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The best thing I ever read about Ray Bradbury, the sci-fi and horror author, occasional screenwriter, and eternal manchild, was an article that criticised his imagination. This is heresy, of course, and to make matters worse I've misplaced the article in question. Bear with me nonetheless: according to this writer, while Bradbury's widely lauded for his powers of invention, in truth his strengths lie elsewhere. His rocketships, his space travellers, his dystopias are flimsy and lacklustre. His real genius was for memory, rather than imagination - for decade-old griefs, lapsed friendships and childhood fears. Those fears! So clinically reconstructed years after the tears had run and the sweat had dried. Bradbury thrived on ghosts, not aliens, and his best material was found in the past rather than the future.I was reminded of this while playing through the first three parts of Life is Strange, an episodic game series that gives Bradbury an early - and prominent - mention, via a battered paperback of The October Country that's been loaned between central characters. The October Country would be an ideal alternate title for Life is Strange in fact, summoning images of sparse pines dappled with golden evening light, of wind and of wistfulness. The connection with Bradbury goes deeper than name-checking, too. At just over the halfway mark, Life is Strange offers an increasingly familiar mixture of ingredients. It's science fiction, but the science fiction doesn't initially convince. What convinces are the more human realities of the game that the science fiction elements seek to illuminate - the memory rather than the imagination.
Even then, it doesn't convince in quite the way you might initially expect. Appropriately for a game about a photography student trying to fit in at an up-market academy, Life is Strange views the world through a series of lenses. Not all of them are intentional, I suspect, but together they create a peculiarly appealing atmosphere. There's the lens brought by what I imagine - possibly incorrectly - to be a development team largely in its mid- to late-30s, struggling to approximate the language of modern teenagers - and burying those teenagers alive at times under an avalanche of hellas and biatches that has thankfully abated somewhat by episode three. There's the lens of Europeans creating a depiction of life in sleepy Oregon, with Paris-based Dontnod delivering a dreamy blossom-pink vision of Americana that gains a certain exoticism through the awkwardly concealed outsider perspective.
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