There are lots of spoilers below.

The core mechanic of Life Is Strange is the ability to rewind time to do-over decisions and see how things play out differently. Protagonist, Max Caulfield, discovers her powers during a photography lesson immediately after which her childhood friend Chloe will be shot dead in the toilets down the hall. Your first objective is not to save Chloe but to prove your powers to yourself by reversing time in the lecture. It was with this scene that I became so curious about the game’s mechanics.

The rewind options and decisions in Life Is Strange’s opening section don’t function like they do in the rest of the game. This tutorial segment requires the player to recreate events in a specific way to teach them how rewinding affects both dialogue options and the world around them. If you avoid rewinding or trying to recreate events the lecture on photography continues and concludes with the teacher asking a question about ‘selfies’ that goes unanswered despite the player having heard the answer before (twice). After four lines of unique dialogue and control prompts the game just waits for you to take a selfie yourself. Doing so will cause a truncated version of the lecture to be repeated as if it had never happened and the same is question posed to Max with an answer immediately volunteered by another student.

All this is done to educate the player but it’s a crack in the realism of Life Is Strange right at the opening. It quickly becomes apparent that there’s no hidden timer despite Max’s insistence that failing to answer this question, like she did before, will now hinder her ability to arrive in the bathroom on time. From this it seemed I had as long as I wanted to make decisions, and as long as I wanted to get to places and as a result I decided to only use my powers when the game forced me to. Could this cause other strange things to happen?

Why do this when the game continually encourages the player to experiment with reversal so often? Firstly because I felt it would be disingenuous to frivolously use power I have no understanding of but I also felt that the game was watching me. Its constant signposting of exactly how you can change the past in each situation and the game’s claim to “revolutionise story based choice and consequence” both made me suspicious that the game was tracking more than just my dialogue decisions.

It surprised me just how entertaining role-playing in this way was. Where many other players would study all the outcomes of a decision I would have to stick with whatever I did in the heat of the moment and that really did make those moments tense. However, moderating my powers had a greater influence during exploration scenes. Both the dormitories at the academy and Chloe’s house are full of personal belongings for you to rifle through and comment on. I found this prying uncomfortable to begin with but knowing I couldn’t rewind any awkward outcomes either made me shy away from poking around.

That might sound disappointing, but to me Max has no reason to be looking at discarded pregnancy tests or personal documents. This isn’t Gone Home or a Sherlock Holmes game where a mystery needs to be sleuthed out, not yet anyway. However, upon completing the chapter I saw just how much content I’d missed out on.

The end of episode reports in Life Is Strange can show players just how much content they may have skipped. At first I thought this was to enable them to act upon it in the future, for instance, at the time of writing 30% of players didn’t water their plant in Episode 1 but only 18% neglected it in Episode 2. However, this hinting wouldn’t work for one off events that didn’t repeat. Also, as a contrast to the plant statistic whilst 84% of players helped Alyssa (a character who gets stuff thrown at her a lot) in Episode 1 only 62% aided her in Episode 2.

The decisions players make in these minor events are massively influenced by their context, for instance the first opportunity to water the plant takes place mid-episode whilst Max is on on a clear quest, but the second is immediately at the beginning of the episode and the plant itself is clearly framed in the opening credits. With Alyssa the first chance to help her is telegraphed by a “Damn, I better rewind” from Max, but the second opportunity has no signposting. What separates Life Is Strange from other narrative games like Telltale’s is that these little stories occur regardless of whether the player notices them or acts upon them, a powerful post-game reminder that the player’s power is limited by what they are able to observe.

What made my minimal-reversal journey through Life Is Strange most difficult was gaps in my understanding of how the mechanics worked. The tutorial segment discussed earlier had different rules to the subsequent gameplay. For instance, when Chloe’s father threatens to barge into the room I thought I had unlimited time to hide or escape only to be caught out in the open. Moments where characters asked me questions changed from simple puzzles to one-chance-only opportunities to make friends and prove myself. I either had to research beforehand or hope I made a lucky guess to avoid another forced rewind. I also can’t prevent things being constantly thrown at Alyssa.

Despite avoiding the use of Max’s power I still found myself very interested in how it worked. The opening scene sees Max jump uncontrollably backwards through time and space but from then onwards the use of her ability requires her to be stationary unless the player rewinds back into a cutscene. Arguably there’s a design reasons for this (eg: it keeps the puzzles simpler) but the pivotal moment at the end of Episode 2 suggests something more.

Players who have approached the game the way it was intended were shocked when their powers were taken away in a moment of urgency. Max exhausts her ability trying to prevent the suicide of Kate, a fellow academy student. Past choices decide the outcome and regardless of what happens it is the first harrowing realization of the limits to Max’s power. The impact of losing power when it was so dearly needed was different for me as I had been limiting the use of it throughout but that didn’t change how difficult the situation felt. Only after the scene had ended did it occur to me just why Max had exhausted her power now and not before – she had used it in a new way. To reach Kate Max moves through the world as it is frozen, whereas before she remained still whilst the world wound around her. Her temporal power is now spatial as well.

This is a new power that opens up different puzzle and narrative opportunities although the game’s rules around Max’s power haven’t been consistent so far. In one early scene Max can take a picture of an altercation between Kate and David, the head of school security, or intervene herself. Objects in Max’s possession are not affected by her power so in this situation she should be able to do both -photograph the situation and then rewind to intervene, but this isn’t the case. Bring her phone into the picture and things get even more confusing as text messages also seem unaffected by time travel even if their senders are. If the puzzles are to get more complex a refinement of what can and can’t be done may be needed.

Ultimately, until Episode 3 arrives we can’t know for certain how Max’s powers will grow, or if the changes at the end of Episode 2 were just done for effect. Whilst I’m sure Life Is Strange will continue to be a beautiful and engaging game in its next three episodes I really hope the gameplay gets more ambitious. Will complete power over space and time turn Max into the ultimate photojournalist? What if she could only rewind once in certain situations so changing your mind would see you stuck with your new decision? If Max grows in strength could we rewind back further than a single scene? Even between episodes in some way? These might sound like overly optimistic ideas but to me they’re tantalisingly possible.