In a year that has seen brand-new releases in video game franchises as massive and varied as Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Persona, we’re finally hitting a lull. For the next two months, the biggest games on the horizon are remakes of Final Fantasy XII and the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy.

Which is great—unless you’re already caught up on all the great games that have already arrived this year. But if you’re looking over the video game slated for release this summer and feeling as glum as, say, Zach Braff at the start of Garden State, allow me to be your Natalie Portman, telling you a video game you might not have played yet can change your life.

And then I’ll hand you a Playstation 4 controller and queue up Life Is Strange.

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I’m exaggerating, but not as much as you might think. Over the past few years, I’ve played better games than Life Is Strange—but few of them have been as ambitious, and none of them have left such a strong and singular impression on me. And if you’ve avoided playing it so far, you’re out of excuses: Starting tomorrow (and for the rest of the month), Playstation Plus subscribers can download all five of Life Is Strange’s playable "episodes" for the low, low price of zero dollars.

Life Is Strange plays like a dizzying blend of Twin Peaks, Donnie Darko, Veronica Mars, and The Catcher in the Rye—most of which are explicitly referenced at some point over the five "episodes" that compose the overarching story. You play as Max Caulfield (Hannah Telle), a high school senior at a prestigious arts academy in Arcadia Bay, a (fictional) small town in the Pacific Northwest. Even before Max arrives, Arcadia Bay is plagued by mysteries: A local girl has vanished, and no one can agree on where she might have gone. But Max’s arrival seems to herald a much bigger change for Arcadia Bay—maybe even an apocalyptic one. Out of nowhere, Max finds herself beset by strange, horrifying visions of the town being obliterated in a massive storm. And immediately after witnessing a horrifying act of violence she desperately wishes she could reverse, Max discovers, to her astonishment, that she can reverse it—and anything else that happens—by using a new and inexplicable kind of superpower that allows her to rewind time.

So that’s the basic premise of Life Is Strange—though just the first episode, because I wouldn’t dream of spoiling anything that comes after. But what makes this game so special, anyway? It starts with the point of view. In theory, video games are basically unparalleled in their ability to immerse the player in the perspective of someone totally different than themselves. In practice, video games are basically unparalleled in their ability to immerse the player in the perspective of a wisecracking badass or a stoic space Marine. Max is different: a smart, compassionate, slightly awkward teenage girl, surrounded by a large and well-developed group of peers, whom you can befriend or alienate as you see fit.

With a few rare exceptions, "teenage girl" is a perspective mainstream video games have never even attempted to explore, and game studio DONTNOD had to overcome entrenched industry biases to get the chance to do it. Disappointingly, if unsurprisingly, the game’s developers have since revealed that multiple publishers told them they would be interested in Life Is Strange if they would agree to make the protagonist male. Of course, the game’s earnest effort to capture the perspective of a teenage girl isn’t always perfect; at times, these characters sounds exactly like teenagers as imagined by middle-aged men, dropping goofy-ass fake slang lines like "Go fuck your selfie."

In theory, video games are unparalleled at immersing you in the perspective of someone different from yourself. In practice, video games are unparalleled at immersing you in the perspective of a wisecracking badass or a stoic space Marine.

But more often than not, the characters in Life Is Strange feel like actual, complicated human beings (abetted, it must be said, by a tremendous cast of voice actors breathing life into their digital proxies). And DONTNOD’s honest attempt to capture the perspective of a teenage girl pushes Life Is Strange into subjects that have rarely been explored in this medium. As written by adults, many stories about teenagers end up being condescending to teenagers: tediously moralizing, or cynically trivializing, or both. With its own goal in mind, Life Is Strange tackles issue most video games—and indeed, most art forms in general—would prefer to avoid: suicide, child abuse, sexual assault, and euthanasia.