in comparison to ALTTP's Hyrule.

The events of ALTTP are a thing of legend in ALBW (pun intended).

The story itself starts of in a somewhat similar manner as well, though the early moments aren't quite as dark as A Link to the Past's. You are an apprentice of the blacksmith and are late for work. You get to work and after being chastised by your master, you get a job to deliver a newly forged sword to a captain of Hyrule castle who forgot to take it with him. This leads you to run around for a while until you are directed to the same sanctuary that was a part of ALTTP's beginning.

Same home sweet home.

 In the sanctuary, a new villain Yuga appears and transforms one of the new sages, Seres, into a painting. You try to fight against him, but are unable to do anything. After a few other events, Hyrule Castle is under dark magic and no one can enter, which sends Link to find the same three pendants that he had to find in ALTTP so that he could go retrieve the Master Sword which can then be used to dispell the magic surrounding Hyrule Castle. Of course Link doesn't win Yuga even as he does this and while Link has been running around to find the pendants & Master Sword, Yuga has painting-fied the rest of the sages. They move to Lorule where Yuga uses the painting-sages' powers to unleash a kind of Yuga-Ganon fusion onto the world. Hilda saves Link but in the process the Sage paintings are scattered all around the kingdom. Much like the Dark World, Lorule has seven dungeons/castles Link has to go through to save the sages.

The world is a bit TOO similar to A Link to the Past's, for being a sequel.

The biggest difference between ALTTP and ALBW is that ALBW is less restrictive in how to tackle the game. You can actually rent all of the items (except one) from the start, so apart from big boulders and a couple of other kinds of obstacles, there's really not much that stands in your way of going through the dungeons in any order you want. I'm not sure if it's more of a mental thing, but I liked ALTTP's approach more. It felt like every new item & skill gotten and every dungeon beaten took me closer to the climax of the story, with Link gaining more experience & preparing to take on Ganondorf with all of his new equipment. In ALBW I was kind of just doing the dungeons in whatever order and got the more powerful items so early on that I never felt any kind of progression, never feeling that kind of build-up to the finale because neither the gamepley nor narrative was pushing me into it like it did in ALTTP. I was just suddenly standing in front of Lorule Castle, ready to take on the final dungeon & battle. Other than having more hearts and a better tunic & sword, I didn't feel all that different from the Link that I had been when I first entered Lorule.

I've got the power!

Wall-merger all the way
The big gimmick of ALBW is that Link can merge himself into a wall as a kind of painting and move around on walls' surfaces (though only left & right). It's used to get over & around gaps, move through tight spaces, evading enemies and popping out of the walls to push stuff that's laying against the wall. It is used a lot during the game, perhaps a bit too much, as it feels most of the items aren't used much at all while it's rare that more than one minute goes between wall-merging. The good thing is that it's not a lengthy process. You pop-in and pop-out of the wall very quickly so it doesn't become too tedious to use it and it just becomes one form of traversal. Even then, the problem really is that the rest of the tools take a backseat.

Be prepared to see a lot of this.

Even in dungeons that supposedly focus on certain item's usage, the wall-merging is used for a lot of puzzles that overshadow the items. This is a bit disappointing as the use of the items almost never goes beyond anything that was already done in ALTTP. As a sequel to ALTTP, I'd have hoped that they'd come up with new, inventive ways of taking advantage of old items. And while there are a few times when some old stuff is used in ways that I don't remember them being used in ALTTP, those instances are far too rare. The problem with this is that there really isn't all that much they do that uses the wall-travelling in inventive ways, so it ends up making the puzzles throughout the game feel a bit same-y. Most of the time, it's mostly just about noticing that you can use the wall-travel in certain situations instead of figuring out how to use it to your advantage.

Rent-a-thon.

Another thing that ended up bothering me is the uneven difficulty level, especially when it comes to the combat. The beginning of the game felt exciting. Enemies could kill you quite easily if you weren't careful. I had rented almost all of the items and because I actually felt vulnerable, there was the kind of tension that I could lose everything if I died that the often-too-easy Zelda series rarely has. But this was quickly done away by the abundance of hearts and the new tunics that halve damage, so the game turns ridiculously easy quite abrubtly quite soon after arriving to Lorule. Only the final boss offered some challenge after the first few hours and even that only because I didn't actually find the second tunic. The game does offer a more difficult Hero Mode after beating the story once, but I don't feel like playing through the game again this soon, so its worth will have to wait for another time. If only it had been available from the start.

