Viraj's Two Cents

The ability of a video game to tell a powerful story is understated. Even in a world characterized by an internet saturated with movies and web series, there is always a demand for an involving and impactful story. The potential of video games to tell these stories is slightly untapped, however in the last half decade, story-driven games have steadily begun gaining popularity. One of the breakthrough narrative games was the episodic “Life is Strange”, released in 2015 by Dontnod, which told the tale of a young adult, Max Caulfield, who discovers she has the power to reverse time. The power of the game lay in the fact that the player, as Max, was no superhero, but an ‘every-day hero’ who had to make choices, and deal with their impacts, sometimes devastating. While the central theme of the game is the bond between the protagonist and her friend, there is a thrilling subplot of the case of a missing fellow student. The game received critical acclaim for the gameplay, as well as for handl...