Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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Cyberpunk 2077 (Vers. 1.61) Review
Played on PS5
{Warning: Spoilers Ahead}

Cyberpunk 2077. A game I wanted to talk about since it was released in 2020. I had strong feelings back then but after 2 years, I wanted to see if anything has changed. Maybe I was wrong or maybe I’m more of a Shadowrun guy.

Story

Quests

The best part of this game is the Maelstrom quest. I know this quest is brought up the most and for good reason. This was the centerpiece of the E3 demo because of its variety of choices in how you interact with it.

1) You can show up and buy the flathead bot with your own cash and walk out with no problem
2) Walk up to Royce and shoot him in the face to skip his boss phase then fight the rest of his gang
3) You can contract with Militech and pay with an infected shard leading to a shootout with Royce as a mecha boss and walk out to Militech controlling the scene
4) You can hack the Militech shard, pay for the flathead and get a stealthy approach for the next couple of fights and
5) You can hack the Militech shard and inform Maelstrom that Militech is on to them resulting in you and the Maelstrom fighting together against Militech
0.5) You can save Brick and depending on whether Royce (and DumDum) lives or dies will affect an Act 3 side quest (Second Conflict)

This quest alone is great and clearly shows potential for what we can expect in quality from the upcoming quests right? Nope. No quest in the main story comes close to this in terms of variety in both gameplay and narrative which is a shame.

Side quests vary in quality but a shining example is Dream On for me. Aside from being an Aerosmith fan, It perfectly encapsulated the existential dread of having your mind warped by outside forces and you being none the wiser.

A terrible quest is Lizzy Wizzy’s which, apart from having Grime’s awful voice acting, ends ‘off-screen’ and we get caught up via text messages. A large chunk of this game is told through text logs and it takes away from my enjoyment.

Cyberpsychos are mini-bosses and suffer the same complaint of being text-based. Cyberpsychosis is wasted in this game but gets brought into discussion more so because of the Edgerunners anime for better or for worse.

Gigs are sub-side quests and involve more gameplay variety with some encouraging you to talk through situations for a better outcome, but most come down to go here and shoot some people or find an item.

NCPD hustles are simply small skirmishes with a loot reward. Sometimes they’ll have some journal entries about “lore” but it's inconsequential.

Braindance

Braindances (BDs) are cool in concept as well as the in-universe explanation for how people make/distribute them but in execution, they’re just so BORING. They play like the detective parts from Batman: Arkham Origins with worse visuals. Seriously, looking through the vision layer in these parts is unpleasantly ugly.

The first BD mission is when you scope out Yorinobu’s penthouse suite to find Silverhand’s relic. It’s detailed with tons of minor things to scan for information through vision, audio, and thermal layers alongside an optional objective to scan Yorinobu’s security systems (which doesn’t amount to anything but is still something to do). This is the most fleshed-out BD the game has to offer and every subsequent BD we encounter pales in comparison. I’m starting to notice a pattern about the front-loaded quality put forth here.

Music

Cyberpunk wears its musical influences on its sleeve proudly. Every main and side quest is named after song titles reflecting that story’s theme. “Heroes” by David Bowie is used for Jackie’s ofrenda matching the bond V had with him (minus the lovers' allegory) to “Dream On” by Aerosmith reflecting Peralez losing his mind as it's altered by an unseen force to use him as a puppet for unknown ulterior motives to “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone showcasing a serial killer using himself as a martyr with crucifixion to escape his judgment through atonement yet being taken advantage of as a brain dance.

This rings especially true for Judy’s final quest “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead (of course its Radiohead) mirroring her feelings after losing everything close to her in Night City with Evelyn, Maiko, Tom, and Roxanne dead as you explore her hometown underwater reminiscing on her past (also her having lyrics from “Parallel Universe” by Red Hot Chili Peppers tattooed on her arm, “Underwater where thoughts can breathe easily…”).

It also extends to the endings of The Devil – “Where is my Mind?” by Pixies (better known as the song at the end of Fight Club), The Star – “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix/Bob Dylan, The Sun – “Path to Glory” by Plasmatics, and Temperance – “New Dawn Fades” by Joy Division where just reading the lyrics of the song defines the emotion/tone of the ending with Temperance being the best point of reference.

