REVIEW : Life is Strange: True Colors (PC)
Certain things happen when they have to happen, sometimes more by chance than necessity. If Animal Crossing: New Horizons made us escape to a distant island during the lockdown, Life is Strange True Colors comes at a time when our empathy was destroyed by forced confinement. In recent months, we have all wondered, at least once, what the limit was between caring and caring for others to the detriment of our survival.
When does being empathic become a defect, transforming us into a receptacle of emotions belonging to all the people around us, which we deal with by sacrificing our own? With the risk of starting to think that, perhaps, sometimes it is better to take care of oneself first, or even only, to the detriment of others?
This is what Life is Strange True Colors talks about and this is what Alex Chen, the twenty-one-year-old protagonist of the story of Deck Nine, worries about.
The studio that inherited the baton from Dontnod, at the helm of the Life is Strange franchise, finds itself with a big cat to fry. Because if Life is Strange Before the Storm was appreciated, there was a setback for Life is Strange 2.
Alex Chen is a girl who, with her brother Gabe, had to live the exhausting life of family homes. With parents harassed by problems and unhappy choices, Alex lived in several families before deciding to stop, finally getting back in touch with his big brother whom he hasn’t seen for eight years. A big brother who lives in Haven Springs, a mountain town in Colorado made up of a small community of a few people, but very close to each other.
Thus begins the umpteenth life of Alex, 21 years old who from the first moment you will learn to love and with whom you will easily get in tune. Thanks to the use of performance capture for the first time, and the consequent acting of actors and voice actors in a state of grace, Alex and all the other characters of Life is Strange True Colors are immediately human, they move, react and make expressions in a completely natural way.
Due to the engine’s stakes, in previous episodes of the franchise, it was impossible to use the body language of the characters, who were severely limited in terms of expressiveness. In Life is Strange True Colors finally there is extensive use of grimaces, glances, winks and gestures, which allow you to enter into total … empathy (!) With the protagonists and supporting actors of the story.
The same empathy that Alex experiences as a curse, because her power is to perceive the emotions and true feelings of those around her. When someone experiences strong anger, disappointment, regret or fear, Alex sees a colourful aura around that person, and by concentrating he can listen to that individual’s thoughts and, if he wants to, feel that same emotion and see the world at the same time. way.
Embracing a person’s strong anger makes her blood boil too while absorbing someone’s anguish makes her lose faith in everything, makes her feel defeated. These backlashes of her ability have made Alex a shy girl, wary of others but no less ready to sting with sharp jokes and scathing comments when she feels it.
While the mystery linked to the Typhon, which chapter after chapter turns out to be more and more a multinational with skeletons in the closet, Alex begins to interact with the inhabitants of Haven Springs, settling in the small town. Real shock therapy for a girl like her who, due to her power, has never had completely peaceful relationships with other people.
In the course of the chapters, you can learn many secondary stories compared to the main one. The couple of guys in which both are struggling to declare themselves, the girl uncertain about her training path who does not want to feel judged, the fate of a small ice cream shop in the hands of a married couple who have different ideas about the future of the bankrupt business, and many others.
You can interact with these people, listening to their thoughts and perceiving their feelings, to help them solve their problems. Even when the dialogues of the characters are only a background, in outline concerning those with which you can interact, they are never thrown there. Life is Strange True Colors works very well to give solidity to the whole narrative context of Haven Springs and those who live there, with characters who comment on events like ordinary citizens who have their say on what is happening.
Everything is extremely credible thanks to writing that never gets lost in trivializations or stereotypes, as it sometimes happened in the past. Hand in hand with the direction of the scenes, with the wide shots and long shots of the environments to which the series has accustomed us, and details that tell the world around Alex without falling into the didactic exposition.
Life is Strange True Colors manages to create a crescendo without ever losing rhythm, where the dead moments are only those that the player takes to explore.
The reflections of the characters involved are profound, the doubts that arise on the nature of their feelings are always legitimate and never out of place. You will find yourself faced with powerful, sometimes shocking revelations, concerning which you will have to take an irreversible choice that will force you to invest several minutes of reflection. All of us have had to manage a strong moment of sadness or anger with the choice to repress it or make it our own to understand its nature and solve it, becoming better people.
Life is Strange True Colors fully uses the greatest tool of fiction of the fantastic and the surreal, that is the ability to tell real and current themes using the filter of fiction. The nova Alex is involved in is nothing more than the things that happen inside us, every day. And the doubts of the protagonist are the same we experience when we approach these events.
