No Filter Sunset

[PC] Life is Strange Before the Storm

Hey, life is always strange, even when there isn’t a storm blowing.

Took me awhile in order to play this game, I wanted to wait till all the episodes came out. I thought it’s gonna be five episodes following the last game’s footsteps. There are, however, only three episodes. Definitely a lot shorter than the first Life is Strange. It came out almost three years behind the first one but the graphic was just about the same as before. The characters still move like pull string puppets with weird head/hand/body movements of awkwardness. There is unnecessary long pauses between conversations  and terrible voice-acting with lack of in-game character facial expressions.

poor excuse for a pillow

You play as pre-bluehair rebel Chloe through her journey with pre-dead Rachel Amber and you’ll learn how they ended up becoming friends. That being said, there’s less choices to make in this game. Maybe because it’s shorter or you’re lack of ability to rewind anything you regret. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot of choices to make.

In this game, instead of photographing shit,  you get to graffiti shit on shit.

and her marker never dries

If you miss anything, you can collect them in collector’s mode. Same as last game. Also, to stretch this game, it added on “back-talk” for Chloe. By choosing the right smartass comeback, Chloe can successfully talk her way in or out of something. If you succeed, you get bragging rights, and proceed in the game. If you fail, the game will still proceed almost the same way. The story line never changes and it doesn’t matter what you do. The thing about making a choice-making game that is a prequel of something already happened, really doesn’t give you much flexibility on how you want the story to go. Because you know what eventually will happen.

I’ll be using Beyond Two Souls as an example. It’s not a very good example considering it is a much bigger game with real actors playing the parts and shit. However, the concept of two games is similar: you follow through the game and make choices. In Beyond, the choices you make affect the story greatly, and you either enjoy or suffer from it. In Life, it almost doesn’t matter much of what you’ve chosen. Because you know whatever you do is not going to flip the story around. During Episode Two, Chloe had a choice to either listen to music together with Rachel or listen alone. If you choose listen together, it will obviously enhance your relationship with Rachel. If not, you’re still cool ’cause that’s not gonna stop you from going to Episode Three and have an ending with Rachel. So you see what I mean.

In the end, just like the first game, you’ll be able to make one ginormous choice which will determine the ending you’ll get. Sounds serious as shit but there’re only three endings. One good one bad and one secret. If you don’t like the ending, just reload last checkpoint and choose again or watch it on Youtube.

ya ya ya

[PC] Last Day of June

Last Day of June features clay-like little people with small bodies, large heads and empty eye-sockets for eyes. No words spoken throughout the entire games. You’ll only hear your characters’ grunts, screams, yells, exclaims and so on. The game doesn’t seem impressive, yet it is.

In the beginning, the main playable character Carl and his wife, June are sitting by the lake. They then get caught in unexpected rain and start driving home. On the way home, they get into an car crash June passes away and Carl ends up in wheelchair. The game then allows you to play as the other four characters in the village that end up impacting June’s life: the little boy, the woman who’s moving away, the mustache man with the gun and the old man with beard. And no, they don’t have names for those characters.

just chilling in my tree house bro

What happens next is very simple yet complicated. You will have opportunities to play each character in a certain order. Once you make a choice with one character, the choice will further impact your next character, and so on. For example, if the moving away lady uses a rope to tie up her suitcase, her suitcase won’t fall out of her car. But then, the little boy won’t be able to use the rope to tie his kite (yes, you need a rope to fly a damn kite in here). The kite flies away and the boy chases it into the street, then causes the car accident. If the lady doesn’t use the rope, her suitcase flies out of her car, causing the car accident. Either way, you can’t save June.

You do have chances to go back to previous characters and undo your previous choice. Then again, the choice will domino effect your ass when you continue. It’s not a choice that’s you cannot undo. You can always go back and fix it later. Carl and June, on the other hand, can’t drive three feet on the road without getting into a car crush. And all that you do in the game, is to avoid doing stupid things that triggers June’s death. 

It’s definitely not a difficult puzzle game. I never got stuck in this game and I get stuck in games a lot. It took me about three hours to complete it. Besides your main quest, you can also collect floating heads. Ya, literally floating heads. If it’s on PS or Xbox I’ll probably get an achievement for getting all of them. Now because it’s on PC so fuck me. Besides collecting those heads, you also need to constantly rewind your previous character’s mistake, and watch those intro and ending scenes over and over. That takes a long time out of your play time. I saw the car crash scene like about fifty times. There isn’t a way to skip any of it either.

The third act of the game is very different. You play as the old man. By then you probably thinking, what can the old man do that can prevent a seemly unrelated death? The answer ties to the ending which I will not spoil. However, I do need to say that it ties perfectly with the rest of the game. And the ending…oh wow, just wow, make sure you have your tissue boxes. I did not expect the ending at all. It’s probably not how most of us gamers envisioned it. There isn’t an alternative ending. Just the one. And it’s perfect. 💗

 

[PS4] Life is Strange

Thanks to my PC Gamer magazine, I learned that Life is Strange 2 is coming out soon. Or is it the prequel? Oh, who cares. It’s the second game in the series made by the same people. I finished the first game about a year ago, only on a few of sittings. Ya, it’s not a long game. It’s an interactive, choice-making game that kind of resembles the Walking Dead game series. There are five episodes all together but you can play through them quite quickly once you know what kind of choices you want to make.

