Story rich games featuring choices that matter, interesting characters, and plots that are the focus of the game have been having a good run lately. Led by the choose-your-own-adventure games of Telltale Studios, these games have shown that there is a market for games that involve more than shooting everything in sight.

Life is Strange is one of the most famous in this genre. An original story told in five episodes, Life is Strange is known for its gripping plot, believable characters, choices that matter, beautiful style… Well, yeah, pretty much everything aside from some occasional quirky mechanics.

In this episodic adventure game, you play as Max Caulfield, a teenager dealing with issues (nothing new there) who discovers that she can rewind time and thus affect the past, present, and future. She uses her powers to try and save her best friend and solve a mysterious disappearance.

Most storytelling adventure games are pretty light on your computer, but Life is Strange has a larger world for you to explore than most. Does this more open world take a bigger toll on your computer? As always, we’re here to help you figure that out.

And as we always do, we will be testing the game on several different Macs, ranging from the newer and powerful to the older and more basic models.

First things first, is the game any good?

You might have figured from the above description that I like Life is Strange and so do others, and you’d be right.

The game has an 83/100 Metascore, which is pretty good, and an amazing 96% positive reviews on Steam from over 100,000 users.

Reviewers tend to love the way the game makes it feel as if your choices matter to characters you care about. PC World said:

This paranormal coming-of-age story is … refreshing proof that small stakes can still feel important, given strong characters.

PC Gamer echoed a similar feeling. The best part of the game isn't the story itself, but the way it's told:

It's a brilliant attempt at progressing and improving Telltale's familiar style, even as it's not, in and of itself, brilliant. I could nitpick multiple problems with the plot and pacing, but Life Is Strange nonetheless remains one of my favourite games of the year.

My Take: Life is Strange is about story and character and the impact your choices, even seemingly small ones, can have on your world. And the game delivers, leaving many players emotional when they see the consequences of their actions.

The test

So we’ve got you hooked on the concept, but is your Mac up to the challenge?

To evaluate how well Life is Strange runs, we’ll test it on these models:

Why these machines? Our purpose is to help you understand how well this game runs on different setups. And hopefully, one of these setups will be similar enough to yours to give you a clear idea of what to expect. These are the setups we will be covering:

• High-end Macs (the 2014 iMac)
• Recent entry-level Macs (the 2016 MacBook Pro)
• Older Macs (the 2012 and 2013 MacBook Pros and 2014 Mac Mini)

These are the settings we used to test Life is Strange using our in-house FPS counter Count It for a fixed duration of 5 minutes:

• 1280x800 or equivalent resolution
• Detail mode: Medium
• Vertical synchronization: On
• Anti-aliasing: Low

Why these settings? Remember, we are testing vastly different machines. Some high-end, some not. 1280x800 and Medium settings won’t impress anyone, but they are acceptable and should meet the requirements of the average gamer.

The Results

Episodic adventure games like Life is Strange can require a heftier system than you might think.

The game is rendering a three-dimensional world and much of this world is explorable, not just static. We’re looking for computers that can handle all that with smooth scrolling and animation as you move through Life is Strange’s world.

This is how we describe the different levels of performance:

• Below 20 FPS: Unplayable: Laggy gameplay, full of stutters and slowdowns.
• 20-30 FPS: Borderline: Can be Ok in slow paced games. Still, not optimal.
• 30-45 FPS: Playable: Acceptable for most (most gaming consoles do this).
• 45-60 FPS: Smooth: Fluid gameplay, with no perceivable stutters.
• 60+ FPS: Very Smooth: For hardcore and professional players, a luxury for most.

To summarize, recent Macs and those with dedicated graphics cards have no trouble running this game at our default settings. But even older computers with integrated graphics were borderline playable, and our 2012 MacBook Pro with a dedicated card was firmly in the playable range.

Do you have a high-end Mac?

There’s no question that a high-end Mac that meets the minimum specs can play this game at our default settings. (Note that FPS is capped at 60 in the game, or we might have gone even higher.) So as we like to do under these circumstances, we decided to see how high we could go.

Settings:

• Resolution: 2560x1440
• Graphics Quality: High
• V-Sync: On
• Anti-aliasing: High

At maxed out resolution my iMac could handle the game though performance was technically in the unplayable 17 FPS range. That said, the game ran pretty well, just with some stuttering during gameplay. Not smooth and not ideal, but playable.

Turning the resolution down about half way while keeping all the other graphics options maxed out led to smooth, playable action. And to be honest, it was difficult to see a whole lot of difference between the different graphics settings.

Takeaway: If you have a high-end Mac, you can expect to play this game at or near maximum settings with no problems.

Do you have a recent entry-level Mac?

The story here is still pretty good. Even with integrated graphics, our 2016 MacBook Pro was firmly in the playable range at 43 FPS and our 2013 MBP’s were in the borderline range at 24 FPS.

While we call 24 FPS borderline for testing purposes, in this game in particular 24 FPS was perfectly playable, and reducing settings further should put you easily in our playable range.

Takeaway: If you have a recent Mac with an integrated chipset you can expect to be able to play this game though you may have to reduce your graphics settings from our defaults to get the best experience.

But what if you have an older Mac?

Things get a little tricky here. Our 2012 15” MBP with a dedicated chipset had no problem hitting playable at 33 FPS. Our older Macs with integrated graphics were borderline at 20 - 24 FPS on our default settings.

Take away: Even our older Macs with integrated chipsets were able to hit borderline playability in Life is Strange with our default settings; lowering those settings a bit more would probably move them into the playable range. There are very detailed descriptions on what Macs are supported on Feral’s website, so if you’re unsure, check there.

Still unsure?

There is one last method that can help you estimate how your Mac would run this game.

You can run the free Unigine Heaven Benchmark using the Basic Preset and compare your results with ours:

If your machine had a better/worst Heaven score, expect a higher/lower FPS score

The correlation between in-game performance and a standard benchmark is far from perfect, but it can still be a good comparison point.

You can also input your Heaven result into this form to estimate the FPS your Mac could score when running the game:

Bottom line: Life is Strange is a great story-based adventure game that can run on a variety of new and older machines. If you’re a Macbook user looking for something fun for your leisure time, there’s a good chance this game will run well on your machine. Anyone with a dedicated graphics card should be able to bump up the graphics settings for an even better experience.

Always check those system requirements

People play this game without meeting the minimum specs, but you want to make sure you meet either the graphics card or chip speed requirement to have a chance at playing this game at reasonable speeds and settings.

These are Life is Strange’s Mac system requirements (minimum):

• OS: 10.11
• Processor: Intel 1.8 GHz Processor
• Video Card: AMD 4850, Nvidia GT130, Intel HD4000 or better.
• Video RAM of 512MB or better.
• Memory: 4GB RAM
• Hard Drive: 15 GB of Hard Drive space

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