Perhaps the most surprising minigame I've experienced in a Zelda game. And I hate it.

 Perhaps the biggest complaint I have of ALBW is not about its quality per se, but more about its nature as not-quite-a-full-fledged-sequel to ALTTP. It feels more like an alternate take on A Link to the Past instead of an innovative continuation to its formula like what Majora's Mask was to Ocarina of Time. The world is different but it's almost the same. The dungeon layouts are different, yet the dungeons mostly function in the same way, having many of the same gimmicks yet oftentimes they aren't even as challenging as ALTTP's dungeons. This feels almost more like a more extensive Ocarina of Time's Master Quest like rework of the original ALTTP with a slightly altered storyline than a completely new Zelda game. It perhaps plays a bit too much on nostalgia and is too afraid to make bigger changes to the formula. Fortunately, even if the game perhaps feels a bit too much like a retread of A Link to the Past instead of an innovative game of its own, it's still a high quality game.

Another nitpick I have is the rewards this game gives you. Way too much of it was rupees and some of the rewards were shockingly unrewarding. I threw what felt like thousands upon thousands of rupees into a fairy spring and what did it give me as a reward? The FIFTH bottle, as if the four I had already weren't enough. What did feel rewarding were the upgrades to my items rewarded for finding all the Maiamai squids. The upgraded items felt suitably powerful. But otherwise, most everything else was Rupees, with a few heart pieces sprinkled here & there.

Long time no see, d00d.

One neat feature is that A Link Between Worlds makes use of the StreetPass feature of 3DS. You can open up your 3DS to download challengers from other ALBW owners in the form of Shadow Links. They are other people's Links as they were at the time of the StreetPass pass-by, only controlled by AI that tries to emulate how the owner of the Shadow Link would play, with the equipment & hearts that the player's Link had. Unfortunately I only confronted one other person with ALBW, so my experiences with this are not that extensive. It seemed like something that could be fun if you live in an area with more 3DS owners, but my particular opponent was so weak that it wasn't much of a fight.


Well excuse me my smooth moves, princess
If there's something that I can't find any kind of fault in, it's the audiovisual side of A Link Between Worlds. The 3D effect is extremely well done (especially nice on New Nintendo 3DS' screen), the graphics are teeming with all kinds of nice details & personality that very few developers can do like Nintendo, it all runs so smoothly at 60fps no matter if you play with the 3D mode on or off and they have shifted the ALTTP 2d style into 3d pretty much perfectly. Although the graphics are a bit simple, it's still a very nice looking game and a joy to see in such smooth motion.

The music is an unbelievably great mix of completely new compositions and old tunes made anew with genius level orchestral arrangements that not only do good with the old melodies but also add new layers & extensions of greatness into them. The old melodies are recognizable yet fresh enough that it doesn't feel too safe. Ryo Nagamatsu has done an amazing job in arranging & upgrading Koji Kondo's old soundtrack to new orchestrated heights as well as offering worthwhile new music that will likely have earned its place among the best of the Legend of Zelda franchise's rich history of beautiful music once all things are said & done.

Meet Hilda. She's like Zelda, but with a totally innocent black/blue-ish hair.

Verdict: GREAT. After the extremely disappointing handheld adventures in Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, which I personally consider thoroughly mediocre or even below mediocre games, A Link Between Worlds is a return to form for handheld Zeldas. The openness of the game's structure does mean some of the sense of progression is lost and I do have a lot of other complaints about the game's nature as a kind of half-remake, half-sequel, but in the end I can't say I didn't enjoy the game. Despite all my nitpicks with it, it did sink its hooks on me and it didn't take more than a few evenings to play through the game. I guess my biggest problem with ALBW, in retrospect, ends up being the fact that it either does things a tiny bit worse than ALTTP or doesn't do them better/different enough, not that anything it does sucks complete & utter ass.