CDPR got Refused to write Samurai’s tracks and I think they were perfect for the job. My exposure to the band was from “New Noise” which encapsulates Samurai’s punk roots. As for the radio and original soundtrack, I didn’t care for much of it since they don’t appeal to my awful taste in music except for the addition of “I Really Want to Stay at Your House” from the anime which I don’t like.

Combat

The player has a tremendous number of options to experiment with from sprinting around with a shotgun and double jumping like it's Doom, creeping in and out of a hideout stealthily without alerting anyone/popping headshots with a silenced pistol and optical camo, sitting in your car while using quick hacks through cameras to melt brains and convert turrets to your side as well as sniping through walls from afar with a tech rifle. Cyberpunk offers a healthy amount of variety in how you want to approach combat your way and encourages personal flair for a playthrough.

I’m concerned with the enemy AI and how they’re meant to challenge the player in working around certain resistances and tactics. It's not necessarily fair to say that the AI is dumb per se but more in how the player has too many options to be countered. More often than not they’ll just stand around and clip into vehicles.

My biggest disappointment with combat outside of cyber ware abilities is net runners. has and cool hats. Can you guess what they have? 2 QUICK HACKS! Ping and Overheat. Meanwhile, my net runner can jam guns, blind eyes, drop grenades, turn knees weak, arms heavy, and make brain spaghetti. I was hoping that enemies would at least use Reboot Optics, Weapon Glitch, and Cripple Movement on me to encourage taking out net runners first but are instead outclassed by a cyber ware mod that negates fire damage.

Driving

You can’t do a wheelie on a motorcycle 0/10.

On a serious note, driving is a mixed bag where some vehicles can turn on a dime while others can struggle to make a right turn under 5 mph. My rule of thumb for a game’s driving quality is by easy it is to make a right turn. I often test via handbrake, slow down to 0 mph or let off the accelerator at high speed before I turn.

This varies from car to car like supercars, sedans, muscle cars, and bikes but there is a factor that slights against me. Steering. The default driving setting for most cars is to oversteer like Johnny’s Porsche. The sensitivity can be adjusted from an update but some cars understeer like V’s starting car so it can’t be evenly distributed on a car-to-car basis (that and I’m far too lazy to test every variable to make driving bearable).

The same can’t be said for motorcycles. I tried. I have tried every variation of motorcycles to try and make it work but they JUST WON’T TURN. It doesn’t matter if I slow to a crawl or drift, the bike either understeers off the road or oversteers the drift to mess up the angle of my turn. Maybe it’s due to the god-awful physics where cars can fly into the air off the slightest bump in the road and how often I can just barrel through other vehicles at full speed without slowing down.

The best thing about the vehicles is their interior design. Every car has its layout filled with detail from where the speedometer is located to the display of your current radio station to looking at all the buttons and knobs gives you the thematic difference between luxury cars and nomad cars.

Let’s shift over to the racing side quest. It’s bad. How bad? The AI has absolutely no feasible way to chase you or fight you in this manner, I mean gangs and police already can’t chase you in the overworld so what should I have expected? If you’re too far ahead of your competitors, they’ll rubber band so close to you that the minimap has a seizure trying to keep up. Enemy cars can shoot you, but Claire pretty much guns them down before you’ll even notice unless you pick a car with wing doors (like the Caliburn) then you’re screwed since you can’t fight back and blow up.

Gear

I like loot. I enjoy games like Borderlands and Nioh so there’s clearly something wrong with me. A part of me likes to see numbers go up to prove how much better I think I am at the game, and it appeals to my love of number crunching in making various builds based on my stats/perks. The problem is that this game wants to be a looter shooter without the commitment to its own system.

Weapons will have a variation in their damage type (fire, shock, poison, bleed) and sometimes have an exceptional trait like the pistol shown in the picture above. Weapon stats are negligible even when going into rarity tiers as the only difference is a slight increase in damage. Special traits have the potential to add some variety with some guns removing vertical recoil, reducing charge time, increasing ricochet chance/amount, etc. except they aren’t something you can reliably obtain.