You play as Max, a college girl dealing with regular youth drama who just discovers that she has power to rewind time. Which means, playing as her, you can also rewind the choice you just made and go with a different direction if the first one doesn’t work out for you.

However, with each choice that you make, you will end up with different outcomes or consequences, as what this game calls them. For example, you see a girl getting bullied. You can choose to not help her but that might damage you in the long run. Or you can choose to rewind time and help her instead, which will piss off the bullies and give you a different outcome. You can’t exactly win in this type of game. You can try to make a choice for the “best” outcome that you think but then it always turns something else upside down. The best way is to play through it like a “what would you do” kind of situation. And play through again with different choices that you made in the first try and see what would happen instead. Since your character can rewind time, you probably will never settle with the first thing you say or the first choice you may. It’s kind of cheat of course. But whenever you’re playing other choice-making games, you would find yourself saying, “oh, shit. I wish I haven’t done that.” In Life is Strange, you don’t have to wish, just gotta rewind.

Now, the story is very fresh. In the beginning, it felt very much like typical high school drama. Unpopular vs popular, jocks vs nerds kind of situation. A girl has recently gone missing. Max is dreaming about a massive storm while reuniting with her childhood best friend, Chloe. Along the way, you can read Max’s personal diary, take photos of people dancing like idiots, meet new people, make conversation choices, make breakfast choices and rewind the shit out of every choice you make. Which by the way, you don’t ever find out why/how you have this ability. I guess that’s why you have the Prequel? For me, it didn’t get interesting until the end of Chapter 4, when the hidden villain in the end, which I didn’t expect to be whoever it is at all.

The whole Chapter 5 felt intense. It was very well done. But they end it up with you making a choice of your life. Okay, I get it. It’s the end so they gotta give you something. But what about the choices I made throughout the game? None of that meant ape-shit by the time you get to the end. I thought I initially got to that point is because of the stupid choices I made in the game. I went on a second play-through but end up with the same choices in the end. I finally looked it up and it turned out, it doesn’t matter what kind of choices you made throughout the game. You will always end up with the same ending choices. You choice one of the two, and you will watch the outcome of your choice and the game ends and leaves you wondering what the other end is. And no, you don’t get to rewind this time. The credit is too long, you can’t rewind pass all of that shit, you’ll get bloody nose. Wooo….bloody nose. That’s serious ok. So I’ll think the only way to see the other end is to replay the entire chapter or watch it on Youtube. That’s what I should’ve done. I got really bored replaying it the second time knowing how it would end. Knowing that you can’t change the ending no matter what, that’s what’s sucks about it. I still enjoyed it though. Hopefully second game is better. I don’t think so you get to rewind this time.

[PC] Broken Age

I saw someone playing this game on Twitch. I liked the art style of it and decided to give it a go for myself. It’s appears to be a very casual, point-and-click game and you can choose to play between a boy and a girl. It really no matter who you choose in the beginning, because you can simply change between characters whenever you wish.

The story unfolds as you progress with the game. Nothing is thrown at you in the beginning. Ya, I don’t like stuff being thrown at me. Anyhow, you’ll slowly find out that the girl is being sacrificed along with few other girls to a fly with no wings looking monster who’s being terrorizing everyone in exchange to the safety of her entire village. The boy lives on a space ship with his smothering and over-protective mother, dying to participate in anything dangerous. How do these two people connect? I thought to myself quite often during the first act of this game. I really didn’t know how there’ll be any connection of the sort. It took me awhile to find the answer to that question. And it simply amazed me when the two characters finally cross the path. I will not spoil anything as usual. But it definitely took me by surprise. Like damn, I didn’t see that coming. 

After the first act, there’s couple of more hours of gameplay for ACT 2 and 3, if you take your time or don’t really know what to do like how I was. I got stuck a few times and not sure where to go or who to talk to. The game doesn’t offer hints but the characters do give you small hints every now and then. Might just have to try/use/combine all the items in your inventory in order to figure it out. No matter what you do, your character can’t die. He/she might just call you an idiot in the game but it’s okay nobody else knows. Like, “Oh! I didn’t know I was supposed to throw that squirrel at the dog, so he can go chase after it and leave his bone behind so I can pick it up and use it as a back-scratcher”. Ya, this is not in THIS game, k. But you know what I’m talking about. Troubles you run into when playing a point-and-click leveled puzzle game. So I finally finished it. The ending was kind of weak for my taste. It sort of just ends. Doesn’t necessarily do justice to the awesomeness of the plot of this game. But that’s just my opinion. What do you think?