Life Is Strange (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Life Is Strange opens in October 2013, as an 18-year-old photography student named Max Caulfield returns to Arcadia Bay, Oregon, to attend Blackwell Academy. During class she has a vivid vision of a tornado destroying a lighthouse and moving on the town.

  The game is a 2015 episodic adventure from Dontnod Entertainment, released by Square Enix in five episodes. Max soon discovers that she can rewind time at any moment, and each choice she makes starts to ripple outward.

  Three questions run underneath the story. Why did most publishers hesitate to back a game led by a young woman? What does a choice mean when it can be taken back? And what happens to a small town when one student keeps rewriting the week?

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• 2. Rewinding Time

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  Max Caulfield's rewind works on almost any action, and the whole game is built around that single tool. Life Is Strange is a graphic adventure played from a third-person view. Players examine and handle objects, and they move through Arcadia Bay talking with non-playable characters.

  Items picked up before a rewind stay in Max's inventory afterward. Information learned earlier also remains available once an event is reset, so a replayed conversation can go very differently. Puzzles take the form of fetch quests and changes to the environment, while conversations rely on branching options.

  Dialogue exchanges can be rewound as well, which turns every conversation into a draft. Yet the game does not let its choices stay harmless. Some decisions carry short-term or long-term consequences, and an answer that seems good in the moment can turn out worse later.

  Those consequences play out across a single week, and it begins in a photography classroom.

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• 3. A Week At Blackwell

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  A photograph of a butterfly, taken in a restroom at Blackwell Academy, comes just before the first act of violence. Max has left her photography class, taught by Mark Jefferson, to steady herself after her vision. There she sees classmate Nathan Prescott shoot and kill a young woman. In a sudden effort, Max rewinds time and saves her. The woman is Chloe Price, voiced by Ashly Burch, and she is Max's childhood friend. The two visit the lighthouse, where Max shows her what she can do, and strange weather patterns begin to appear around town.

  The next day, a student named Kate Marsh jumps from the roof of the girls' dormitory. Kate has been bullied over a viral video showing her kissing several students at a party. Depending on what the player does, Max either saves Kate or fails to talk her down. Afterward Max resolves to find out what happened to Kate and to Chloe's missing friend, Rachel Amber.

  That night, Max and Chloe break into the principal's office and find evidence that points to Nathan. The next morning they sneak into the motorhome of drug dealer Frank Bowers. There they learn that Rachel had been romantically involved with him, a fact she never told Chloe.

  A childhood photograph of the two friends then pulls Max back to the day it was taken. She stops Chloe's father, William, from dying in a traffic accident. The result is an alternate reality where William lives but Chloe is paralysed from the neck down after a separate accident. Heartbroken, Max uses the photo to undo what she did.

  Beneath a derelict barn owned by the Prescotts, the pair find a bunker. Inside are binders of photographs showing restrained young women, including Kate, and an image of Rachel's corpse being buried. At a scrapyard they find Rachel's remains. A text message from Nathan, sent during a school party, threatens to destroy the evidence, and the friends hurry back to the scrapyard.

  Jefferson is waiting there. He anaesthetises Max and shoots Chloe in the head. Max wakes in the bunker, where Jefferson reveals himself as a serial killer obsessed with photographing young women. He says he wants to "capture the moment innocence turns into corruption." Nathan, he explains, acted under his influence and accidentally killed Rachel with an overdose. Jefferson has since murdered Nathan himself, and he plans to kill Max once he finishes photographing her.

  Max escapes by stepping into a photograph and lands at the start of the week, in Jefferson's class. This time she warns David Madsen, Chloe's stepfather and the academy's head of security. Chloe lives, and both Jefferson and Nathan are arrested.

  The arrests, however, do not stop the storm.

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• 4. The Last Choice

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  Principal Wells takes Max to San Francisco in Jefferson's place, and one of her photographs hangs in an art gallery. From there she telephones Chloe and realizes that the storm has reached Arcadia Bay anyway. Max returns to the moment she took her winning photograph, and she passes through several collapsing timelines that play like a dream-like nightmare.