However, a really cool thing is that every gun has like 6 different reload animations (3 for partial reload, 3 for empty reload). It’s something I hope more games would start doing considering how often players reload in an FPS and it adds some flair.

Iconic weapons are the exception to my complaints about weapon variety/traits. They’re reskins of existing weapons but have variants that make them unique like Problem Solver which takes an SMG and gives it an 80-round mag with an absurd fire rate, Chaos is a tech pistol that cycles between fire/poison/shock damage during reloads, Plan B which uses your money as ammo and my boy Skippy who lovingly sings Rhianna’s “Disturbia” and thanks me for reloading. He is the best and no one shall dare talk smack about him or else I’ll… cry in the corner so beware.

Weapon mods are simple stat increases to damage, fire rate, and crit chance/damage as well as adding muzzles and sights for most weapons. The only muzzle you had were suppressors until it took them around 6 months to add a muzzle brake to the roster. Sights are your standard red dot/ACOG scopes with a bizarre caveat that gives you a -0.01 to ADS time which is such an insignificant modifier I’m not even sure it’s worth explaining why this is dumb. Also, am I the only one that thinks it's weird to not have any way to increase your ammo capacity both for reserves and/or apply an extended magazine for a weapon in an FPS?

Clothing is just as worthless in terms of stats as you only need to look at the armor stat. Some gear will have a trait like more damage to enemies at a lower level than you and small cooldown reductions, but they only serve for defense alone. There's a commonality with RPGs like this where you’ll wear a hodgepodge of ugly clothes for the stats and this game is no exception to how stupid I’ll look.

They did add transmog to alleviate this problem however it took them 2 years to do this and they already had this system in place at launch. Outfits functioned the same way except you only had 3 outfits, a militech suit (used once for the heist), Big Boss’s MGS5 hospital attire, and a hazmat suit. Transmog also reduced clothing stores to a place where you want to buy a specific jacket or shirt for your costume making the entire function of buying gear worthless.

Stores are available to purchase weapons and clothing to upgrade yourself which would be fine if their stock wasn’t randomized. There have been updates to make each store more consistent in what they have to sell but their convenience is undercut by simply going to an NPC, fighting them, and looting them for gear roughly scaled to your level rather than paying for an overpriced item that gets outpaced relatively quickly. Consumables like med kits and food are EVERYWHERE so why bother with medic/food shops?

Crafting is a flawed mess of a system but it's only useful when you’re at max level and you want to play with iconic weapons consistently. Sure you can craft grenades, med kits, and gear but you can find them easily by looting so you’re better off just crafting ammo. Upgrading gear is pointless since you can find always find better gear for free.

Alternatively crafting quick hacks breaks the rule about gear because it scales through level/attribute rather than gear score so I can craft a legendary Contagion at level 8 and it’ll carry me through the entire game. Cyberware is technically an exception but they affect your playstyle with attachments to your arms and legs. Double jump, mantis blades, and mono wire are the most popular because who doesn’t want to double jump while smacking people with machetes taped to their arms or with a light-up jump rope? However, I want to mention the PLS cyberware as it doesn’t get much attention.

The Projectile Launch System is the equivalent of having a grenade launcher in your arm so why isn’t that as cool as it sounds? Because it doesn’t have any damage scaling, damage output sucks and it requires a smart link but doesn’t lock on. The only reason to use it is if you give it non-lethal rounds which knock out enemies with one shot no matter what. Be aware that the explosive radius can dismember and kill them so it’s not 100% safe. I still find it funny how it's nonlethal to blast a rocket at someone’s face. Batman would be so proud.

Finally, I’ll talk about inventory bloat. It’s a similar complaint that I have for The Witcher 3 where there are so many items that share the same effect. The picture above shows roughly 96 consumables with different art assets. All food heals the same amount and all drinks increase stamina the same amount so why bother giving me all these options?

