The studio responsible for this title is again Deck Nine. The main character is Alex Chen, a young woman who is empathetic and whose special power is the ability to sense and react to emotions in others. They will be indispensable to discover the secret of the small town of Haven Springs, Colorado. The girl goes there to see her brother, Gabe. The siblings have not seen each other for eight years. The reasons why the girl ended up in the welfare system are part of the story, so I'm not going to go into detail here. However, as is usually the case with games in this series, the plot is delivered in a sensational way, even though it does not attempt to make some amazing elements. There is drama, there is a lot of joy. Everything that happens in this game, we've seen before somewhere. For some, such "redundancy" is a minus, for others it is not. The most important thing is how individual events and the whole story are presented to us, it is a real masterpiece. In my opinion, this is the best part of the series.
I will immediately point out that if someone is very emotionally sensitive and is familiar with empathy, he should prepare a box of handkerchiefs. There are plenty of events that made me cry like a beaver or shed a tear or two. Of course, a lot depends on the individual approach of each player and what touched me, others can only shrug off. For an emotional game, however, I was just emotionally dragged, emptied, and spit out as much as I could.
The characters with whom we will come into contact play a very important role in the excellent plot. And many of them have extensive side-plots that we can, but do not have to, explore in order to understand what the units are driving. From the romantic point of view, we have Steph Gingrich, who runs the town's radio station, and Ryan Lucan, who is the ranger of the national park - so we can choose whether we want our character to be associated with a person of the same or opposite sex (of course, we may not be associated with nobody, this is also an option).
We will meet Diane Jacobs (representative of the big Typhon corporation), Charlotte Harmon and her son Ethan, who are trying to create a family with Gabe, Eleanor Lethe and her granddaughter Riley (they run a flower shop), Jed Lucan (owner of the Black Lantern bar-restaurant) , Mac Loudon (Riley's boyfriend, Typhon employee), Jason Pike (police sheriff) and a lot of other people. Deck Nine brilliantly created the world of a small town and the relations between its inhabitants. There is a lot of truth in the fact that in a small town no one is anonymous, everyone's problems are known to everyone, but also everyone helps each other when needed.
From the graphic side, the PS4 version looks very good. There are times when it can look amazing even on the previous generation equipment. Most of the time I spent on this title (about 8 hours) it looked great. But the reception of the whole thing was spoiled by shortcomings. From this point of view, this title suffers from unreadable textures or graphic elements. It happened to me several times that the game showed only half of the screen for a few seconds. I don't know if it's a camera problem in the game or just an image display error, but I would like to inform you that this has been the case. In addition, in some situations, the characters' faces looked grotesque. Example? During one of the dialogues between Alex and Gabe, with the boy closing his eyes, his face looked like one big blur for a split second. At times it seemed to me that his eyes and everything around him were blending into a single blur. It seems to me that this is another argument for the new titles not to be released on the previous generation consoles. However, as long as the user base does not increase enough to make it profitable for companies, we have to be prepared for the fact that games released on previous-generation consoles will just work and look worse.
All in all, for me, Life is Strange: True Colors is the game of the year. Let all blockbusters and turkeys hide. For me, the most important thing in games is experiencing emotions, an excellent plot and such a synergy between all the elements that everything goes to its place. A multitude of choices is always welcome. However, I must emphasize that my decisions and the ending they led to satisfy me one hundred percent or more. I got a beautiful and touching story, the greatest emotional rollercoaster of the year. I know that I will go through it more than once, wanting to know other variants of the story.
