A narrative trick the Life is Strange series has always got away with isn't having to explain how its superpowered protagonists got their gifts. How did Max Caulfield get the ability to turn back time? So how exactly does Daniel Diaz move stuff with his mind? The how does not matter because Life is Strange mostly focuses on the when. Max discovers her power when she's trying to save Chloe's life, and Daniel unleashes his power for the first time to protect his father from the racist officer. Life is Strange's heroes receive their powers once they need them the most and understand them minimal.
But the other answer to Life is Strange's superpowered teenagers is that their powers represent a key part of their journeys. Max's rewind represents her returning to her past in the form of Arcadia Bay and Chloe, and seeking to repair mistakes or right old wrongs. Daniel's powers, meanwhile, serve as a metaphor for his older brother Sean's journey, that has to handle the burgeoning agency that his younger brother feels whilst protecting him from the external forces of the world that would visit a youngster put behind bars.
For better and for worse, Life is Strange: True Colors' Alex Chen is really a very different kind of Life is Strange protagonist. Unlike Max and Daniel, Alex has known about her ability to see other's strong emotions as colored auras and pay attention to these feelings for some time before her Life is Strange journey even begins. Where Max and Daniel are wanting to explore their newfound powers, Alex sees her ability as a curse and it has labored to seal it off. By the time True Colors starts, Alex is 21 years of age, almost 22, and has already experienced a tumultuous childhood and adolescence, bouncing between foster homes and orphanages.
But the biggest difference between Alex and former Life is Strange protagonists is how her superpower fits as a metaphor within her journey. There isn't necessarily a newly made link between what Alex can do and what she's facing. What Alex wants is a place to call home, where people need her, a place where she can put down roots and feel safe. In some ways, that's what her trip to Haven Springs, where she's reunited with her estranged brother, Gabe, can represent.
From the outset, Alex is presented as friendly, charismatic, and personable. She seemingly doesn't have problem ingratiating herself to folks of Haven Springs, and she quickly forms relationships with everyone she meets around. There is no sense that she doesn't trust Gabe, or Ryan, or Stephanie, or the other characters she meets, and there's no sense that they has trouble connecting with them, either. Nor does she appear to have trouble seeing the planet using their viewpoint-the type of personality flaw or hurdle that having superpowered empathy is needed clear.
It takes too much time for that story to show the challenge that her own superpower represents is her capacity to feel too much. At the start of True Colors, Alex does everything she will to suppress her superpower-she does not want to feel not anticipation that the visit to Haven represents. Through the game, she gradually begins to rely on this ability more and more, sometimes to assist others, but mostly to uncover the truth about Gabe's tragic and mysterious death. She's constantly told that she's special, while still feeling just like a freak, however in the end, she has to manage her very own traumas before she can fully accept herself and her ability.
In theory, getting the climax from the story center around Alex coming to terms together with her past to ensure that she will fully embrace herself and her powers, works. But it also comes after several chapters of the player already using Alex's power around they're allowed to. Sometimes, she experiences people's deepest feelings of sorrow, anger, fear, and joy so that she can help them find the courage to manage their very own truths. Most of the time, however, she's using it to achieve inside information about why her brother died so that she can nail those who she deems responsible for his death.
For us because the player, making use of the inner lives from the other characters is as easy as holding a button. It's a controlled and frictionless experience that does not mirror those of the protagonist-a special, quieter kind of ludonarrative dissonance. Alex isn't professing to be a good person while killing thousands of faceless enemies, as that phrase generally indicates; she professes to possess trouble with her unique talent while using it couldn't be any simpler for the player. If you take as soon as where Alex discovers her power and hiding it in backstory, the player does not get to experience the emergence of those colorful auras alongside her. Instead, we have to trust what the story is telling us, while what we're experiencing informs us something else.
