At this point I think I've told about 10 different people that I'm reviewing these games together, and just about every one of them has asked me the same thing: 'Umm... why?' and, you know, now that I've actually sat down to write it I think they might have been right to question it. Honestly, why review two games with similar design philosophies that both tackle themes about growing up and loss of innocence and that have a focus on their characters, choice, conversations, dialogue and story over their gameplay and that are both largely centered around misfits from small town America dealing with sinister and supernatural elements in the second half of the month of October together. Makes no fucking sense! but now I've already started writing this shit and I don't exactly have time to turn around and review something else given that I don't have completely inexplicable and equally contrived time-travel powers Oh well. At least having a point of comparison allows me to say a lot more about the way I feel about these 2 games without having to outright spoil anything. Given the aforementioned similarities and the fact that by the time I'd completed the both of them I'd caught enough Rye to put Nature's Pride to shame It also handily gives me a really good yardstick with which to measure their respective qualities because while one of the games managed to create a living world full of interesting characters who all felt very real and human and well as able to connect with them in a on a deep, personal, and emotional level. The other one was Life Is Strange. Hi, I'm Shammy, and welcome to my channel! I'm a bit like someone NRA t-shirts with skinny jeans because I really like to keep people guessing Now, since I'm essentially going to be mercilessly beating Life Is Strange with an aluminium bat for about half of this video I feel like I should probably preface it by saying I don't have any problems with the intent that Dontnod had going into developing it. I actually think the intentions behind Life Is Strange are pretty great, but unfortunately that's not really what I'm here to review, and its mostly irrelevant when the game itself is a complete narrative mess and, as it turns out, thats sort of an issue for a game that's entirely being sold on it's narrative In spite of that, Dontnod had a few ideas that I genuinely thought were pretty neat, and I'd hope that if anyone working there somehow stumbled across this review they'd be willing to take it as the constructive criticism its meant to be and not the aggressive, personal attack against their years of hard work that I'm about 90% sure its going to come across as, because its abundantly clear to me that they cared immensely about telling this story right. That being said... [clanging sound] They didn't. But I'll get more into that in a bit, Because I wanna go ahead and get my criticisms about the gameplay in both games out of the way first because there's obviously very little of it to talk about and it's also the least interesting part of the both of them, just to insure that i'm tanking my average viewing time as efficiently as humanly possible. Life is Strange takes the usual Telltale approach to design, were the gameplay is separated between walking around talking to the various NPCs while making superficial choices and exhausting their dialog trees and cutscenes were you make the slightly less superficial choices that guide the story along its mostly fixed rails. Not inherently a bad thing, just nothing I haven’t seen before. The only really notable difference from a gameplay perspective is that the walkie-talkie bits are in third person and not shown using a fixed camera, which some people might say makes the game a lot less cinematic but I don’t really find constantly having to reorient myself and occasionally walking into walls to be the height of the cinematic experience so I can’t really say I mind the change. Oh, and you also have the ability to reverse time in order to go back and change your decisions. I know that’s sort of a major thing to throw in with no explanation as an afterthought, but hey, I’m just trying to immerse myself in the writing, get the hell out of me. All in all, it’s neither particularly bad nor is it particularly good, and as a result it’s not really interesting enough to be worth discussing any further. Night in the Woods takes its presentation one step beyond changing the camera angle by changing the camera angle to a sideÂ-scrolling view and pretty much abandoning any pretense of being cinematic entirely, opting instead to let the writing and extremely charming art direction carry its narrative. As I mentioned before the game is set in autumn and, as a result, has a color palette comprised mostly of warm colors like brown, yellow, and orange, which makes it feel very cozy and homey as well as a making it very effective backdrop for when the story starts to tackle how cold the world can be and how nothing, not even home, stays the same forever. It’s a contrast that perfectly complements the game’s themes and story, and it also just makes the game really fucking nice
