An excellent remake of the original Half-Life, made with attention to detail with much effort.

It was pretty nice entertainment for three hours. Really good at teaching or refreshing your knowledge of digital gates, in a simplified form (no flipflops are created, the game provides one built-in).

Some minor usability bugs plague this game, and the lack of way to transfer text between the game and the outside environment (either by copypaste or files) is annoying when you want to get into optimizing the solutions.

The ending of the game let some to be desired; it sort of just ended, untriumphantly. Even as a programmer, it left something to be hoped: You create a CPU, and then you never see it used, never realize its potential. Also what did we create those MEM elements for? They were not used in the final puzzle(s).

Top of my head, a couple of ideas that would improve this game a great deal:
— Need support for selecting which monitor it fullscreens on
— Need possibility to copypaste or save/load from/to external programs
— Need possibility to create and save your own elements for reuse in puzzles; for example, I would have liked a MUX4W4B or MUX4W2B to optimize one of the puzzles
— Need possibility to create own testcases
— Need possibility to save several parallel solution attempts for the same puzzle (aim for a pure solution, aim for a pass-provided-testcases technically correct, etc)
— Need better ending
— Fix the bug where the game sometimes gets stuck for a few seconds
— Fix text editor bugs: Sometimes copypastes paste only a part of the selected text
— The game should automatically optimize and elide duplicate gates

Life is Strange™ is art. It is beautiful. Yes, the topic of game revolves around photography, but the development team really spent bucks on artistic values. It is beautiful, and the cinematography (composition of shots, lighting, direction, pacing) is nothing but excellent. You can’t help but marvel it throughout the game.

Categorically, this game is a high-school drama game, with a paper-thin layer of a science fiction serving as a plot device.

Voice acting: For the first two episodes, I thought the voice actors were average. Nothing in their performance cried out to me “wow, this is great”, but eventually you start to notice how it all just works. The voices are right. Towards the second half of the five-episode game, moments started arising where you enjoy the performance because of the depth of emotion put into it. It is told in the developer commentary and in Wikipedia that they spent majority of their budget in voice actors and writing. It was money well spent, in my opinion. In particular, Hannah (Max) and Ashly (Chloe) did really great. None of the others were bad, either.

Script and dialog: Overall the plot, per characters, is impressive. The plot device that drives the story and game is loose and never quite explained in the depth that it could and frankly should. Its implications are explored admirably though. In dialog, there were some lines that felt a bit tacky, but such is to be expected when the main character has to have words to say about everything for gameplay and usability reasons. There are some plot holes, and a lot was left to imagination, which, judging from the amount of fan-fiction written for this game, was the right and successful choice.

Choices: In many situations, the game offers you choice, and then immediately proceeds to throw doubt at your choice, urging you to change it. Originally, the game was called "What If". While the name was changed for marketing reasons, it is really reflective of how the game is designed. Basically you will be second-guessing yourself all the time, and the game does not waste a single opportunity to rub the consequences of your choice in your face. In the end, most of your choices are roleplay. The game is still heavily railroaded, despite any choice you make. The impact of your choices comes from the way the characters act or what happens to them, and it can be very emotionally taxing at times.

Character development: Through your actions in the game, characters develop. But some of those changes can be subtle, or they may be heavily overshadowed by all the action and drama that you forget to notice it. One of the tackiest moments to me is near the end of the game, where one of the characters basically says “look, this game has character development, have you noticed?” (not in those exact words). There is plenty of optional material in the game: diary notes, letters, posters etc. which shows that each character was actually carefully designed to be believable.

Bottom line: Unless you are a psychopath, you will enjoy this game a lot. And even if you are, you may still enjoy it although for different reasons.

This game is best enjoyed when you sit down and relax to absorb and enjoy each scene. If you are the type of a person who always seeks to rush to the next “trigger”, you may not necessarily enjoy this game. I hope you are not one of those people. Relax, sit down on the bench, and look at the squirrels.