  At the lighthouse, Max blames her own decision to save Chloe earlier in the week for causing the storm. Chloe, who has kept the butterfly photograph, then offers a final choice. Max can rewind and let Chloe be killed to spare Arcadia Bay, or she can keep the current timeline and let the town be destroyed to save Chloe.

  Chloe argues that other people in town deserve to live, and she names her mother, Joyce. Max protests that she cannot bear to lose her, but Chloe urges her to decide.

  If Max sacrifices Chloe, she goes back to the Blackwell restroom at the beginning of the week and listens as Nathan shoots Chloe dead. Nathan and Jefferson are arrested, the storm never comes, and Max attends Chloe's funeral alongside Joyce, David and the rest of the town.

  If Max sacrifices Arcadia Bay, she destroys the photograph. She and Chloe watch the storm devastate the town before it fades, and the next morning they drive out of the ruins together.

  Long before any player stood at that lighthouse, the people building the game had to convince a publisher that it should exist at all.

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• 5. A Hard Sell

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  Most prospective publishers, according to a developer diary released before launch, would not back a game unless its lead was male. The diary said they had raised the same objection to Dontnod's first project, Remember Me, which also starred a woman. Dontnod CEO Oskar Guilbert challenged the idea at the start. The developers said Square Enix was the only publisher with no intention of changing the protagonist.

  Development began in April 2013 with a team of 15, and more people joined once the collaboration with Square Enix began. Dontnod told Square Enix London about the project only after a pitch for a larger game had been turned down. The studio had imagined a full-length game that it would publish itself. Square Enix judged that an episodic release would sell better, and the first plan called for episodes about six weeks apart. The working title was What If, but it was dropped because a film already used that name.

  The idea itself grew from the rewind mechanic, which the studio had already experimented with in Remember Me. Max was created with the power to rewind time to support it. Dontnod also chose the episodic format for its own reasons, which included creative freedom, financial limits and marketing. The format let the team tell the story at a slow pace. Co-founder Jean-Maxime Moris was the original creative director.

  The team decided early that most of the budget would go to writing and voice actors. Jean-Luc Cano wrote the original story in French, and the co-directors and design team turned it into a game script. Christian Divine and Cano then refined it in English.

  Hannah Telle auditioned for Max in July 2014 and was offered the part. Ashly Burch auditioned for both Max and Chloe Price, and she was cast as Chloe. Recording took place in Los Angeles, California, with the French developer joining by Skype.

  The finished story still needed a world to live in.

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• 6. Texture And Tone

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  Autumn light and a nostalgic mood were the reasons the team chose the Pacific Northwest. The developers traveled to the region, took photographs, read local newspapers and used Google Street View to keep the setting accurate.

  The game runs on an improved version of Unreal Engine 3, reusing lighting and depth-of-field tools built for Remember Me. Every texture was hand painted, a look art director Michel Koch called "impressionistic rendering." Post-processing, double exposure and overlapping screen-space particles mark each moment when Max rewinds time. The studio described Remember Me as a digital view of memory and identity, and Life Is Strange as an analogue one.

  The Walking Dead, Gone Home and Heavy Rain were on the team's mind as influences. The visual novel Danganronpa informed the balance between play and story. The novel The Catcher in the Rye supplied a quiet link, because its narrator, Holden Caulfield, shares a surname with Max.

  The characters began as familiar archetypes, which gave players an easy way in before the game subverted them. For realism, the supernatural elements were designed as a metaphor for the characters' inner conflict. Experts were consulted on how to handle teen suicide.

  Jonathan Morali of the band Syd Matters composed the score. Drawing on modern indie folk, the soundtrack mixes composed pieces with licensed tracks. Featured artists include José González, Mogwai, Amanda Palmer, Bright Eyes, Local Natives, Sparklehorse, alt-J and Foals.

