One game I played recently that really stuck with me was Life is Strange. I love adventure and visual novel-style games and needed something to tide me over until Uncharted 4 came out so I picked this up for $20. It totally blew me away. Definitely one of the best $20 I spent on a game in recent memory. I’ve done my best to avoid any spoilers here and have tried to be as vague as possible. Any specific mentions happen very early in the game.
The basic story is you’re a teenage girl that discovers she has the ability to alter time and tries to use it for good, but predictably everything goes to shit.
It riffs HEAVILY off of Twin Peaks (not obliquely either – you will find a “TWNPKS” license plate); it takes place in the Pacific Northwest, has supernatural elements, and plays its overall weirdness very straight. I started jokingly calling it “Teen Peaks”.
The story covered some really deep subject matter (LGBTQ issues, teen sexuality, rape, murder, bullying, abuse, drug use) and in many (but unfortunately not all) ways did it deftly and without feeling exploitative.
My main gripe is that at times the dialogue could be pretty cringeworthy (in the “teen girl dialogue clearly written by a 30 year old man” way) but after a while I found it more charming than distracting. I was hooked by the first episode, and as it went on it just got better and better. There’s 5 episodes in total and if you take your time and don’t rush through everything you can get a good 4 or so hours out of each episode. It rarely felt like a slog to me – there’s a lot of detail in the world and many easter eggs to find (first thing I did after finishing was to pull up the tvtropes entry on the game to find all the stuff I missed).
It uses the Telltale-style “the choices you make affect the gameplay” decision making process but one really cool thing is that because the story involves time travel in most cases you can go back and review potential outcomes of your decisions before settling on one. This is nice because it give you some flexibility to experiment with different outcomes to find the one that feels right for how you’re playing your character rather than thinking “oh shit, what if I did this instead.” As is usually the case you’re presented with varying degrees of “which awful decision will I choose” but at least you can go with the one that seems to best fit how you are playing.
I found that the choices you make actually do influence the story from some subtle to very major ways. It’s not just “conversation X happens slightly differently because you chose option Y”, but there can be some striking differences in what happens based on your choices. It really gives the feel of player agency when you see something happen and realize that your choices made it happen that way.
In summary, if you like Twin Peaks, and aren’t averse to adventure style games or visual novels I highly recommend checking this out.
