Remember Me developer Dontnod has a new game out this year, the episodic adventure Life is Strange. This one’s a bit less action-packed than their previous effort, instead putting the focus on characters and an emotional branching story.
“This is definitely a game for the Telltale and Heavy Rain fans,” the developer’s creative director Jean Maxime Moris tells VG247. “We are putting a lot of effort into crafting a slower-paced game that again really emphasizes choice, story and character development.”
As in those popular adventure games, your choices will affect the overall storyline, coloring other characters’ opinions of you and altering cutscenes and dialogue.
“The consequences of a choice you make in a given episode will carry onto the following ones,” explains Moris. “The main narrative will move forward in the same direction for all players, but your experience of it will be customized depending on how you have interacted with the story’s protagonists. We will cram a lot of details into every cutscene and line of dialog that will make every play through feel very unique. There will be a few different endings, but not 67 of them.”
While you might not be punching bad guys in the groin and firing assault rifles, however, there are thematic and mechanic links back to Remember Me. In particular the ‘rewind’ mechanic, which allowed players to modify memories in order to manipulate their targets, will return, though in a slightly different form.
“Coming out of Remember Me we felt there were things that we could take further with the rewind concept, and so we took it from memories into the real world,” Moris explains. “What links the two games I think is the theme of identity. In our first game you were playing as an elite memory hunter who could remix people’s memories at will and therefore change who they were. In Life is Strange and with our teenage characters, we are looking at a period in people’s lives where they make the choices that will define who they become, in other words their identity.”
The five episode run of Life is Strange kicks off on January 30 for PC and consoles. Expect teen angst, time travel, and lots of indie music.