It's a quality game, but feels like a (re-imagining of a) game that I already played when I was around 7 or 8 years old. Not a bad thing per se, but not quite the sequel I was hoping for. I guess it ended up harming the experience a bit when Miyamoto & Co couldn't decide whether to just remake A Link to the Past or if they should make a proper sequel, so they kind of did something in between. Maybe my expectations were a bit too high, but as a sequel (especially as a sequel to a Zelda game) this is a bit disappointing in how overly safe it seems. While it's nice to see old environments again, at some point you do kind of go "so what's so different about this?" As a game it's still a great one far above most other action adventure games that are usually just pale imitations of Legend of Zelda games.







p.s. I absolutely loathe the baseball minigame and it will probably be the reason why I'll never truly 100% this game. >_<


INFO BOX

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer(s): Nintendo EAD Group No. 3, Monolith Soft

Platform(s): Nintendo 3DS, New Nintendo 3DS

Release Date (Europe): November 22nd, 2013

Number of players: 1

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD ReMix (PS3)

The first Kingdom Hearts was a game that I don't think anyone could have seen coming and even once it was announced, few probably thought it would become one of the biggest JRPG series in the world. But exist it does and successful it did become, so here we are over ten years with the first game and the two interquels between Kingdom Hearts & Kingdom Hearts II compiled into a single package in preparation for Kingdom Hearts III.This is the review of KH 1.5 HD ReMix, with the review of the second HD Remaster collection to follow.

The beginning
The epic saga starts with three friends Sora, Riku & Kairi building a raft that they want to use to travel off their small group of islands to see what's beyond the horizon. Before they can do that, darkness starts to engulf their world. Kairi seems to disappear and Riku is swallowed by darkness, which leaves Sora alone to fight off dark creatures called the Heartless. Luckily he has just gained the skill to summon & use a weapon called Keyblade to ward off the shadowy beings attacking the islands. While he succeeds in fighting off a big Heartless monster, Sora can't escape the darkness completely and as the Destiny Islands disapper into the darkness, Sora gets thrown into a world called Traverse Town where lost souls gather when their worlds are overrun by the darkness. Here Sora begins to learn about the nature of the Keyblade and sets on a journey to find his friends with help from Donald Duck & Goofy. They travel through a dozen or so worlds looking for Kairi, Riku and King Mickey, all the while sinister forces have their own plans behind the scenes.

The first thing you'll notice when starting to play Kingdom Hearts is how well it has aged from a visual point of view. Even though it doesn't sport the latest graphical techniques, with just a bump in resolution it's still quite the pretty game to look at. The colourful cartoony style is probably to be thanked for that, but the original development team's mastery of the PS2 hardware should not be forgotten either. What these people got out of PS2 is nothing short of amazing.

Kingdom Hearts is a long-running series and while the franchise mostly appearing on handhelds in recent years has meant there have been no advances in the visuals (and the DS games naturally looking much worse), the games have taken great steps forward in certain aspects of gameplay. Kingdom Hearts 1 is a bit clunky by today's standards, but the fast-paced combat, decently challenging battles and worlds packed with secrets to find & stuff to do still make it entertaining to play. Still, there's no denying that the first game is a bit dated on the gameplay front. While it's one of the better games in the franchise when it comes to offering interesting locales and rewarding exploration in imaginative environments, a lot of fun optional things to do and a straightforward story, the basic gameplay could be tighter. Precision jumping, which is needed at certain parts of the game, is particularly annoying and the camera isn't the best of 3d action games. It's nothing you can't get used to if you enjoy the experience otherwise, but that doesn't mean the problem isn't present and it can annoy some more than others. Personally I've played the game so many times that the camera isn't much of an issue anymore, but I understand if it frustrates some.

All in all there are a lot of games that have aged far worse than Kingdom Hearts 1 from the PS2 era. It's still the heartfull, fun, exciting action RPG that made millions of fans in 2001 and can still enthrall people today. The biggest fault I can muster about the collection, as far as its nature as an HD remaster goes, are the trophies, which applies to both the first game & Chain of Memories. Both KH1 & Re:CoM have the worst designed difficulty trophies around. You have to play KH1 through at least 3 times on each different difficulty level and Re:CoM is even crazier because you have to play the game through on all difficulty levels with both Sora and Riku. This makes the platinum trophies extremely time-consuming & tedious to get. So these aren't the ideal games for trophy perfectionists. But that's about as bad as these HD remasters get.

