Publishing giant Square Enix is teaming up with the Dontnod Entertainment – the developers of Remember Me – to bring us the first episodic adventure game from the Japanese publisher titled Life is Strange.
Story-driven games have always been high on Square Enix’s priority list. Games like Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and the recent Tomb Raider reboot have all featured complicated and engrossing narratives at the heart of the game-play. It’s no surprise that a company known for such narratives is to take a chance on the episodic game Life is Strange with Dontnod.
According to Polygon, Life is Strange will take place in the fictional town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, where a student named Max Caulfield and her friend Chloe are looking into the disappearance of fellow student Rachel Amber.
What follows is an adventure focused on choice and consequence as Max learns that she has the ability to rewind time — giving the player a chance to rewrite decisions and fix their mistakes.
In a press release today Jean-Max Moris, creative director at the studio, said
“Everybody at Dontnod is excited to be working on such a refreshing title. We’re not only crafting the best game we possibly can, we also feel we’re providing the type of experience that perfectly fits today’s renewed taste for originality and diversity.”
Episodic gaming has recently come into vogue through the success of Telltale Games’s The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. However, we’ve yet to see a successful episodic adventure game that is not based off of pre-exisiting intellectual property, which makes Life is Strange an exciting addition to the genre.
Despite some repetitive gameplay and annoying mechanics, Dontnod’s first game, Remember Me thrived when it came to narrative and memory remixing mechanics. The unique formula of the episodic adventure game should better showcase the company’s talents for both story-telling and player/world interaction. Needless to say, we’re getting excited about Life is Strange.
