IMPORTANT NOTE: This post will reveal crucial plot details from Life is Strange: True Colors because I feel it's necessary to seriously discuss the game and it would be silly to spoiler tag practically the entire post. It's intended for those who have already completed the game or else just don't mind knowing what will happen in advance. If that doesn't describe you, this is your chance to click away.

Don't think I've actually discussed any installment of the Life is Strange franchise before at any kind of length here, so I figured since I just wrapped up my second playthrough of True Colors, playing according to my instincts the first time and as differently as possible the second to see how different I could make the experience.

Those who follow my posts I guess may not necessarily suspect this, but Life is Strange actually hasn't been among my favorite gaming franchises. You might notice that Gone Home, which LiS borrows some game play and thematic elements from, routinely ranks among my top 5 all-time favorites, yet, if paying close attention, notice conversely the conspicuous absence of this franchise from my annual top 50 lists and wonder why. Well it's because, to me, Life is Strange as a franchise has felt comparatively half-hearted all in all. Enough resources go into the graphics and play length for sure and certain thematic elements that have been rare in mainstream gaming are staple features of LiS, but the more essential things like the near absolutist and intensely cliched portrayals of cliques, rampant overacting (as though saying everything louder makes it more convincing), and especially the hella bad writing in general make it evident to me that the people behind these games have made only a superficial effort to understand how young adults (especially today's) actually talk and think and live because it just doesn't matter, apparently. True Colors has proven an exception to this rule for me, representing a VAST improvement in the basic quality of writing, voice acting, and often of character arcs as well, to state the obvious. Clearly far more genuine effort has been put into this title than preceding entries. I definitely think this the best game in the franchise to date. Overall, I enjoyed my time with True Colors! But at the same time, I still have a very mixed opinion.

My three favorite scenes were...

#3: The LARP. Just about everyone seems to like this part of the game. I was genuinely surprised at the expansiveness of the LARP and the level of interactivity present within that framework! I especially enjoyed playing out classic Final Fantasy-style turn-based battles (that made me laugh), Steph's EPIC transformation of her record store into a magic shop, and the concluding encounter with Jed, but also really everything. It was so sweet how all the residents chipped in to try and help out this one young boy heal just a little from the trauma of losing Gabe. The charming dorkiness of it all made me smile. A lot. It's an experience that's genuinely unique to this game. Nothing like it can be found in any other video game (at least to my knowledge anyway). I've never done a LARP before IRL, but it sure the hell seems like fun! Might have to find a way of trying it sometime.

#2: The spring festival. Okay, this was just fun. Festivals like these are how small towns tend to get most of their incomes. That's just a reality that I'm intimately familiar with. They're absolutely crucial cultural events for those sorts of places and this game really captured the spirit of them pretty well with it's bean-counting challenges and folk type music and town lore and distinct rituals (like in this case the rose) and just everything. It was sweet! I felt the love for small town America in the spring festival. The best part though IMO, obviously, was meeting Steph afterward and the kiss. That beam of light spreading out over the land I think really raises the bar for lesbian kisses in this medium. In case you're wondering what destination I chose, of course it was Salem; was I seriously going to choose anything else after getting to meet witch Steph in the LARP??

#1: The trippy dreams guided by Gabe. This is the point where the game really had me the most. For Gabe to act as Alex's subconscious here and make you correct your own memories of these traumatic events that can't help but feel like a cumulative rejection by the world was just something especially powerful. Your family are supposed to be the people who love you the most. What happens when they leave you? Well I kind of know what that's like, but not what it is to lose everyone at such a young age. Yet you know these things happen. What must that be like? There was just something about the format here, even the sort of metaphor of different levels of pain concentrated in Alex's second fall midway through, that really made me connect emotionally to Alex herself on a level that I just hadn't quite up to that point. While reading her exchanges online (especially the older ones) helped me get a certain, evocative sense of who she was (including some painfully familiar experiences around feeling fetishized and so forth), all in all Alex herself had mostly felt like just a hollow stand-in for me as the player. This was the scene that really established her as a person in her own right with a lived experience of her own. I appreciated the inclusion of that a lot.