to look at. As for the gameplay itself, it’s still pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a game like this. You walk around talking to the various NPCs, exhausting their respective dialogue trees and developing relationships with them based on the dialogue options you choose, broken up by playing a few quick little miniÂ-games. I personally found the majority of these miniÂ-games to be pretty bland and uninteresting, but they’re obviously there to change up the gameplay so it doesn’t get too monotonous and are honestly just aren’t really worth complaining about. As far as the branching dialogue trees go, it’s worth pointing out that the differences between lines can be about as superficial as those in Life is Strange from time to time, but the characters and conversations are generally much more interesting so it didn’t ever really bother me all that much. Part of me does wish that Night in the Woods had taken Oxenfree’s approach to this, where it shows the branching dialogue choices while the other character is still talking so that conversations could have a faster, more realistic flow to them, but this system does have the clear advantage of showing you the exact line of dialogue that you’ll be saying rather than just an approximation of it. That, in combination with the fact that there’s no voice acting to make the lulls in dialogue as noticeable and awkward as they would be otherwise, is enough to make this approach work for me. None of it is groundbreaking or even particularly great, but it’s exactly as good as it needs to be. What is great, though, is the fact that Night in the Woods’ completely inexplicable inclusion is another entire game called Demontower that is shockingly competent in its own right. It’s a pretty bog standard top down pixel art hack and slash type thing that probably would’ve been the tits with fries if it was released in 2012: You kill enemies, find the key to the boss room, kill the boss, repeat ad nauseum. It’s obviously not perfect, the level design is pretty uninspired and the fact that some attacks can hit you twice is patently bullshit, but it balances increasing the player’s power with increasing difficulty better than the majority of the games I’ve played over the past few years, and while it is a slightly bizarre inclusion it’s definitely a welcome one that offers a nice bit of variety that even the best games in this genre tend to lack. Now before I get into talking about these games’ stories, I want to circle back and talk about what I said in the introduction about Dontnod not telling the story of Life is Strange 'right' really quick. I think you could pretty easily make the case that they did tell the story 'right' because the game succeeded in delivering the intended message to the people playing it, and while that’s a fair argument I would still argue that that definition of telling a story 'right' is not the same thing as telling a story 'well,' and Life is Strange’s story is told so poorly that it barely feels like it’s interested in telling one at all. Actually, if I was asked to describe what Life is Strange’s story feels like I’d probably say something along the lines of one of those PSAs that you’re forced to sit through in middle school. You know the ones, they’ve always got really obvious messages in them like: don’t bully anyone, wear a bicycle helmet, smoking is bad, don’t… stab people. You know, the classics. Now the reason that Life is Strange reminded me of these is largely because of the fact that, and understand that this is coming from someone who halfway unironically says “rad,” “lit,” and “hella, the dialogue in this game is some of the most artificial, pandering, snake person garbage that I have ever fucking heard. I’m convinced that if they could figure out a way to use emojis in dialogue they- oh... Oh wait, right. Okay, listen. Here’s a hot tip for any aspiring writers out there: If you feel like you’re having to try to make teen dialogue relatable, it's not. There are very VERY few things that become outdated and awkward to hear faster than slang, and the things the teenagers say in Life is Strange are so out of touch that it feels as if they were written by beings that exist on a different plane of reality entirely, which is… Yeah, you know what, nevermind. That’s... Not too far off. To be fair, Night in the Woods isn’t completely exempt from having dialogue that feels about as artificial as a YouTuber’s apology video, it’s just that there’s a lot more space between the lines that feel distinctly “written,” and that the space is more often than not taken up by good shit and not memes from 2009. The characters and their personal arcs, for instance, are probably the game’s biggest strength to me, which is not something that I expected to be saying after I played through the game’s introductory scenes. That’s not to say that the characters are particularly weak at the beginning, per se, it’s just that they felt very archetypal and shallow to me. Gregg was the happy-Âgo-Âlucky “fuck the police” loudmouth, Angus was the smart and quiet one, Bea was the standoffish chain smoking goth girl, and Mae was the rebellious miscreant who wants to be treated like an adult but doesn’t want to actually grow up herself. However, as the story moved along the writers did that whole “their job” thing and built upon the foundations they had established to give the characters a whole lot of genuine personality and depth. Bea is my personal favorite, but I’m willing to concede that that could just be because Bea’s BÂ-story (fuck you) is the one I played through and I haven’t gone back to play the game again to do Gregg’s because I feel genuine pangs of guilt at the thought of not being there for her when she needs it, which I think demonstrates just how well realized these characters are better than pretty much any stupid joke I could write about them