Between a computer upgrade and some other stuff not worth mentioning, I haven’t had a lot of time this month to cover anything (fortunately [?], nothing has been sent my way). Thankfully, I was able to snag another 3 months of Game Pass for a little over a dollar. That’s 4 months total for $2.15 or so. Microsoft is doing a great job of getting people comfortable with its Game Pass ecosystem, which is far more than can be said of Sony’s abysmally overpriced but otherwise similar Playstation Now service. Now, I had to try out Life Is Strange 2 when I saw it available, but it’s just the first episode. Are all episodic games on Game Pass the first episode? My inability to know the answer to that suggests a problem with Game Pass’ communication (and on that subject, I’d love the option to sort games by their removal dates). All I know is that Life Is Strange 2 is boring.

The original Life Is Strange didn’t have a great first episode, but you know what? Its stakes were immediately apparent. The first game begins with a storm wiping out the town, and it’s obvious that it’s a hint of what’s coming. The second game hints at an event that happens in the early-to-middle portion of the first episode. Basically, the main character beats someone up (even when you try to avoid conflict) and events snowball to the point where his dad gets shot and his little brother displays telekinetic abilities to accidentally kill a cop. Then they run, which is just… yeah.

I’m not one of those “no politics in gaming” people. When a viewpoint is shared in a way that comes across as believable and human, games can be a great way of seeing the world through an unfamiliar perspective. Life Is Strange 2 is political as hell in the worst possible way. I don’t know what happened to developer DONTNOD (who created the fantastic Remember Me and Life Is Strange), but the animations and dialogue in this game are cringe-inducingly unrealistic. The whole thing feels like a bunch of robots acting out a cheesy after-school special about racism.

But more than anything, Life Is Strange 2 is aggressively boring. Every scene is packed full of dead space, with the game’s numerous unskippable cutscenes all being padded out with 5-20 seconds of its robots silently staring at stuff with blank expressions (presumably because someone was so proud of the admittedly fantastic environmental design that they insisted on showing it off with a bunch of unnecessary camera angles). It adds up. I’m honestly glad there’s only one episode. Also, I looked it up as soon as a dog character was introduced: DONTNOT kills the dog. They used to be an excellent developer whose titles I eagerly anticipated, but they’ve seriously lost their way and phoned it in over the past few years.

Life Is Strange 2 is unreasonably boring first appeared on Killa Penguin