I also really love lots and lots of characters in this game. Steph and Duckie are definitely my favorites, but Charlotte is also an especially interesting character to me. I thought the inclusion of Charlotte's character arc, including the fact that there's nothing Alex can do to genuinely help her and that she ultimately has to conquer her own pain and anger, was an especially honest and mature inclusion. Matter-of-factly, I kind of wish there more truly life-like character arcs like that and somewhat fewer simple video gamey solutions to everyone's problems. But anyway, Pike and Eleanor were great characters, even Jed really. And Diane is the perfect corporate PR drone for her role. I also enjoyed most of the online exchanges people have, which smack of a lot of realism. As something of an internet politico myself, Ashley and Aaron's online political quarrels made me chuckle every time because, let's face it, that's exactly how it is and we all know it! Also of course the option to play arcade games and stuff in-game. Always like that sorta thing! Really though it's the music that's a particular strong suit here. I'm 100% with the very alternative kinda vibe thereof and the game's unabashed celebration of vinyl and cassette tapes and just being of a counter-cultural spirit.

HOWEVER! Let me be honest and frank in saying that really the main quest -- the murder mystery here -- is overall kind of a weak element that I just didn't find that emotionally compelling or plausible. Night in the Woods is another choose-your-own-adventure type game that's set in a small, American mining town, narratively centers a female bisexual character around the same age, features in-game video games (well okay, one, but you get the point of comparison I'm making), and also features a mine-related murder mystery of sorts. One struggles not to reach the conclusion that the one game might have in some way influenced the other even. But Night in the Woods backgrounds the murder mystery stuff as a secondary aspect of one's playthrough in favor of primarily focusing on character development, whereas True Colors foregrounds its version of murder mystery and I feel suffers a lot from doing so. It also suffers from being a fully voiced choose-your-own adventure rather than one that relies on text-based dialogue like Night in the Woods because the constant interruption of conversations with mostly pointless dialogue choices really reduces the immersiveness of the experience for me a good amount. Convos quickly come to feel unnaturally choppy in a way that they just don't in text form. I couldn't help often wishing that basically only the most meaningful dialogue choices -- the ones you have to confirm before going through with -- were left and that the rest of the dialogue was just decided by the developers because when I compare the general flow of conversations here to that in say The Last of Us or The Last of Us Part II, I...just can't help feeling like the plain old cinematic format, because it flows so much more smoothly, is actually more genuinely involving than constantly making narrative choices that only alter one line of dialogue anyway. This is a genre challenge. The AI technology needed to have sophisticated, life-like conversations with machines just isn't there yet. We have to face this reality.

My final thought is that also Ryan...just doesn't belong in this game. He's a sweet guy, but he consistently feels out of place in every scenario he's placed in. He's the type of impossibly ideal guy who seems as though he just stepped out of a Hallmark Christmas movie and just doesn't seem like the type of person you'd meet at Steph's counter-cultural record store or participate in a geeky LARP with or find in the same friendship circle as Steph, and least of all romance after he wound up being the one who cut the rope that saw your own brother plunge to his death. And he's conveniently Jed's son for some additional soap oper-y melodrama? Come on now! Behind his unnatural, clearly forced presence in this game, I sense publisher pressure to include a heterosexual romance option for Alex despite the fact that the average LiS player is almost certainly there for something else. (I know I am.)

Okay, those are my thoughts! How'd you feel about this game (anyone)?

I have it installed, but might take a while until I get to it. Can't read the OP yet, thanks for the spoiler warning!

I hope it's good :) Any spoiler free indication how long the game is? Got to plan it in lol. (Just got a ps5 and already have a stack of games to play, where is the drought when you need it!)

I had similar experience for the series.. really liked the first game but couldn't get into the others. Moving forward to True colours, this one I could get behind. Albiet with some caviats, which I won't spoil.. I'd actually rate this one over the first.

