A Sense of Regret in Life Is Strange

Anatomising the melancholy of Dontnod’s episodic drama.

- Tony Ellis

After I finished I wanted to hear the soundtrack again, so I hit YouTube. There, among the comments demanding Max and Chloe should be together forever, or saying no game had even given them such feels before, Alchemical Games had posted “It makes me sad in a really weird way. A little nostalgic, but also a sense of wanting my life to be more like it is for max.” Another commenter responded: “I thought I was the only one that felt this way.”

More replies followed. “Playing this game makes you feel like you’ve been missing something that you never realised until now.” “For me it’s Max’s friendship with Chloe. It’s a type of friendship I’ve never had in teendom.” “Something in life just feels missing, and this game has it.”

The last time I looked, that thread was over 40 responses long.

The sensation those Youtubers are experiencing is not actually that mysterious. The Germans, those masters of melancholy, even have a word for it: sehnsucht – a sort of painful nostalgia for something unknown in your life. What impresses me is that Life is Strange attempts to make people feel this way at all. Games tend to steer clear of the human condition. Even story-driven games rarely dare to make us feel sad as players: NPCs get sad, then usually we make them feel better by solving a quest.