Life is Strange 2 review

Episode 1 – Roads

At one point in the first episode of Life is Strange 2, entitled ‘Roads,’ your character gazes at a photograph and muses to himself, ‘Can old people be... cool?’ The writers behind these games, doing their best to ape the tics and trends of youthful patter, seem determined to find out. Early on, after hearing characters mention how ‘emo’ they feel and worrying over the state of their ‘BFFs,’ the answer, as it was back in 2013, seems to be ‘no, but they might pull a muscle trying.’ But as the episode steers out of a slow start, the tone shifts, shirking its teen leaning and taking to the open road.

Aside from The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, which was a short prologue to this season, this episode marks the return of season one writers Christian Divine and Jean-Luc Cano. In other words, Life is Strange 2 stares into the headlights of the sophomore slump. The game’s focus is on two brothers, Sean and Daniel Diaz, who were first glimpsed at the end of The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. Sean is 16; Daniel is 9. After their lives are shaken by confusion and cruelty, they both need to act older – fast. The need for emotional calluses weighs most heavily on Sean, whom you play as – and it’s a slight pain that the stiff lip-synching and doughy faces undersell the impact of the more moving scenes. Fortunately, the gloom that’s engrained on his actions sits on your shoulders.

On their journey, the stresses of survival have you managing their meagre budget, eating into what’s left of Sean’s money to accommodate the appetites of the brothers. As they alight at a petrol station for supplies and food, you can feel the hungry hiss of pressure as Sean holds their fate in the thin slip of his wallet. When you’re given the option to steal, it rings in your ears like the howl of a wolf. Larger choices are telegraphed with a freeze-frame, the screen split into shards as you deliberate. You’re given a greater degree of choice here than has been in previous games, with more than binary decisions dominating the twist of the tale.

But it’s the small choices that truly test the brothers’ bond: will you swipe a chocolate bar from the dash of a parked car? It’s Daniel’s favourite, but he’s watching your every move, and it isn’t a good example to set. These choices creak with tension, each one a moral bear trap baited with something you could really do with; the punishment – you’re sure – lurking down the line. They are earthed in turbulent soil as well, with decisions testing not just the boys’ connection, but their relation to the outside world.

The episode is couched in the anxious murk of October 2016, just after the US presidential election debate, and politics pours in throughout. The Diaz brothers, being of Mexican descent, tread through fraught exchanges with people whose hearts lie behind walls. The writing starts off timely and conscious. When Daniel claims that someone ‘Totally looks like a mushroom,’ I had to suppress a smirk. It’s clear the team at Dontnod was blessed with luck, writing, as it was, long before the storm of recent headlines. As the episode unwinds, it swerves into the unsubtle – ‘Everything is political, Sean,’ insists a Seth Rogen stand-in – and crashes into clumsiness: ‘Oregon is like the edge of the world,’ one character remarks, contained in their own coastal bubble.

If ‘Keep Portland Weird’ is that city’s unofficial slogan, perhaps Seattle’s should be, ‘Keep Seattle Strange.’ As the two boys encounter a bearded blogger with a big heart, called Brody, he warns them, ‘This ain’t Seattle no more.’ It’s an odd reversal of Dorothy’s line in The Wizard of Oz, who marvelled, ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore.’ Unfortunately for the two boys, they’re headed in the opposite direction, turning their backs on the Emerald City and heading into the wilds of the woods.

Quite what they will find there remains to be seen, as this first episode struggles to gain sure footing. but it isn't the imagined sanctuary they’re heading toward that makes an impression; it’s what they’re running from. The romance of the road the two boys walk is like a frontier tale in reverse: they’re venturing back into the untamed, rejecting the hand they’ve been dealt and turning inward to each other.

Episode 2 - Rules

If you were to judge Life is Strange 2 on the titles of its episodes, you might think to gear up for the breathless thrills of a traffic safety seminar. The first is called ‘Roads,’ and now we have ‘Rules.’ You would be well within your rights to expect episodes three, four, and five to be: ‘Proper Vehicle Maintenance,’ ‘Licensing, Tax, and Insurance,’ and ‘The Drink Drive Limit.’ Sure enough, this episode is stuffed with a litany of laws, lectures on responsibility, and warnings against the temptations of intoxicating power. I’m expecting a test at the end.

We pick up the trail of Sean and Daniel Diaz, two brothers on the run from the police, as they make their way down the backroads and byways of Oregon. Their destination is Puerto Lobos, but it may as well be El Dorado – a golden glint of illusory promise that takes a backseat to adventure. The boys’ father, Esteban, was shot and killed by a police officer. This triggered a surge of telekinetic power in the younger brother, Daniel, a shockwave of anger that flipped a car like a pancake and wound up killing the officer.

There are shades of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, the young prodigy who manifested similar abilities as a reaction to the abuses of her upbringing, like a rose rising from manure. Elsewhere, Daniel rescues someone from harm using his gift, only to be cautioned by Sean, who worries about the attention these things attract. I thought of Man of Steel, where a young Clark, after saving a busload of his peers asks his father what he was supposed to do, let them die? Back comes the answer, spoken without conviction: ‘maybe.’

Playing as Daniel, you have to help Sean control and conceal his powers; hence the rules ‘hide your power’ and ‘run from danger.’ Later on, when in the care of their distant grandparents, they have new ones dropped on them both – ‘don’t leave the house,’ ‘no phone/no internet’ – owing to the dangers of their fugitive status. It’s frustrating for them both to be bound by these fears, but for us it’s just boring. Choices are often hollow-hearted and pointless, like minor potholes on the path to be skirted round. And idle stretches of this episode are spent watching, not playing.

It seems churlish to chastise a game so concerned with story for its lack of mechanical engagement, but Life is Strange 2 all too readily casts off its connection to its adventure game heritage. I could do with a puzzle or two. Last night, my play session was interspersed with me making coffees, and eating a Twirl; the notion that I had to pause now and again to prod someone forward or press a button to trigger the next conversation was only irritating.

The challenge of the anthology series is changeability. Each season must seize upon the timbre of its forebears while refreshing the contents completely. Life is Strange 2 has certainly done the latter, but what of the former? In short, what makes Life is Strange? Is it the songs on the soundtrack, that mixture of plaintive piano and plucky folk music? Perhaps it’s the misty light, the faded pink and peach of those Oregon mornings. Or maybe it’s the fir trees, huddled at the fringes of the series like a Twin Peaks picture frame.

One luxury the Diaz brothers don’t have is time. The stillness and slowness of the first two seasons allowed for the gradual cross-hatching of detail upon a small town, the hopes and fears of scattered residents written across the hours. Here, people come and go, briefly resting a hand on the boys’ bubble but never breaking through.

Thankfully, it’s in these brief exchanges that the writing blooms. One moment sees Sean’s grandfather tell him ‘America is your home.’ At another, Sean reads a newspaper article in which the dead cop’s family reaches out with a message of even-handed hope, that their thoughts are with the Diazes, and that, ‘It’s easy for people to judge and attack behind a keyboard, but just as we mourn for others we mourn for the loss of a brave public servant.’ But before we feel any joy, Sean asks, ‘How can I feel bad for him?’ reminding us that, while there is hope, the wounds are freshly riven and still raw.

In the end, perhaps this is what makes Life is Strange: the mixture of the everyday and the cosmic. The choice to hide Daniel’s power (something that Max never had to do) reminds me of Coach Carter, of all things – another tale of tensions, both racial and familial, in America. To hear one troubled youngster proclaim, ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us,’ is exactly what the boys need to hear. I hope they don’t have to hide forever.