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The consequence of player decisions is a central theme to Square Enix’s upcoming Life is Strange, developer Dontnod has said.
This is definitely a game for the Telltale and Heavy Rain fans,” creative director Jean Maxime Moris told VG247. We are putting a lot of effort into crafting a slower-paced game that again really emphasizes choice, story and character development.
The consequences of a choice you make in a given episode will carry onto the following ones. The main narrative will move forward in the same direction for all players, but your experience of it will be customised 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.”
The game will also expand upon elements of the studio’s previous release Remember Me, specifically the ‘rewind’ mechanic.
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 added.
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 studio yesterday said that Square Enix was the only publisher that was receptive to the game’s female lead, with some potential publishing partners even demanding that a male lead be added.
The first episode of Life is Strange is due out on PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on January 30th. There will be an additional four episodes.
