This review contains spoilers for Life Is Strange 2.

I felt nothing as the credits began to roll on Life Is Strange 2. Or, at the least, I didn’t feel the things that developer Dontnod wanted me to feel. For the most part, I felt indifference toward a series I love.

Where the game attempts to make a deep, impactful statement on the life of people of color in a post-2016 America and the nature of living in a broken society, it mostly fails, revealing it had nothing to say and no insight to behold.

Life Is Strange 2 is the gaming equivalent of Paul Haggis’ 2004 Oscar award-winning film Crash. It wants to make a grand statement about race and life but does so with shallow strokes of the blade, not even understanding why it’s holding a knife in the first place. At the same time, it’s also a piece of media asking to be rewarded for trying to say anything at all, even if the message is muddled and incoherent.

Will Harrison

Toss a coin to your Witcher o’ valley of synergy

There was some real irony in Life Is Strange 2 being nominated last week in the Game Awards 2019’s “Games For Impact” category, presented by Beaker and Bunsen of The Muppets in a fun, yet inappropriate skit for an award all about societal impact and difficult topics.

Much how that decision undermined the serious nature of the award, Life Is Strange 2’s story about Sean and Daniel Diaz loses strength and meaning by adhering to multiple-choice adventure game tropes and brazen emotional manipulation.

I’ve played a video game or two in my lifetime, and more than a few adventure games. When Life Is Strange 2 introduced a puppy early on in the game there’s only one kind of reaction one can have: “Oh, that dog is going to die.” Lo and behold, the illusion of choice in adventure games rears its head when said dog dies an unavoidable death.

This choice isn’t bold or daring. If anything, it’s expected and a brazen attempt at manipulating player emotions without having a deeper meaning or truth that relates to the story. Time and again the Diaz brothers run afoul of situations that give the illusion of choice through scenarios that appear to make big statements on society but are shallow cuts.

The original Life Is Strange had these moments as well, but there’s a difference when it occurs on a character level, as a statement about who someone is. Max’s time travel powers in the first game weren’t solely a neat mechanic or an easy way to remove some of the more annoying aspects of adventure games.

Max’s need, at a personal level, to be liked and to do things the best way possible is a manifestation of her power. The scenes where Max’s own internal psyche confronts her abusing power to make people like her are powerful because it makes a statement about who she is and who she is becoming.

Will Harrison

Lovers in a dangerous, digital time

The choices in Life Is Strange 2 attempt to funnel a specific kind of reaction through rage and injustice but don’t have anything to say about the topic at hand. Multiple times, the Diaz brothers end up captive or hindered by white racists, including an elderly man in a nondescript but topical red hat locking Sean in a room for stealing.

The man shouts slurs and derogatory remarks while the teen sobs. The player can choose to assault the man or leave him be as you’re saved by your super-powered brother. But nothing in this and other scenes have anything to say about the harsh realities of being a person of color in current-day America.

There is no insight. No untold truths. In this instance, the Diaz brothers are no different than the dead dog for the sake of narrative storytelling. It rings hollow and leaves the player asking if the game has a point other than asking over and again “Don’t you think racism is bad?” It feels like a cartoon version of racism, there solely to generate a reaction, not make a statement.

These choices of lashing out at people through your emotionally empty action figure of a younger brother are made even stranger by the game’s overall focus of living in an unjust society. The overarching final choice has to deal with whether or not Sean has taught the younger Daniel to live within the rules of life. Yet, time and again the plot requires the two to not do that.

This leaves Sean feeling less like a full character and more like a babysitter who is arbitrarily directing Daniel one way or another, like a series of true/false statements in computer programming. Never at any point does Sean feel like a brother struggling to be the sole caregiver. Never do they feel like people.

The smaller moments in Life Is Strange 2 are the rare few that make the game worth playing, but I find this game hard to recommend. Given the original Life Is Strange was The Blade’s 2015 game of the year I can’t consider the sequel to be anything more than a massive failure and disappointment. I now wonder if Dontnod knows what made the first game successful in the first place or if even that was just a happy mistake.

First Published December 19, 2019, 11:30 a.m.