could. Unfortunately, on the flip side of that, the major characters in Life is Strange don’t ever really make it past the whole “shallow archetype” phase. Most of the main and supporting cast can essentially be summed up in one or two sentences: You’ve got your main character, Max, the shy, kind, talented, smart, new girl that several characters hate for no reason other than her just being too perfectÍľ her best friend Chloe, an angsty punk girl with authority and abandonment issues; Kate, the sweet and innocent GodÂ-fearing Christian girlÍľ Warren, a socially inept niceÂ-guy nerd who couldn’t keep his dick soft at a funeralÍľ and the bullies, who are so cartoonishly evil that every time they’d open their mouths I’d roll my eyes so hard that I could watch my brain losing higher functions. Now I’m not saying that people like this don’t exist in the real world, because believe me, I know they do, I’m just saying that the dialogue used to characterize them has all the subtlety and nuance of the fucking Fat Man. I wouldn’t have minded it so much if the game had bothered to develop them at all, but with the exception of some slight development for one of the bullies they stay essentially one-Ânote for the entire game. Obviously I’m being slightly reductive right now for the sake of comedy and there is a tiny bit more to the characters than I’m making it sound, but the amount is negligible at best and I stand by my criticism that they’re unceremoniously Nagasaki’d into existence and never quite manage to feel like real human beings who existed before the story began and who will continue to exist after it’s ended. That last bit in particular becomes really glaring if I double back and directly compare them to the characters of Night in the Woods, because in addition to being far more complex, likable, and layered, they all have personal history with one another that exists for reasons other than simply pushing the main story forward. Characters like Bea and Mae have clearly known each other since childhood and have a complex relationship because of it, which is actually reflected in the way that they behave and interact with one another rather than just being something explicitly spelled out in a few throwaway lines of dialogue. And while Mae and Gregg have also known each other for several years, that relationship is completely different, which is, again, obvious from the way that the characters interact from their first scene together all the way to the very end of the game. Outside of some artifice to a few lines of dialogue and a few scenes and interactions here and there that felt a bit contrived, the characters in Night in the Woods feel like real human beings in a mostly grounded reality which is incredibly ironic given that of the two games this is the one about cartoon animal people. Here, I’ll give you an example of what I mean: if you decide to go to the mall with Bea, there is a scene in which you shoplift what is essentially a Hot Topic for no real reason whatsoever. Without the context of who the characters are and the history that they have together, this scene is really fucking stupid. For the entire game up until this point, Mae has been trying to act like an adult, unsuccessfully, mind you, but she was making an effort nonetheless. Because of this, it would feel really sudden and really stupid for her to drop all pretense entirely and to go so far as to call pointless and petty shoplifting an “experience,” especially when the slow moving shoplifting miniÂ-game makes the act of theft itself feel very deliberate as opposed to a quick “in the moment” sort of action. However, the scene works because of the context in which it’s delivered. Mae is back with someone she knew when she was a delinquent kid in a place she used to frequent when she was a delinquent kid, so the nostalgic memories and her own desire for things to go back to the way they used to be caused her to act like her old delinquent kid self again as a last ditch effort to cling onto the childhood that seems to be all but dead upon her return to Possum Springs. With the full context and history, it’s a great scene, and it encapsulates a lot of the reasons that Night in the Woods’ story works so much better than those of the vast majority of these storyÂ-driven adventure games. Now, I mentioned toward the beginning of this review that both of these games seem to be pretty heavily inspired by The Catcher in the Rye, which is obviously fine in and of itself, but while Night in the Woods’ inspiration is mostly limited to having similar themes about growing up and a whiny sometimes-Âhard-Âto-Âlike protagonist, Life is Strange seems to feel the need to jerk off on the pages at least one time per episode. The protagonist’s name is Maxine Caulfield, for fuck’s sake, and if that reference goes over your head the first time it’s awkwardly interjected into the dialogue you’re in luck, because just about every single character that you interact with in the first episode desperately searches for an excuse to say the entire thing. The first time it happened I was already slightly annoyed, because making the name of your protagonist a Catcher reference puts you on ice so thin you may as well be standing on the surface of Mercury, but by the third time a character unnecessarily crammed her full name into a sentence I wanted to force feed the writers a cheese grater. It did get less annoying as the game went on, though. Not because the references were less inÂ-your-Âface or obnoxious, it’s just