Played: Life Is Strange, Episode Two: Out of Time (2015).
This game - an episodic series that relies heavily on narrative and is all about choice and consequence - is doing a far better job of making things feel like they matter than any recent outing by Telltale Games, the company who pioneered this model. While that sucks for Telltale, here it’s magnificent.
There’s also genius in the choice of protagonist and setting - Max is an eighteen-year-old photography student who wilfully embraces her indie-kid aesthetic in a way that feels deliberately nostalgic while staying utterly genuine. The relationships in this don’t feel like they’re on rails, either - you make a series of social choices, but they rarely play out in such a threadbare way that you can see the structure underneath.
Episode three is out in May. I can’t wait.