Nothing feels especially optimised, and everything’s rather rough about its edges, is what I’m saying. And this might be a me thing or something tied up with the remaster process itself, but I’m finding lining up interactive elements way more fiddly than my PS4 playthrough seven years ago, although memory’s a tricky thing and perhaps it was always this needlessly annoying. Playing the two simultaneously, bouncing between episodes, the visual differences are jarring.Įlsewhere, loading times are long - it takes a full minute to get from the menu for the first game’s episodes to the start of gameplay, and a few mid-game loads were so prolonged I wondered if the game had crashed (even the save/load camera icon on the corner froze for a bit). Character models, too, appear to have a warmth to them that’s lacking in Life is Strange itself. Things are better in the prequel game, which pops with punchier contrast and greater depth to each scene, a better suggestion of this being a real place rather than a doll’s house recreation of one. Apparently facial motion-capture was added to this release, but it’s not noticeable.
Textures in the first game - which originally came out in 2015 with a simple but stylish aesthetic, all crisp lines and bold colours - can be muddy and glitchy, and characters move about like stiff marionettes, an impression only exaggerated by their skin tones appearing oddly wooden in select scenes. Make no mistake about it: this two-game release, containing both the breakthrough first game and its prequel series Before the Storm (plus its bonus episode, ‘Farewell’), is exactly the kind of visual experience that has Switch naysayers smiling gleefully, ready to swing into the comments with lines about why you’d want to waste your time on such an inferior version.
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