A memory of cards
Sora's journey to find Riku & Mickey takes a slight detour in Re:Chain of Memories. This PS2 3d remake of the original GBA game takes Sora and his friends into Castle Oblivion, a mysterious place filled with people dressed in black-hooded leather coats and filled with memories of places visited & people met in the past. These people seem to have some kind of plan for Sora, who only wishes to see his friends again. The story introduces some new, long-lasting characters like Axel and Namine, who have major roles in many of the future games. It also gives us our first experience of playing as Riku, who is still haunted by the darkness he succumbed to in the first game and has to redeem himself if he ever wants to see his friends again.

As a game, Chain of Memories is very divisive, which is mostly due to its gameplay & structure. The combat is done with cards and if you don't learn the ways of exploiting the system, it can get a bit annoying with enemies & bosses interrupting a lot of your moves. Basically, you have a deck of cards that you can build with the cards that you get throughout the game. Each card has a numeric value that decides its strenght against enemies' cards. If it's higher than the enemy card, you'll manage to attack. If it's lower, your attack is blocked no matter what. If you don't know how to build an effective deck of cards, you'll have to get used to tons of attacks blocked by enemies. You can also do a combo of three cards that will launch different kinds of destructive special moves depending on what attack, spell & other special cards you use in the combination. The catch is that the first of the three cards will be eliminated from your deck until the end of the battle, so you can't abuse the system too much, although certain powerful special moves make that limitation somewhat obsolete.

Another flaw of the game is that it's very much a retread of the first game when it comes to the Disney worlds, stories & bosses as well as basic enemies. That wouldn't be too bad, but it's not even a very good one in the sense that the overly simple rooms that Chain of Memories consists of are quite boring in comparison to the lively, varied worlds of the original. It feels more like a randomized dungeon crawler with Disney world skins than the kind of romp through (more or less) fun worlds with distinct locations & actual exploration.

I personally like Chain of Memories, though it's far from my favorite overall game in the franchise. The card combat isn't all that bad if you get the hang of it and aren't annoyed by the interruptions to your attacks by enemy cards, and the story is easily the strongest in the franchise. The worlds are a bit boring, but the intriquing story pushes you to go forward and collecting cards & leveling up can be quite addictive. While ultimately the things that are introduced in Chain of Memories do lead to some of the more crazy aspects in the franchise's storyline, as a self-contained story Chain of Memories is the best one in the series. Organization XIII messing with Sora's memories is an intriguing concept and it's handled surprisingly well with enough complexity to have some real surprices yet not too much so that it becomes needlessly convoluted. All the plotting, backstabbing and manipulating within the Organization XIII's ranks is entertaining to watch unfold. On the other side of things, Riku's story of redemption & learning to control his darkness starts in a well done way in Chain of Memories and it's what made him a long-lasting favorite of mine and a lot of other KH fans. 

Another prequel-sequel-interquel
The last of the "games" in this collection is the movie recapping Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days' story. Days is another interquel taking place between the first and second mainline entries in the franchise, taking place prior to, in parallel AND after the events of Chain of Memories. The main gist of the story is to tell about Roxas' time as a member of the ominous Organization XIII, showing how he got there, what he did during his time there and what eventually lead to him leaving the organization. It also gives a slightly deeper look of the other Organization XIII members, their interactions and what they were doing at the time.

Outside of ReCoded, Days is perhaps the most pointless entry into the franchise from a story perspective and not all that special from a gameplay point of view either, so it's perhaps best that a lot of people can just experience it as a 3 hour movie instead of slogging through the repetitive gameplay badly paced story of the original. It's a game/story for the Roxas & Axel fans, but its significance in the bigger picture is pretty small. It doesn't really take the story forward, but its function is merely to fill some of the blanks in the timeline of Roxas, though it does hint at some still untouched storylines such as Saix & Axel's connection and some kind of secret plans that are somewhat separate from Xemnas & Organization XIII's.

Be prepared to see a lot of sea salt ice cream eating.

It goes through the story much in the same way the original game did. You go through Roxas' days in the Organization XIII and can see the passage of time as the day counter  counts towards Roxas' inevidable last day (#358) at the Organization XIII, right before the beginning of Kingdom Hearts II. While you could say that it does a decent job at telling the story of Days, all-in-all the movie is boring because they haven't really added any action scenes into it to bring some variety to the watching experience. And since pretty much all of the action in the game was in playable form, there's not much of it in the movie. This means you will see characters standing around and talking, sitting and talking, eating sea-salt ice cream and talking, and doing all of the above and talking.