TL; DR My Stupid Opinion
I don’t understand Cyberpunk 2077. It wants to be everything at once but nothing feels finished or fully developed. Some side quests start and end abruptly, we have a 4 mission-long racing and fist-fighting tournament but no shooting tournament. The police spawn directly behind you and can't chase you when you’re in a vehicle but can also be negated by driving less than half a block to remove your wanted level. This is supposed to be a Next-Gen RPG yet it took CDPR 2 YEARS to meet the standard other games have achieved in less than half the time. I still vehemently disagree about how this game is ambitious, it's just an unfocused mess, as I hold Red Dead Redemption 2 as a more ambitious game.

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I didn't do a review of True Colors because it is a game that I find hard to talk about, but replaying Life is Strange really gave me a device to put a lot of my thoughts into a context I could process. So this following thing you are about to read is kind of a review of Life is Strange, through the lens of a review of True Colors. Or maybe the other way around. Hopefully it'll make sense once read. If not to you, then at least to me.

So, firstly, it is important to note that True Colors is a game I love, one which resonates with me so deeply I’d argue it is one of my favourite games of all time. But replaying Life is Strange made me realise that maybe it isn’t very good? Like by conventional metrics at least?

Maybe?

Look, by my own definition, conventional metrics don’t matter to me a whole lot when it comes to how much something makes me feel and that is why I am able to love True Colors with no reservations, but for the purposes of a review… let us talk more about those warts.

Firstly, let us talk about pacing. True Colors is in far too much of a rush to get to a climax that honestly just isn't very good. Had the game basically made the first two chapters the entire game I feel like it would have made for a far more powerful experience - even if I think the experience we have is plenty powerful already.

With the context of The Storm, which looms large over the whole of Life is Strange and brought the whole experience to a cathartic, satisfying, crescendo which is reminiscent of the original Last of Us ending (depending on the choice you make) before Part 2 fiddled with it. True Colors just has no comparison, it isn't even competing in the same league.

Life is Strange's problem is the opposite though, in that it is in absolutely no rush to get to an ending which absolutely slaps. In True Colors, you want to savour every moment with these characters, in Life is Strange, I am often trapped in a cage with uninteresting or unlikeable characters I'm forced to engage with to progress. And yes, at least in part, this seems to be somewhat intentional, but knowing the intent doesn't remove the friction.

And even if it did, it doesn't solve just how ***** tedious Life is Strange is in the moment to moment. I really wonder how many sequences here were mandated, rather than there to truly give the player anything interesting to do. And I mean, if the intent really was to give the player something interesting to do... my word, you failed about as hard as one can fail. Life is Strange would have been an immeasurably better of an experience had they taken those sequences out of the game entirely or just turned them into cutscenes. At least in my books.

To put this into perspective, two thorough playthroughs of True Colors clocked me just under 20 hours, I was only a couple of hours shy of that in just one play through Life is Strange, and based on my journal I missed a bucket load of stuff in that game.

So on measure, both have their evils, but I’d argue Life is Strange’s evil the greater one, as if I must choose, I’d rather it rushed than boring.

A big part of the problem with the pacing is Life is Strange does seem to be trying harder to be more “gamey” (by conventional standards). You get excruciating stealth sections, insta fail puzzle things, maddening boss battles, tedious memory games and other rubbish. All of it is clearly there to be used as pacing mechanisms, but it doesn’t help pace the experience, so much as it grinds it to a complete halt as you either seethe at the unnecessary frustration of some sequences due to the general clunkiness of this whole thing, or simply struggle to even keep your intention on the game at all for how utterly bored you are.

For as much as people complained about True Colors “walking sim” elements, as you mostly walk around and click on things until the next conversation starts, Life is Strange again is the greater evil for me. I actually am not surprised now replaying this as to why True Colors basically removed this stuff entirely, if Alex needed to convince Ryan her power was real by telling him what action figure he got for his 4th Birthday, what type of cake it was, how many candles were on the cake and what shoes he had on, and you fail this until you remember all four things in an exact sequence, then I might not have ever finished that game.

