By Paul Attard ’15 | Staff Writer

By playing video games, we are able to escape reality and become our ideal selves. The scenarios may be impossible in the real world, but the simple decisions made in the game are as real as anything we decide in our everyday lives. That’s why games like “The Walking Dead” fascinate me, they make us choose different paths, allowing us to escape from our real choices and make choices without any real consequences.

The sign of a good game, however, makes us hesitant to reach these consequences. In the newest episodic game from Dontnod Entertainment, “Life is Strange,” I haven’t cared this much for the characters involved and my relation to them in a long, long time. Due to this, I believe it is an excellent game.

Teenager Maxine Caulfield moves back to her hometown with few friends. She talks to the devout Catholic Kate Marsh, restarts her friendship with emo girl Chloe, and is interested in missing student Rachel Amber. Amidst all of this drama, Max learns she has the ability to rewind time, a tool she uses to unlock the secrets of her friends and save them from an upcoming storm Max has been having visions about.

With an indie soundtrack that’s a mixture of a Bon Iver and Modest Mouse watanabe and some terrible voice acting not helping, I had my doubts about the game at first . But, the main device of the game –the ability to rewind time– allows for some of the most organic character building I’ve seen in a while. Every conversation can be rewound and the player can see the outcome of every conversation. The game won’t “trick” you into picking a certain path. It lays out all the options for you and you alone make the choices. Most of the time you learn there are no easy choices, for seeing all outcomes of a conversation, you go back in time, decide on a choice, and then go back again to re-examine what you chose.

With this ability, speaking to characters can reveal so much without feeling like blank exposition. You can go one route with a  conversation, learn a vital fact about the character, and then go back to re-start this conversation. Again, the game never wants to “cheat” you into a situation, but to fully understand the weight of these interactions.

Much attention has been brought to the fact that the game stars a female protagonist, a rare inclusion not many games see these days. It’s rather refreshing to see a game expressing diversity by having a female lead who’s intelligent and personable. In a gaming culture where most females are shoved off to the side or placed as a pedestal, it’s a welcome change for “Life is Strange,” making the game feel even more unique.

To remain spoiler-free, I’ll briefly describe the moment when I think I fell in love with the game. In the home stretch of the second episode, Max has to save a girl from committing suicide, but her power has mysteriously vanished. There’s no going back in this conversation. It’s do or die time here, and one false choice might result in her death. In order to save her, you have to remember certain interactions earlier in the game, knowing that every choice you make will be final. After playing through nearly two episodes, while the time travel effect is used wonderfully, it can also be used as crutch against making mistakes, which affects the overall difficulty of the game.

In episode two alone, there are several moments that require time travel, but now it’s all taken away. This kind of pulling the rug from under my feet moment rarely comes along this excellently executed anymore. In the day of the military shooter where it’s main focus involves the same thing over and over again, having ‘Life is Strange” around makes me believe that videogames are art again. For right now the first two episodes of the game are available, with the third due in May. The game could go down the toilet for all I know, but for now we have the contender for ‘Game of the Year” here.