Life is Strange

Posted On January 18, 2016

Recently Will and I have been watching people at Giant Bomb play through a game called Life is Strange. I don’t want to spoil it too much for people who might either play it or watch it on Giant Bomb, so if that’s the case, you might want to skim through some of this and instead divert your attention to photos of my dog being a fluffy baby.

So it basically revolves around the friendship of two girls, who haven’t seen each other in a few years or so. When one intervenes in the shooting of the other, she discovers she has the power to rewind time by a few moments, and later on to go back to a moment when a photograph was taken. She tries to avert her best friend’s death in various forms by making different decisions and jumping to different places, but ends up with so many strands of conflicting realities that a huge storm forms and starts to destroy the town. After all that, after every decision made in the game, the only way to fix things is to go back with a photo taken just before the powers were ever used, and let her friend die anyway.

Games are a method of storytelling much like any other, and all have the ability to make me cry. And I did cry. I’m more affected by things which hit home, which might be true of everyone. There’s more of an impact when I make a special effort to not think about a given thing, day to day.

I lost my best friend more than a decade ago and I literally don’t think about it. It’s the only way to stay sane. I think about other things that hurt me everyday. But not this.
It’s miserable to go through life without a best friend, and that sense of misery ruined my night.
I think you only get one. I call Kadek my best friend, but the same level of closeness isn’t there, and I don’t she’d want it to be, she has too many other friends to be getting on with. I tried to consider Will my best friend for a while, but he’s not, he’s my partner. I have tried to turn various others into best friends, but it always feels forced and doesn’t last. I crave that intimate connection with another human being, but it’s not something you can fabricate.

I think you only get one true best friend. And if you lose them you’re fucked. Because I have been waiting a long time for another person to be so impossible to pry away from me. Yet I continue to sorely lack an Ann Perkins or a Chloe Price.

There are so many things about a person that there aren’t actually words for. The way they turn to look at you. The way they laugh and move. Their instinctive reactions, their general vibe and demeanour. All things that inexplicably bugger off somewhere when a person goes in the ground. I guess that’s the thing I struggle with the most.

Calpurnia sold on Saturday and was picked up yesterday. I got £300 for her which is the exact deposit for a Sasaki iPower, but I’m still going to keep depositing things into my savings account and I have to wait until we have time to physically go and pay-in the money anyway. But hopefully, before long, I will have a nice slim powercair I can zip around downstairs in, and then, around the town!