And yeah, those characters, man. There are a lot of throughlines between the two casts, everyone has their unique flaws, but the True Colors is just the better version for me, I'm sorry. Despite how fleeting the whole thing was, I felt like I formed quick connections with all of the core cast and cared for them deeply by the end of it all. Despite the heavy themes, just hanging out with your pals and vibing in Haven was its own reward there, no matter how fleeting these moments are.

Yet in Life is Strange I spent twice as long with everyone and liked them all an absolute fraction of the amount I liked the True Colors cast. Life is Strange is a cast defined by their flaws, rather than simply given dimension by them, which makes for a generally unpleasant bunch.

Part of this, admittedly, may be down to Life is Strange’s technical limitations and heavily stylised visuals. Whereas True Colors felt truly vibrant and alive with its rich facial animations, and excellent mocapping of the physical performances of the actors, to accompany the vocal performances, Life is Strange feels like a Gerry Anderson production by comparison. (Will any non-Brit get that reference?)

In Life is Strange, everyone stands around awkwardly cycling through those weird movements that only make sense in video games (like who in real life keeps touching the back of their neck over and over again during a conversation?) as crazy looking eyes dart around inside of almost entirely static faces, devoid of almost all detail entirely.

And I mean static literally, too. I dunno if it was a bug, or just bad animation, but there were a bunch of really pivotal exchanges that were ruined for me because the lips just literally weren’t moving at all and the actor was making some emotional declaration and it was coming out of this: (._.).

Not to mention you can mostly tell people are just reading a script in isolation in Life is Strange and it translates to the conversations, which often lack a natural cadence and flow. True Colors got the actors in to do their scenes together and act them out, and it has an immeasurably positive impact on how conversations feel.

I also just think the Life is Strange artstyle in general is just kinda ugly, ya’know? Like Arcadia Bay can be gorgeous, there are some nice cinematic moments with the framing and lighting etc but I dunno, why in a game so obsessed with photography, is so much of this seemingly all done in Microsoft paint? It makes me laugh every time they remark on how great a piece of artwork or whatever is and it's just a scribbly stickman that looks like a placeholder. And this might be some kind of deliberate device because we see Max’s photos normally, but Max’s photos, despite what the game tells us, are also awful, even in proper detail. What is an everyday hero about a self shot of the back of someone’s head?

I will say, along the course of the journey, Life is Strange’s smoke and mirrors game is definitely the stronger of the two. It manages to make choices feel meaningful and impactful, and when they don’t feel like that, there is probably a narrative device already built to explain that away.

True Colors, on the other hand, is almost devoid of meaningful choice entirely, except for key choices and even with the key choices, these choices aren’t weighted by any other actions taken, so they feel hollow and isolated. No matter what you have done up until this point, if you press X in this exchange you are always going to get Y every time. Maybe Life is Strange works in the same way, but it tricks me into thinking it doesn’t, by referencing and calling back to smaller choices I made along the way, rather than just being built around a few key ones.

This does, however, ignore the elephant in the room which is the time travel mechanic in Life is Strange. Which, even by the very poor record of good time travel narrative devices, still somehow seems like one of the worst. It establishes rules, quickly dashes them whenever it becomes too inconvenient for the writers and then by the end you can barely follow how anything works at all.

At least in the early chapters, I do like how we explore Max’s abilities and how her abilities are directly interwoven with the core narrative. And for as utterly off the rails it comes by the end, my goodness does it make for a ***** spectacular final stretch. Although along the way, you will become baffled by how limiting this mechanic actually is in reality and will be ripping your hair out at times when there is such an obvious solution to something using your power that the game just doesn't let you do. Maybe that is also part of the reason I didn't like Max too much, as at times she just comes across as so ***** stupid and you are practically screaming at your screen for her to do something.

By comparison, you can’t help but think of how much of the potential of Alex’s powers in True Colors is ultimately wasted. Sure Alex can't mess with time and space, but we brief explore the idea of how Alex's power allows her to manipulate people or the potential damage that can be done should Alex take away someone's emotions entirely with her power. There was definitely an opportunity for a Chapter 3 and 4 in Life is Strange style moment where Alex uses her power with good intentions to make a massive change, and has to face extreme consequences for those actions. But no moment really comes, at least not in quite the way Life is Strange presents these moments.