 Final remix HD superiority
 Kingdom Hearts 1.5 is a very good remaster. It runs at 1440x1080 resolution with a decent 2xMSAA to smoothen some of the edges. It could have done with a bit better anti-aliasing, but the image quality looks really good otherwise. It runs at a smooth locked 30fps and I don't remember too many instances of it dropping below that.

The KH1 in this collection is the Final Mix version of the game. While it's not nearly as big an improvement over the version we got in the west in the first place, there are still some things that western players will have missed because it was never brought outside Japan, most notably the optional, hard-as-balls Xemnas fight and the cool extended secret ending. The recoloured enemies are a bit of a hit & miss, but even the worse ones aren't too bad, except a select few.

There is one thing that I haven't talked about at all in this review yet, and that is the music of the package. And what glorious music it is. Square Enix hasn't done the bare minimum with updating the music, no, they have orchestrated every song that wasn't orchestrated before. The new orchestral arrangements sound absolutely amazing. There are a few where it's a bit uncertain if the new one is better than the original, but most of it is a big improvement over the already great midi sounds. Some purists might have preferred an option to choose between the original and the new arrangements, but personally I don't ever want to return to the originals, the arrangements are just that good.

Verdict: GREAT. Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD ReMix is one of the best HD remasters around. They've updated it to look & sound amazing, brought the previously unreleased version into the west and done everything to make the collection worth every penny for both people new to the franchise & returning fans who want to relive the past. While the games themselves do show their age in some aspects of gameplay and the intro to KH1 is a bit too long & boring, they can still offer plenty of enjoyment if you can get past the somewhat clumsy controls & slow start of the first game and the unorthodox card battle system of Re:Chain of Memories. Outside of completely remaking the games and/or their graphics, this is pretty much the best possible way for Square Enix to re-release these games.

INFO BOX

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer(s): Square Enix Osaka Team

Platform(s): PlayStation 3

Release Date (Europe): September 13th, 2013

Number of players: 1

Life is Strange Episode 1: Chrysalis (PC, PS3, PS4, Xbone, X360)

Telltale has seen much success with their story-driven, interactive movie like games in the last few years. As such, it's a bit surprising that there aren't many others who have tried to get a piece of that pie. Now Dontnod Entertainment has teamed up with Square Enix to bring along something that is clearly going for the audience that buys Telltale's games, but fortunately isn't just a copy-cat, rather setting out to try to do its own thing.

 

Episodic, interactive, graphic adventure video game indie movie
The word 'indie' gets thrown around a lot nowadays, as indie games have found the kind of success through digital distribution they could never have imagined before when physical releases were pretty much the only way to find real success. However, Life is Strange is perhaps the first game that really feels like one of those stereotypical indie movies with an unknown cast, soundtrack filled with non-mainstream bands with melancholic music and set in smaller towns with a more personal slice of life type story than something bombastic & epic.

All that said, the story starts out with a bang. The main character is Maxine Caulfield, a somewhat self-conscious teenager who has just returned to her hometown recently to study photography and you are near what seems like a destructive tornado approaching her old new hometown Arcadia Bay, until she suddenly wakes up. Just a dream or a vision of what's to come? That is a bit unclear as Max wakes up from the dream in the middle of a lesson. Startled by the vivid dream, she decides to go to the bathroom after class to freshen up. In the bathroom, she witnesses an argument between a boy and a girl that leads to the boy shooting the girl. Freaked out by what she just saw, she suddenly notices she's in the middle of the lesson that she thought had already ended. It seems Max has somehow gained the power to move through time.

What follows is the slow-building first episode of a five-episode indie drama. The first episode's 3-4 hours are mostly spend with introducing the people of the town and setting up the main mysteries of the story; mainly, what was that tornado all about, Max starting to experiment with her new-found powers and starting to unravel all the behind the scenes shenanigans that are going on in this small town, some of which might have something to do with the disappearance of this Rachel girl whose Missing-posters are all over campus.

