If you have any love in your heart for choice-based narratives, from the "______ will remember that" style that Telltale Games popularized, to the dialogue tree and routes in some visual novels, or even the dialogue options to pick in Fallout 4, then Life Is Strange is worth your time for one mechanic alone: you can rewind time, however briefly. It's a surprisingly limited form of save scumming in that each area of the game has a certain amount of choices, both story-central and ancillary, that are locked and can't be undone once you leave that area. But that little bit of freedom in choice Life Is Strange gives opens the whole game up and prevents some rather frustrating accidents. More than once, there has been an option in these games that produces a wildly different immediate result than you intended ([Glass Him], anyone?) It's an incredibly frustrating thing to run into, because now you've been explicitly divorced from the game character--you have lost control in a way that the game is more at fault, as it didn't properly communicate to you.
Life Is Strange is the first game that could have gotten away with this. Except for the absolute last decision in the entire season (and one part in the middle that's actually a very well done execution of taking away your powers, like some kind of imaginary ice level that doesn't suck), any choice can be redone, over and over. This lets you see what the immediate aftermath of your choices are, and thus always lets you choose what you consider preferable. You won't ever have to mess with the controls when you've been suddenly given a QTE and either not pick anything to do or pick something you truly didn't mean, or want to. While this may seem like it's made everything easier, it just makes the consequences of your choices hit that much harder. No longer can you give the excuse that you were under pressure; this is the world that you explicitly chose, so when you see the long-term consequences of your absolutely preferred option, it hits home so, so much harder.
The simultaneous freedom and responsibility the game's choice system affords is the icing on the cake, though. On almost every level Life Is Strange either impresses or is solidly satisfying. The side characters, while understandably not given as much depth as the main duo of Max and Chloe and with few exceptions are little more than what you immediately understand them to be, are convincingly portrayed. Those few characters that do develop quickly became some of my favorites.
Graphically, Life Is Strange doesn't exactly look amazing, but the visuals do their job--the slightly cartoony and just-emotional-enough faces is just stylized enough to possibly forgive the at-times poor lip syncing. They were just enough to make each character look different and not get pulled out of the world of the game.
Though the setting and characters of Life Is Strange definitely--and intentionally--invokes some fairly dated stereotypes of "hipsters," the way the game incorporates elements of hipster culture, particularly polaroids, is actually fairly impressive and, after some initial bumps and cringe-worthy dialogue that teenagers would've said maybe a decade ago, ended up painting the world of Arcadia Bay far more than taking away from it. Since the main threat of Life Is Strange is an eco-disaster, the familiar and comfortable imagery of the small beach-side Oregon town being horribly subverted raises the stakes in an almost subconscious way.
The soundtrack, mostly composed by French band Syd Matters, is largely acoustic and thus may not be everyone's cup of tea. When it works, though, it drives home the emotional moments instead of using particular chord progressions to manipulate the player into feeling certain feelings, like some songs I can think of. It's a refreshing sort of honesty that I, at least, responded to. My feelings always felt organic--I felt them because I did, not because a particular sad song started in.
A good chunk of that honesty is due to the voice performances, particularly for the two leads. Though I hadn't heart of Hannah Telle, but she truly gave life to Max Caulfield, with just enough nervous breathiness to make you believe she was an insecure teen trying her best. The real surprise, however, was Ashly Burch's performance as Chloe--considering most people know her best for being either the hyperactive adult child from Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? or the hyperactive regular child from Borderlands 2, she delivered Chloe with enough subtlety and sincerity that I laughed at the early, cringe-worthy lines not because they were delivered poorly, but because subtitles were on. She brought life to an unintentionally goofy script, something almost the entire cast of the Star Wars prequels couldn't do.
Most of the praises I have for the game, unfortunately, are absent in the last episode, which ends on such a sour and unsatisfactory note that I couldn't in good faith call the season perfect, or give it 5 stars. You see, there's something strange in the little town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon; a girl's mysteriously gone missing, another is being bullied, and scuzzy, scuzzy people are around every corner. When you spend some time with the villain of the game, they suddenly turn into a cartoonish Disney villain--every single antagonist previously could be reasoned with, or had some believable reason for why they were such a monster. It was a philosophy that there is some good in everyone, that people will respond to your desperate efforts to be a good person. To have that seemingly ignored at the last hurdle is just such a bummer. There definitely is a way to have an unreasonable monster, but you won't find it here.
There are two possible endings to Life Is Strange, but only one of them feels very well thought-out. Between your two options (which you can't rewind), it's totally understandable to choose one over the other--people come to their own conclusions and decisions and assumptions, I'm not here to judge. What's kind of unforgivable, though, is that I chose what the developers DONTNOD Entertainment considered the "true" ending. It feels complete, elicited a serious emotional reaction from me, and actually provides some closure. The other ending, though, feels like it was slapped together to give the player a final choice. The song for that ending is a repeat of an earlier one, leaves far more questions unanswered, and just feels... sudden. It's a horribly disappointing and unsatisfactory ending for those who aren't utilitarian or believe in the power of love. The real problem comes in when I saw the consequences of my final choice and sat on it. Though there's more there and feels like a real ending, it's just as unsatisfactory. I actually ended up reconsidering my decision, which I hadn't ever really done in any of these story-based adventure games. The core of the problem between both endings is that none of your choices really mattered in the end. It's the same kind of ignoring the "people responding to you" philosophy that made the villain so disappointing.
For however monumentally shitty the ending of Life Is Strange is, I'll probably replay it. Not to 100% it for the steam achievements, though there is that. I'll replay it because the emotional reactions from Life Is Strange still feels just as genuine as when I first played it. As much as the ending of The Walking Dead's season finale broke me down, what brought me through the season was waiting to see what happened next. I genuinely enjoyed my time with the residents of Arcadia Bay in a way that few games have, which makes me believe that Life Is Strange is the kind of experience you revisit. I'll also do it because I'd like to believe that, with Max's rewind powers, there can be some kind of Groundhog-day style loop where there's a happy, satisfying ending.