No, in True Colors the power is just sorta… there, it doesn’t have any real direct effect on the game and it is clearly an inconvenience for the narrative to bring people up to speed, so people just don’t even blink when Alex says she has powers. It kinda makes me wonder if they felt like they had to include something because it is a Life is Strange game, but the entire game was built to work without it and it was added later.

My tl;dr is that I liked True Colors more on a pound for pound basis for how much True Colors made me feel, for the excellent characters, visuals and performances. Life is Strange also gave me newfound appreciation for True Colors in how it had the smarts to do away with almost all of the gameplay that makes Life is Strange so tedious to play in the moment to moment.

But on the flip of that… damn if Life is Strange isn’t just simply a better story, in the end. Messy and full of plotholes maybe, but my word this narrative goes to some places. Maybe it didn't emotionally resonate me like True Colors did, but I still appreciate what Life is Strange did with its ideas. True Colors ultimately leaves so much on the table, this really makes the most of every beat and I respect Life is Strange for giving me a bunch of choices which I genuinely struggled with in my personal life over making.

So yeah, there is kind of… a lot here. But I hope this made for a good read, anyway.

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It is me again, back with another Life is Strange Review. This time for Before The Storm, I bet you are all so excited 😂 I am just so glad I have this space to get my emotions out so I'm not jus crying myself to sleep. 😂

Life is Strange is a special game to a dedicated core group of superfans, however, the original LiS didn’t resonate with me in the way it has with others, not on the first playthrough all those years ago, or through any subsequent playthroughs like my most recent one. In fact, the franchise in general general wouldn't reach that mythic status with me like it has done with so many others until years later when I played True Colors for the first time and experienced more emotion in that ten or so hour runtime than I might have experienced in my whole life up until that point. Sort of only half joking.

I start there, because I get why Before the Storm divided the fanbase and still does to this day. Square Enix took something that is basically held sacred by people and handed it to a completely different studio. There are those who out of principle were always destined to hate Before the Storm before even the first line of story was written, and while I think that is unfair, Deck Nine do themselves few favours with BtS, especially when it comes to continuity. The mistakes in that regard are almost too numerous to list, creating plot holes for the core game it is meant to be a prequel to and is just simply not the way a new studio goes about endearing existing fans.

That being said, when all was said and done, I loved Before The Storm and in fact I would even go as far as to say I like it more than the core game. It is a fallacy, maybe, but as much as I am irked by it's continuity failings and unnecessary plotholes, it makes decisions which enrich the core LiS game, in ways often so obvious you wonder why Don’t Nod didn’t do it themselves.

Chloe, a once somewhat flat and abrasive manic pixie dream girl twinkling in Max’s eye is brought to life in dazzling technicolour here, giving her all the depth, charm and charisma the core game often told me about, but rarely showed. And so in turn I now have the emotional connective tissue and sympathy for her that I sorely needed throughout the core game.

Rachel, at least in the core game, is far more of a concept than she is a person. We learn things about her during the course of the game, there are developments, twists and turns, but they are all held at arm's length away from us, because everything we know about Rachel is third hand, we never truly knew her. And by design, accounts of her are disparate depending on the source, angel or demon, so we are never able to truly know her based on these accounts, either.

Deck Nine were given a seemingly impossible task here because of this, to turn all those disparate third hand accounts of Rachel and combine them together into a flesh and blood cohesive human being. One who feels real and tangible. One whose gravitational pull can have a profound effect on those around her, like we were always told it did. One who could give the impression of angel, or demon, equally depending on the audience. And honestly, I think they ***** nailed it. Rachel is all of these things, and more.

It has a profound affect both on this game in the immediate sense, but now in the core game all those developments, twists and turns which once meant nothing to me as a player, now they mean everything. There are many scenes in the core Life is Strange game that fell flat for me, because they assumed a level of connection with Chloe and Rachel, but I hadn’t much of a connection to either. Rachel, as already explained, was as real as Santa Clause to me, and Chloe was barely any more tangible. We saw an idealised Chloe through Max’s lens, never Chloe the real human being, not really. So as she mourned her friend, or learned of her betrayal, or other such things, why should I care, when I know next to nothing about either person involved? Well, now I have a reason to.

