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The 10th anniversary of Life is Strange is fast approaching: in January next year it’ll have been a full decade since Max, Chloe, and co. first entered our lives and, in many cases, won our hearts. For many of us who really loved Life is Strange upon first encountering it, it’s fair to say that we’re still just as besotted with the world and its characters all these years down the line as we were back in the day.
For a fairly niche choose-your-own-adventure series about marginalised superheroes growing up in modern-day USA, Life is Strange has become a surprisingly sprawling franchise over the past decade, no doubt spurred on by the deep pockets of publisher and IP owner Square Enix. Life is Strange: Double Exposure, due for release on October 29th, will be the fifth main game in the series; but to focus on mainline releases alone is to rob yourself of some delightful side-stories in the form of DLC chapters, comic books, a planned TV series, and now even a couple of novels.
Life is Strange: Heatwaves was published on July 31st, a conveniently-timed prose addition to the franchise for anyone itching to get an LiS fix in before Halloween rolls around. It follows Life is Strange: Steph’s Story as the series’ second prose entry and, now that there are two LiS tie-in novels to compare and contrast, I’m more confident than ever in my overall assessment of the current state of the franchise. Sure, like most long-running series, it’s essentially a fanservice machine; but I’m consistently impressed by the wildly different interpretations of “fanservice” at work here.
You only have to put Steph’s Story against Heatwaves to see what I mean. Steph’s Story is an interquel set between Before the Storm and True Colors, following fan-favourite Steph Gingrich on her offscreen journey from minor character in BtS to the deuteragonist (and optional love interest) of TC. Author Rosiee Thor absolutely nails Steph’s voice from the games, and it’s a delightful gaiden look at what an ordinary resident of Arcadia Bay was doing and thinking and feeling during the original game’s devastating aftermath. If there’s a downside, it’s that there are no surprises there whatsoever for someone who’s played the games. Steph’s Story was quite literally mapped out from start to finish before Thor ever wrote a word, and while they gave a pitch-perfect insight into Steph’s inner life, there’s not much more there for lore hounds to sink their teeth into.
Heatwaves, written by Brittney Morris (also the author of the tie-in novel for Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales, incidentally), takes a drastically different approach. Set after one of six possible endings to Life is Strange: True Colors, Heatwaves is more or less a self-contained story about what might happen next in the event Alex chose to leave Haven Springs to pursue a music career with new girlfriend Steph in tow. The foreword is very clear that the existence of Heatwaves — like all other tie-in materials, which of necessity always follow one timeline or another to some extent — isn’t intended to canonise that particular ending to the game, but only to show one possible future resulting from a specific set of choices. It’s less of a character study like Steph’s Story and more of a small-town mystery in line with most of the games in the series, and devotes significant B-plot time to further developing the popular (but optional) romance between Alex and Steph.
So yes, both books clearly exist for the fanservice — be real, what video game tie-in novel doesn’t? — but still, the approach taken in each case is very different. This isn’t a review, but if you want a quick verdict, I’d have to say that Steph’s Story captures the characters and world of Life is Strange in a way that feels more authentic to the games, but Heatwaves is a more interesting read thanks to branching out into an original narrative. LiS superfans should definitely read both; casual or non-fans of the series will probably be underwhelmed in either case (again, that’s tie-in novels in a nutshell).
Despite having narratively nothing to do with the upcoming release of Life is Strange: Double Exposure — which returns to the perspective of original protagonist Max Caulfield, fittingly following up with her 10 years after the events of the first game — the fact that Heatwaves took the risk of alienating parts of the audience in order to deliver a follow-up that would satisfy other groups of fans, demonstrates why Squeenix’s unexpected decision to make a straight-up Life is Strange sequel a decade on isn’t a reason to dismiss the new game out of hand. Much like giving Alex and Steph their ride into the sunset, a follow-up game for the original leads has been a popular talking point in the fandom ever since the debut game wrapped up. But appropriately for fans of a series all about making tough choices, the LiS community is far from a hivemind, and not everyone’s happy that Double Exposure will serve as a sequel to both divergent endings to Max’s story, meaning that Chloe is going to end up sidelined one way or another.
All the same, it seems unfair to suggest that a Max-fronted follow-up means the developer has run out of ideas for the series when every core entry has been so markedly different from what came beforehand. Following the original game with a prequel, then a numbered but otherwise disconnected sequel, then an anthology-style follow-up, and now a direct sequel may make Life is Strange as messy as one of its disastrous bisexual leads, but at least you can’t accuse them of reusing the same idea over and over again. In the likely event that a sixth LiS game surfaces in another couple of years’ time, the only thing I know to expect is the last thing I expected them to do next.
The Life is Strange novels (and, to a lesser extent, the comic series) are now shaping up to follow a similarly chaotic trajectory; but luckily, chaotic good is my favourite alignment. Despite the fact that Heatwaves sadly received minimal marketing from Square, I’d nevertheless be quite surprised they didn’t dip back in for another book at some point in the future. Now that we’ve broken the seal on sequelling endings to the games that didn’t feature time travel as a convenient narrative handwave, could we even hope for a Life is Strange 2 follow-up novel one day? Probably not, I think that’s one offshoot of this franchise might actually be dead and buried for real… but then again, as we’ve already established, Life is Strange seems happy to stay audacious when it comes to giving the fans what they’ve been asking for.