Life is Strange 2's thoughtful minutiae add up to make it one of the best games of the year, and one of the only mainstream games to ever successfully address the lived experiences of the oppressed.ĭisenfranchisement comes in many different forms The simple sketching mechanic becomes harder, more frustrating, disempowering. But then, after losing his eye, the game permanently vignettes the left side of the screen to communicate Sean's newly impaired vision. At first, things like the drawing mechanic (you just move around the left stick to make Sean sketch) seem ineffectual and unnecessary. The gameplay doesn't necessarily suffer for it, either. But Life is Strange 2 turns this convention on its head, speaking volumes by forcing you to make choices in a world determined to stripe you of your rights and freedoms. The more abilities you have, the more you can manipulate and shape the world to your liking. The reason most games rely on powerful protagonists is because power allows for more variety in gameplay. It's in these small, meditative details that DONTNOD shows just how quietly revolutionary their game is, taking risky swings that somehow almost always land. You can't move or get up, and are able to only look around at objects and wait patiently until a nurse shows up.
Forcing you to make choices in a world determined to stripe you of your rights and freedoms.īut in Life is Strange 2, you find yourself waking up in a hospital bed after losing an eye, completely confined. It's completely counterintuitive since nearly every mainstream game is designed to make players feel like rulers of their virtual worlds. Many times in the final three episodes, the designers commit one of the cardinal sins of traditional video game design: They force the player to do nothing. Unlike the previous Life is Strange, he's not even the one given special powers, with his brother Daniel's telekinesis often presenting itself as yet another obstacle he's powerless to control. Throughout the five-episode arc, he faces homelessness, poverty, racism, xenophobia, drug lords, disability, and border police. He and his little brother Daniel are forced to go on the run after his Mexican immigrant father is killed in an instance of police brutality.
As we wrote in our reviews of the game's earlier episodes, Sean Diaz's story begins with tragedy.
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