The writing in this first episode is a bit uneven. Most of the time it's serviceable enough that it shouldn't take the player out of the experience and they succeed decently well at giving characters distinct personalities that feel natural, but there are some jarring lines of dialogue here & there. Luckily even though they don't always quite talk like actual real-life people, the characters still mostly feel like actual human beings with a past that has shaped their personalities & lives and the game sets up potential storylines for most of them that seem like they are worth seeing till the end There's some not-so-sunny things going on with many characters and we'll undoubtedly get to uncover a lot of secrets many of these characters have, which will hopefully make up for some good drama.

Welcome to Arcadia Bay
So what do you actually do in Life is Strange? Well, it's a story-driven game, but with quite a lot of exploration and optional discussions. One thing that sets Life is Strange apart from Telltale's games in a positive manner is that it does feel a bit more like a traditional graphical adventure game and less like just an interactive movie. You are more in control of your character & her actions and there are even some puzzles to solve. Exploration is rewarded with all kinds of objects & things Max will comment on, easter eggs about Square Enix games and meeting more people that will shed light on the dynamics & going-ons of the small town. There's also a side quest of finding certain events, moments & things to photograph. A lot of Life is Strange is about the interaction between Max and Arcadia Bay's inhabitants. Getting to know people, finding ways to get more information about certain things and figuring out what you should do in surprising situations. The game does also have some hidden things you can find to do that could affect future events and which you can only find by thorough investigation of the different locations.

There's plenty to interact with in the game, most of it not in any way integral to the story

Max's time-rewind skill comes into play a lot during the game. The time-rewind skill is handy in that you can remember conversations you have even if you rewind time. For example, if you don't remember someone's name immediately and they complain about it to you, you can just rewind time and use your newly gotten information to get a better reaction. Items are carried through time, which is mostly used in puzzle-solving. You can also alter your decisions based on the immediate reactions of other people to your actions, though what long-term effects they'll have aren't clear, so most of the time you are still forced to live with your choices not knowing what kind of ramifications it might have in the future. Is the goodwill of a bullied girl better in the long term when you angered the security guard to get that goodwill? There are some fairly strickt limits as to how much you can rewind. Most of the time you can only rewind until the beginning of the discussion and there are some bigger decisions that are locked in after certain checkpoints the game will notify about in a "after this point this decision made cannot be changed anymore, do you really want to continue?" manner.

Tunes of a small town
Life is Strange isn't the most technically impressive game, but it's adequate enough to carry the experience and to not affect the experience too negatively. The art style is the kind that it looks good even though the budget isn't on AAA level and everything runs perfectly fine on at least PS4. It has some areas that could use some improving, like lip synching, but otherwise the art style comes together with the small-town feel & soundtrack to successfully create the perfect kind of atmosphere for this kind of indie movie imitating game. At best it feels like Twin's Peak, even if the writing isn't up to par. Speaking of the soundtrack, it's quite good. It's exactly the kind of indie folk music that can create that kind of melancholic sense of nostalgia of small town life that fits the vibe Life is Strange is going for. The soundtrack is the perfect companion to the whole Life is Strange experience.

The game does have its pretty moments despite budget restrictions

Verdict: INTRIQUING. This first episode won't blow up anyone's mind, but it is a strong enough start for this episodic small town drama that you'll most likely be left wanting to see more, especially if moody, melancholic low-key indie dramas are your thing. Unlike Telltale's games and despite the dramatic beginning with tornadoes & school shootings, Life is Strange so far is less about who lives and who dies or making constant life or death decisions and more about a somewhat slow-building drama about life in a small town hit by a tragedy in the not so distant past with many people who have something to hide. You aren't fighting against impossible odds against a zombie apocalypse and you aren't fighting to stop the downfall of the whole Fables society as much as you are seeing Max slowly getting used to living in her old hometown again, growing a bit more confident as an independent young adult person and gathering knowledge of the town, its inhabitants and all the campus & small town drama and politics/intrique as they have become since she first moved out of there. Based on the first episode, this seems like something that could grow to be quite special if they can just keep the awkward dialogue to a minimum and build on the promising premise adequately and end it up with a suitably climactic & intriquing, yet personal finale. Even if you aren't ready to jump in just yet, this is one episodic game to keep your eyes on.


INFO BOX

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer(s): Dontnod Entertainment

Platform(s): Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, Playstation 4 (tested), Xbox 360, Xbox One

Release Date (Europe): January 30th, 2015

Number of players: 1