that I started to sort of enjoy the irony of the fact that the game that wants to play pitcher is also the one that seems to have missed the fucking point entirely, and you’ll have to excuse me, because I’m about to go freshman level litÂ-major on your ass and explain why. For anyone who’s never read The Catcher in the Rye, or anyone who only halfheartedly skimmed it in high school, one of the primary themes that acts as a throughline for the entire novel is that the quoteÂ-unquote “adult world” is a cold, phony, and unforgiving place. However, running parallel to that is the fact that the story is all about how incredibly self destructive it is to approach the world by explicitly viewing it in that way, and how alienating yourself from friendships, relationships, and society as a means of protecting yourself is ultimately more harmful than the real world really is. Holden’s issues with the adult world largely stem from his own actions and the fact that he’s kind of a complete fuck up of a personÍľ he constantly complains about how phony everyone is while simultaneously being the single most phony character in the entire novel. He’s meant to make teenagers feel empathetic and adults feel sympathetic, and it’s the entire fucking reason that the novel works at all, so you’d think the people who constantly draw attention to the fact that it was a major inspiration for them would have maybe picked up on that. Maxine Caulfield doesn’t really bring any of the shit she goes through upon herself, and the few times her actions do have negative real world consequences for her it’s still never due to her intentions, which is, again, missing the fucking point entirely. “Oh but Shammy, "obviously the game isn’t trying to be The Catcher in the Rye, "it’s totally different, "you just didn’t get it.” You know, cunt, I’d probably be more inclined to believe you if Dontnod’s copy of Catcher in the Rye didn’t have all of its pages stuck together. It’s annoying, because the incessant references make it so much harder for me to appreciate some of the other themes that the game introduces. One of the major ones, for instance, is that growing up and being an adult means that you have to stop wishing you could go back and change things that happened in the past and instead accept the fact that they happened and learn to grow from it. That’s actually not bad, and the game gets bonus points for tying its themes to its game mechanics, but as I said before, it felt so steeped in its desire to be the Catcher in the Rye of video games that I found it really hard to appreciate those bits for what they were. Another thing that makes it difficult for me to appreciate the good bits of Life is Strange is just how much of a technical mess it is. I’m not even talking about the fact that the lip syncing is so bad that it would’ve taken me out of just about every scene if the dialogue and complete lack of voice direction hadn’t already fired me so far out of the scene that I was colliding with the Andromeda galaxy, because that was pretty obviously just a budgetary issue. I’m talking about the fact that I experienced so many bugs in my playthrough of Episode 5 that I genuinely started to think that some of them might’ve just been really weird stylistic choices. Half of the cutscenes played without any audio whatsoever, and in one of the few scenes that did have sound Max’s lips were just flat out not animated at all. Combine that with the fact that the actual content of Episode 5 cuts corners like Bethesda cuts QA testers and the game just feels blatantly incomplete. To be fair, though, Night in the Woods isn’t entirely exempt from having technical flaws itself. For instance: there are a couple of moments where the sprites are oddly layered, which causes Mae to occasionally pass behind objects that she appears to be in front of. This only ever happens during dream sequences though, so there is the possibility that it was a stylistic choice they made to try and make those segments feel a bit more surreal and dreamlike, but every time I saw it happen it just looked like a bug to me, so I wouldn’t exactly call it effective. I’m also hesitant to buy into that excuse because there are a couple of blatant typos in a few lines of dialogue, and I’m not talking about the fact that the characters’ lines occasionally break grammar rules (which I actually think is a good writing choice, by the way), I’m talking about things that can’t be dismissed as just being 'the way' 'the way' that a particular
character speaks. None of these were enough to pull me out of the game entirely, though, and I only really thought they were worth mentioning in the interest of fairness to Life is Strange, so I’m definitely willing to give these issues a pass. I’m also probably more willing to forgive the technical shortcomings of Night in the Woods because I felt a much stronger emotional connection to it than I did to Life is Strange, maybe that’s because the quality of writing was higher and the characters felt more real to me, maybe it’s because the overall presentation was charming enough for me to let most of the faults slide, maybe it’s because I also dropped out of college at 20 after having a mental breakdown as a last ditch effort to try and preserve my rapidly declining mental health, maybe it’s because I can relate to the feeling of returning home to a disapproving but begrudgingly accepting family and constantly having to remind myself that their disappointment stems from wanting the best for