Alex Chen, the protagonist of Life Is Strange: True Colors, describes her hidden superpower as a curse. And over the course of five chapters that hold the series’s traditional decision-making and character-building at bay, players may feel as if this leaden game is itself cursed. Alex’s power of empathy—as opposed to the first Life Is Strange’s time manipulation gimmick and the sequel’s focus on telekinesis—serves a singular passive purpose across the campaign as she interacts with puzzles and the people of Haven Springs, Colorado, and takes away our ability to figure out just anything out for ourselves.
In the world of Life Is Strange, you walk around a fixed area, interact with people and objects highlighted in white squiggles, and make choices that affect your relationships. The wrinkle in True Colors is that when Alex uses her empathetic superpower, new and colorful points of interaction appear in the environment. A blue-highlighted foosball trophy reveals a memory of sorrow, while a purple CCTV camera keys us to a person’s fear of surveillance.
In games of this nature, you normally have to make your own determination about whether a person is trustworthy or not because you don’t know what they’re actually feeling. But Alex’s superpower leaves nothing to the imagination, as everyone literally shows their true colors. The game’s one-note representation of interiority is, then, a far cry from the vivid ways in which films like The Cell and games like Psychonauts convey the ways in which people see and feel the world. A few exceptions aside, such as a live-action role-playing game in which your costumes and enemies become more realistic as you bond with your teammate, True Colors doesn’t show the world in a new light so much as it slaps an Instagram filter over it.
Worst of all is the way in which True Colors entirely glosses over mental health and the ramifications of Alex’s actions in particular. We learn, over the course of the game’s chapters, that Alex and her older brother, Gabe, were separated eight years ago when he was sent to juvie and she bounced between a series of orphanages. But while we’re told that Alex gets overwhelmed by other people’s strong emotions, this only happens once, and very early on, when she uncontrollably defends her brother from a local’s jealous rage.
From there on, even when gripped by intense fear or sorrow over Gabe’s abrupt and possibly intentional death, Alex is able not only to stay in control but to ultimately calm others by suppressing those overwhelming emotions. The Life Is Strange series is about showing the consequences of actions, and yet we see none of that when Alex is given the choice to absorb a single mother’s anger or a well-intentioned cop’s fears, stealing away their feelings.
True Colors also suffers from an unfocused narrative. The game is split between two halves, the stronger one being Alex’s attempts to start up a new life in Haven Springs and the far more cliché one being Alex’s amateur investigation into her brother’s death. This results in a lot of awkward scenarios where the game either has to find ways to make Alex’s love interests, affable park ranger Ryan and nerdy radio DJ Steph, a part of the investigation or to come up with reasons why Alex would be setting aside her detective work to flirt.
At least, though, the interactions during these particular stretches of the game are somewhat illuminating, insofar as we actually get to see how Alex, Ryan, and Steph evolve as individuals. Too many other character interactions are optional and easy to miss, so you might never know why Riley Lethe’s relationship to school is so fraught or why the normally loquacious Duckie is prone to suddenly clamming up. And, ultimately, the narrative builds to a dissonant whiplash where one minute Alex chases her friends away to dig into a piece of evidence only to just as suddenly set aside her pursuit of justice to sing on stage with Steph.
True Colors already feels closer to an interactive movie than a game, especially in the final chapter. Here, we’re plunged into a series of overly expository flashbacks in which our decisions have already been made for us. There are fewer choices to make and interactions to discover as we’re led toward a narrative twist that’s as convenient as it is messy. You can see the seams in the editing as the game’s engine chooses which of two responses you’re going to get from each member of the town council, depending on how you interacted with them in earlier chapters. Were you ever actually empathetic toward these people, or simply tallying up points to get them on your side? A stronger game might have better concealed this behind-the-scenes scorekeeping, but Alex’s power makes the game’s true colors all too visible.
The game was reviewed using a code provided by fortyseven communications.
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