Before The Storm has fun playing with parallels, too. Chloe is as much of a concept, rather than a real person, to Max, as Rachel is to Chloe here. And Rachel offers Chloe much of the same liberation she would in turn go on to offer Max. You also can't help but think about the betrayal, and ultimate end, Rachel will go on to commit, in contrast to at least one of the choices Max ends up making to close out the core game. Is Rachel the storm? Or is the storm just the toxic spiral these broken, *****, people find themselves in as they drag one another through their orbits?

Either way, I appreciate Before the Storm for this. Now if I ever replay the core game, when scenes once fell flat, my heart will now break, not once, but twice. For the Chloe I have grown a deep connection with and the Rachel I now know just as deeply. When people recount the Rachel they knew in the core game, I can share those experiences, because now I knew her too.

Miss her too.

Most of the time when people try to explain a mystery, it only loses all of its magic, but the character writing by Deck Nine is so strong, the more the mystique is replaced by reality, the more the magic itself grows.

My feelings towards Rachel and Chloe by the end of the first episode alone, felt stronger than anything did for me in the entire of the core game, this is that rich emotional tapestry Deck Nine so masterfully crafted in True Colors, and its absence in the core game is made so obvious because of this.

In fact, in many ways, BtS is as much a spiritual prequel to True Colors as it is a direct prequel to the core game. The lead writer here would go on to become the director of True Colors I believe, and it can be felt. TC and BtS are both Life is Strange games, but they have a subtly different feeling to them.

The supernatural and grand poetic narratives take a backseat here to mostly the more mundane moments of life that happen between those grander moments games tend to focus on. The supernatural is here, but only ever implied, never cemented. You can read this game in one way, but in others that have a transformative effect on the core game in the process. I appreciate the game leaves this to my interpretation.

Under Zak Garriss you make far less meaningful choices than you did in that core game, but it is far more focused on the characters and how you express yourselves through them with your choices that way. Garriss also seems far less preoccupied on trying to make things conventionally “gamey”, which for BtS has an immeasurably positive impact on the overall pacing of the game, versus the core one.

I know when listed like that it sounds like Deck Nine’s formula is far worse, and if you liked the formula of the first Life is Strange, I can understand why BtS’s shift in focus may not be appreciated, but I find Deck Nine’s character writing so strong, it overrides any other faults with their approach. Again, to me, being able to feel something is more important to me than anything else, and Deck Nine knows how to make me feel every emotion in life like detail.

The elephant in the room this time is definitely the voice actor changes, apparently there were some strikes with voice actors around the time this was made? Weirdly, I’ve never heard about this before and don’t think I’ve ever had this impact on any other media I’ve consumed, but as a result basically everyone in this game has been recast. Again, if you feel a deep sense of love for the original, this is going to hurt and it was definitely noticeable for me to begin with as I went straight from the original into this. However, I actually pretty quickly stopped noticing after a while, if I am being honest.

As I said in my last review, while I know it is somewhat of a controversial opinion, I actually don’t think the voice acting in the original LiS is that great, a lot of it is really flat and just sounds like people reading scripts, rather than having genuine conversations. That is mostly true of BtS as well if I am being honest, but people seem to act like the acting in BtS is comparatively garbage compared to the core game, and I just do not agree.

What elevates Deck Nine’s acting beyond the really strong character writing though is Deck Nine properly mocapped the performances, so its now no longer flat acting combined with weird Gerry Anderson puppet character models stiffly touching their neck over and over. Deck Nine is still held back by LiS’s ugly art style, but now people act with their faces and their bodies, it feels as natural and real as the artstyle allows, it really does so much for the performances when they aren’t being carried entirely by the voices alone.

To close, I would say maybe the greatest crime of this game is we don't get to spend even more time with Rachel than we do, but like Chloe, I feel as a player that even a fleeting moment with Rachel Amber is better than none at all.

I feel truly grateful for being able to have experienced this.