me to keep it from eating me alive from the inside out, maybe it’s because I’ve also had nightmares and stress dreams on an almost nightly basis ever since due to my anxiety and borderline debilitating fear of failure, maybe it’s because Gregg has a pretty sick jacket. Truth is, there’s no way of knowing for sure, all I can say for certain is that I felt a much stronger and more personal connection to Night in the Woods than I did to Life is Strange. It's worth bearing in mind that it's not exactly a death sentence for Life is Strange, given that Night in the Woods was one of two pieces of media that have ever managed to make me cry extremely masculine tears. What is a death sentence though is the fucking ending. This may be kind of surprising to hear, given a lot of the shit I've said up until this point, but Life is Strange actually almost started to win me back a bit at a few points during episodes 3 and 4. Not because the writing magically and inexplicably became good or anything, It was more a mixture of me lowering my expectations, trying to enjoy the game for what it was, And the writers throwing in a few emotional punches that I didn't think they'd have the balls to follow through with. I almost felt bad for some of the things I'd already publicly said about it, until I hit the end of episode 4 and (spoiler alert) and audibly said "Oh fuck you" when the big plot twist was revealed. I won’t go into details, but everything after that moment was just a downward spiral of garbage on top of garbage on top of garbage, the climax of which is when you make a binary decision that either makes every single decision you’ve made over the course of the entire game pointless, or makes every single decision you’ve made over the course of the entire game pointless with a side of paste. That’d be egregious enough in its own right, but it’s made infinitely more obnoxious by the fact that every single episode starts with a message telling you that your actions and decisions will have consequences by the time the game comes to a close. Now, as I said before, I don’t have a completely inexplicable and somehow even more contrived time reversal powers, so I don’t really have time to go into every reason that I think this game has one of the worst endings of any piece of media that I have ever consumed, but I’ve linked a video in the description that covers maybe an eighth of the reasons that I think it’s terrible for anyone who’s wondering how bad it gets. At this point I don’t think anyone watching will be surprised to hear that I’m going to end this video by recommending Night in the Woods, and I’m going to go ahead and recommend it now, before the fandom surrounding it makes me grow to resent it. As it stands, it’s an extremely charming game with a lot of heart, and I would be bold facedly lying if I said that it didn’t elicit a very strong emotional reaction from me. Although that could be partially attributed to the fact that I played it immediately after finishing Life is Strange, a game that only ever really made me feel anything at all by ending the episodes with melancholy indie music on top of angsty and dramatic shots of the characters, but the game doesn’t really get too much credit for that emotional popcorn bullshit. Putting some emo hipster indie music over any footage with halfway decent cinematography and a few Instagram filters doesn’t take any kind of writing or directing skill, in fact it’s pretty blatantly emotionally manipulative from where I’m standing, as it feels like I’m being tricked into thinking I should be having an emotional response that just flat out doesn’t exist otherwise. That’s more than likely just the cynic in me talking, but I’d be willing to bet money that you could put sad indie music over just about anything and make it feel at least somewhat emotionally fulfilling to someone. It’s basically direction shorthand for “I have no fucking idea how to end what I’ve started here, so I guess this will just have to do.” ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ pictures of the same place ♪ ♪ whats it like when you come home to remember ♪ ♪ pictures of the same place ♪ ♪ I thought I left safe but I came back dismembered ♪ ♪ I don't know where I belong anymore ♪ ♪ I don't know what's going on ♪ ♪ where I come from ♪ ♪ where I belong ♪ ♪ where I belong ♪
♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ where I belong ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ I belong to you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ I belong to you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ I belong to you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪ ♪ I belong to you ♪ ♪ more than summer and afternoons ♪ ♪ I'm in love with you ♪
I have been waiting for a new vid for a long time rewatching the old ones just isn't enough.
edit: God fucking dammit that ending was far too good
Man I was going to give some constructive criticism but I noticed your owlvatar drinking Captain Morgan Gold Rum so I had to immediately dislike and unsub sorry
Tfw he actually uploads a video. Thank you Shammy
Goddammit Shammy. I wait ages for a video and you review the one game I'm playing. Can anyone tell me if there are spoilers for Night in the Woods?
bitch ass fuck im still drunk and cant comprehend a single word you say in the video flair was good tho
I thought that the work Mr. Shammy put into this video accompanied with the amount of time it took made it possibly his best video yet. Keep it up Shammy!