Definitely worth a play if you liked the first game.

Fundamentally, I'd recommend it to just about anyone really. True Colors is definitely the all-around best Life is Strange game.

If to give a personal numerical score for quick summary, whereas I'd personally score previous installments of LiS maybe a 5 or a 6 (depending on the particular game), this one I'd give more like a 7.5 or an 8, so still not really close to my definition of perfect, but a substantial improvement compared to all previous games in the franchise. The writing quality and voice acting are much better and you'll notice the difference immediately. Also, dialogue choices are often more meaningful than in previous installments, the world is also more expansive and lush and the cast of characters I think you'll find the overall most endearing in the franchise to date, and the decision to ditch the series' traditional episodic format was certainly the right one. That's about as good as I can do for you spoiler-free. You'll want to read the OP for my opinion of the game's greatest specific strengths and shortcomings (both of which are predominantly narrative) once you've played through the game, but for now suffice it to say that my baseline recommendation is that you buy it.

You missed the drought by a month. I'm currently rotating between Deathloop and Kena myself and am eagerly anticipating Solar Ash next month, so I know what ya mean! (And that's not mentioning Metroid Dread, but that's on another platform.)

True Colors took me about 12 hours to play through the first time, though I took my time and was thorough. Some playthroughs I'm seeing posted to YouTube right now are about 9 hours or so, but I'm guessing those are less leisurely than was my approach.

This series is not my thing, because at my age the young adult angst scene is just insufferable to be honest. However, I have seen a lot of this on Youtube because of curiosity. Adventure games have always been my favorite kind, so I wanted to find out if these games would be serviceable in that regard. Nope for me.
Some of the main characters that one is supposed to be rooting for are just obnoxious and self centered in multiple ways, I don't understand how the relationships depicted here are supposed to be good and healthy at all.
I gather the sexual minority representation is a big draw here for some people, but I think fans looking for that are getting short-changed here in a bad way. The characters are terrible, the writing is terrible, the dialogue is terrible and the visual presentation is nothing to write home about either.
I haven't seen very much of True Colors to be fair, maybe it's a step up from the previous games as Jaicee said.
Just my two cents, for what it's worth.

Thanks, will be over 12 hours for me then :) I like to explore and try different things. I played Road 96 for over 100 hours and that's only a 8 hour game lol. 5 play throughs to try all the combinations and had it running a lot in the background for the music. Fun little game.

I posted some more commentary over in the comment section of the official VGC review article for the game. Thought I'd link to it here to hopefully foment more discussion.

No worries, I just didn't have much else to do at the time, so thought I'd try and revive this topic. Glad I got one whole reply out of it.

Well anyway, of course you're right, the choice has traditionally existed in this franchise, but what I'm getting at is that it just doesn't seem natural here to me. What I've heard is that the developers wanted the player to choose Steph as their partner, which makes complete sense to me because it really does seem like you're supposed to. In general, the choice doesn't feel like it's an equal one. It feels weighted in a certain direction by any number of factors, but because especially obvious when you compare the depth with which their respective meet-ups after the spring festival are explored by the people who made the game. There was clearly more heart behind one of these options, and indeed about two out of every three players do wind up picking Steph. I guess I'm one of those people who feels like rather than trying to convince players of what their better option is and designing much of the game around doing so, why not just keep things simpler?

I agree that there's logical room here for Gabe to have had more than one friend in town before Alex moved there, but I'm just saying it seems like it would've been somebody else. As to that hypothetical other friend needing to be male, *shrugs* I don't really care one way or the other. Ya make me feel weird. Much of my childhood (and some of my adulthood for that matter) was spent withough any friends who were girls/women as applicable.  Hell, just think about all the other ladies here for that matter. That's not been too unusual a scenario for me, although you're right in that it does get a little awkward sometimes. Well what I'm saying is that I could perfectly understand somebody not having any friends of their own sex, personally, so that wouldn't really make a dif to me one way or the other.