Pacing is another problem when it comes to True Colors' story. The inciting incident comes early in previous Life is Strange games, so the remainder of their respective chapter ones have time to begin their stories in earnest. In True Colors, though, Gabe's shocking and brutal death comes in the end from the first chapter. Giving Alex and Gabe time together is essential to provide the gamer by having an emotional motivation for locating the reality behind his death, but it also means the story doesn't attempt 'till the end from the first chapter. When compared to first Life is Strange, which puts the inciting incident as close as you possibly can to the beginning of the game and then lets its various plot threads branch out from there, True Colors' feels so singularly minded because of how it starts. There's Gabe's death, the grief over Gabe's death, an unnecessary romantic subplot, as well as an undeveloped and uncomplicated plotline about Alzheimer's that, while tragic, barely pays off. Gleam chapter in the middle of the sport that is almost entirely dedicated to a live-action roleplay involving most of True Colors' key characters that will happen to be great inside a game that gave more time towards the remainder of its more compelling story elements. As it is now, that chapter just takes up a significant amount of time that would happen to be better served elsewhere.
In essence, True Colors feels more like a spin-off than the usual mainline entry, and lots of that has got to use Haven Springs itself. The small town atmosphere is pivotal to the story that True Colors tells, however the game's adherence to its setting makes everything feel claustrophobic. It's not only that True Colors is set almost entirely in one place; the first Life is Strange did exactly the same thing with Arcadia Bay. Rather, it's how the game and the plot utilize the town. Life is Strange had Max and Chloe hopping in one reason for Arcadia Bay to another in Chloe's beat-up truck, making the city feel both small and open, the whole world and merely a small sector of it at the same time. In True Colors, you can fully walk around Haven Springs, go in and out of buildings, only the main one block from the town the game enables you to explore, and just several interiors that you will revisit again and again. Because the story keeps you associated with such a small place, Haven Springs feels like a limitation rather than a feature. It's especially ironic taking into consideration the vast mountainous vista that surrounds the city, dominating the landscape. Mountains seem so small when viewing them from such a distance, and so too will the world that Alex inhabits.
In the finish, though, Every day life is Strange games live and die by their characters, and Alex certainly ticks all the boxes of the good protagonist for the series. She's introspective, thoughtful, confused, anxious, inquisitive, artistic, and sensitive, and she likes you the people round her, without or with her superpowered empathy. The supporting cast, too, has its own standouts, particularly in Stephanie and Ryan, Alex's cohorts in uncovering the truth about Gabe's death as well as her potential romantic interests. Ryan has lived in Haven Springs all his life only found a brother when Gabe moved to town. Stephanie, meanwhile, was transient her entire life until Gabe made her feel that she belonged. If the Life is Strange series is most notable just for how much it gets you to worry about its characters, regardless of the flaws of its plot lines, then True Colors will the franchise justice in that regard. And, from the representational standpoint, Alex is essential in the video game landscape-another series tradition continued.
True Colors also advantages of an enhanced engine. The game's visuals provide a lot more detail for the characters and also the scenery while still managing to keep the series' softer, unmistakable look. From the purely visual standpoint, Haven Springs is completely stunning-just looking at it can make it clear why so few people who arrived at the city wish to leave. But it's within the full motion capture performance and improved facial animations where True Colors really comes to life. You get the sense the actors were finally permitted to fully get the job done, while taking some from the acting onus from the animators. If you squint, you are able to almost convince yourself that a few of the cutscenes are live-action. The technological advancements used to create True Colors allow the artists at Deck Nine to bring Every day life is Strange to, well, life like nothing you've seen prior.
Despite its faults, Life is Strange: True Colors does feel like it earns the franchise's title, even if inside a more limited capacity of computer should. Having taken over from series creator Dontnod, Deck Nine-which previously developed Life is Strange: Prior to the Storm-still includes a ways to go whether it wants to produce a Every day life is Strange title that does not feel secondary. But it does understand the reason for an existence is Strange game, which is to cause you to feel something. More than every other series, Life is Strange enables you to think that its characters and also the world they inhabit constitute a genuine, lived-in life-through exactly what the characters say, the things they think, and just what they observe, the random detritus of lives lived. True Colors certainly doesn't get to the heights that its predecessors have, but it is a good reminder that Every day life is Strange is still as essential a sequence just like any in the video game medium.