  The finished game reached players one episode at a time.

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• 7. Release And Reception

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  Square Enix announced Life Is Strange at Gamescom on the 11th of August 2014. The five episodes arrived digitally between the 30th of January 2015 and the 20th of October 2015. They came to Steam, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, and a demo of the first 20 minutes launched with episode one on consoles. In November 2014 the publisher said it was "100 per cent focused on the digital release." A year later, a retail edition was planned for the 19th of January 2016 in North America, with an artbook and the soundtrack in its limited version.

  Metacritic summed up reviews as "generally favorable." Some reviewers criticised the lip-syncing and the dated slang, but many praised the character development and the time-travel mechanic. Eurogamer called it "one of the best interactive story games of this generation," and Hardcore Gamer named it the sleeper hit of 2015.

  Kevin VanOrd of GameSpot said the first episode, Chrysalis, was "an involving slice of life that works because its situations eloquently capture a peculiar early-college state of mind." Game Informer's Kimberley Wallace singled out its handling of "subjects that are usually taboo for video games." Mitch Dyer of IGN disagreed, calling the script "laughable."

  Of the fourth episode, Dark Room, GameZone's Matt Liebl wrote that it was "easily the most emotional episode." Critics also pointed to tonal problems, and reviewers were divided on the ending. Reviewers called the final episode, Polarized, a "fitting conclusion" to Max's coming-of-age story, though one stealth sequence was described as "tedious."

  Sales followed the praise. Life Is Strange reached one million sales in July 2015, with more than 1.2 million unique players. By May 2017 it had been purchased by 3 million unique players. By November 2023, Square Enix counted 20 million total players.

  Ports followed on other platforms. Feral Interactive brought the game to OS X on the 16th of June 2016, and Black Wing Foundation later ported it to iOS and Android.

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• 8. Awards And Afterlife

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  Legendary Entertainment stated that the game received more than 75 Game of the Year awards and listings. It ranked first on Vulture's top 10 games of 2015, and New Statesman named it Best Game on its own list. At the Develop Industry Excellence Awards in 2015 it won New Games IP and Use of Narrative. Apple later labeled it Game of the Year in its Best of 2016 awards. Even the Steam Awards list includes a category titled "I'm Not Crying, There's Something In My Eye."

  Success changed Dontnod's position in the industry. Publishers began pursuing the studio, where before it had to pursue them. Guilbert said the game saved his company financially after the mediocre sales of Remember Me. The Washington Post said it passed the "Steven Spielberg test" for games as an art form, which holds that they prove their worth "when somebody confesses that they cried at level 17."

  In 2016, Square Enix ran an "Everyday Heroes" photography contest inspired by the game, with a scholarship for the winner. It also worked with the Parent Advocacy Coalition for Educational Rights, known as PACER, on an anti-bullying initiative and donated a total of $25,000.

  The series grew beyond the first game. Deck Nine developed the prequel Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, released on the 31st of August 2017. Life Is Strange 2 followed in September 2018, three months after the free spin-off The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. Life Is Strange: True Colors arrived in September 2021. Titan Comics began a comic series in November 2018, written by Emma Vieceli and set after the "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" ending.

  The Life Is Strange Remastered Collection appeared in February 2022, with updated visuals, improved animation and full facial motion capture. Double Exposure, released on the 29th of October 2024, brings back an older Max who can experience two parallel timelines at once, as she tries to prevent the murder of her friend Safi.

  A screen version has taken years to arrive. Legendary Digital Studios and Square Enix announced a digital series in July 2016, and Hulu acquired the rights in 2017. In September 2025, Amazon Prime Video acquired the rights and greenlit a series under showrunner Charlie Covell. In March 2026, Maisy Stella and Tatum Grace Hopkins were cast as Chloe and Max. In May 2026, Tom Cullen was announced as Mark Jefferson, the photography teacher whose class opens the game.

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