Great potential hampered by a propagandized childish view of morality.
Really nice notebook, like in the original game, with photographs replaced by sketches containing notes with each one detailing the events that have happened in between episodes and additional character details. Though, your artwork has less overall meaning and story significance than Max's photos from the original game. A lot of good small character moments with the supporting cast, their lives, what they have dealt with, finding their place in the world. Your mom and a guy you meet on the road in the first episode (Brody) are both great characters with more to find out about them by looking at your mom's letters or Brody's website and articles. It runs the gamut of different types of racism in that almost everyone you meet may be blatantly violently or verbally racist, they can hold up racist power structures through their jobs or actions, show more subtle displays of racism towards you, racists aid or work directly with state laws and police to hinder or threaten you, and you often find even people that seem nice and willing to help you are likely the exact kind of people that created the kind of world that lead to the situation you are in in the first place. Most of the people you meet behave and speak much more like normal people compared to the first Life Is Strange. Although this is typically all the exception to dealing with your idiot brother and his pointless superpowers.
Daniel's powers just make everything awkward and take the focus off what is more interesting like police violence, subtle and aggressive distrust of nonwhite/poor/outsiders by the more ideal white trash American citizens while playing as two half Mexican brothers, sexuality (unfortunately only when starting a relationship with the girl and not the guy, for some reason), religious cults, dealing with death of and reconnecting with your lost family, etc. The police shooting at the start was made odd enough to begin with by including a lot of pointless events around it and the dead cop take a much stranger turn when that entire area of the neighborhood took massive damage and cop cars are flipped over and all that just becomes the afterthought. You being told you killed a cop because an entire area was hit by magical massive blunt force trauma over a period of about 15 seconds just makes everyone look stupid. Your grandpa just saying, "noticed some strange things about your brother being able to move things with his mind, don't tell Grandma." Max's powers in the first game work well since the story is based around them and they can't just be used however you want and aggressively to get out of situations, but here the powers tends to make the other parts of the game worse, create plotholes, and worse you can remove any powers from this game completely and have the same plot with very few changes. Not wasting time to instead focusing on more meaningful personal, political, and thematic plot points. The game shows you all the things your brother can do but then a guy has a gun and now he's just useless and can't even hold a skinny guy in place because if he could we couldn't have a cliffhanger before the getting to the next contrived plot point that this will create.
Powers aside, Daniel is probably one of the worst character I have ever seen in a game. The 10 year old bases his entire mortality system on the generic black and white style responses you can give and the actions you perform. "Sean, you stole from a white supremacist that hit us both and chained you to a wall during a difficult situation, so I'll just steal from a guy that saved us, helped us, gave us money and presents, and his friendship, stealing is fun." "You let me use my powers, I guess hurting anyone I want is fine." At one point you are basically asked if your dad is in heaven with another of the game's characters that died and you get to choose, yeah or nah. And if you say nah you tell him heaven isn't real and all we have is here and in our memories. And he just goes, oh ok, and a few scenes later is like, "Heaven isn't real Grandma, Sean told me." Next episode tells a guy sharing a story about losing his faith that that seems dumb. Runs into a cult leader an episodes later, "This is my home now I'd I'll just watch them beat you to death because they said you were a sinner." Because like all games that do things like this, Daniel had no previous existence until the day the game started. Was he going to call home one day after moving out, "Dad we never talked about this, is it cool to kill people like we used to do in video games?" You even get the generic, "You'll never lie to me ever again about anything right," choice in the first episode. Though him not wanting anyone to lie doesn't stop him from immediately lying about things in the next episode with no way for your character to say anything connecting those two things.
We help out the physically and verbally abusive dad from Captain Spirit, and the game even brings back the other abusive dad from the first game in a positive light. The main issue I have from these games and a lot of other games with kids is that these kids need to be half their age, they need to be five at most. These games give meaningful choices in the subtly actions of your character and how they view the world, but they do not grant you any ability to create meaningful major plot changes. Which means that a game where you are trying to influence how your brother views the world can have no meaningful choices until the very end of the game because we can only take one path through this story. You have no nuance or ability to explain anything like don't hurt people for no reason, don't hurt animals, and that cops, cult leaders, and white supremacists (who literally just shot you for fun) aren't people so kill as many as you can and have fun doing it.
Some problems with certain events loading properly or continuing correctly without freezing. Some conversations get cut off or don't start properly. Pretty much always involving something that your brother is supposed to find in the location or someone he is supposed to try to talk to. Some of the end chapter results don't even match what happens (about one every chapter for me, though always something minor), some of the visuals don't properly match what happens (having bruises from a fight that in my playthrough never took place, etc). I had no idea what quite a few of the dialogue choices were even implying when it came to what he would actually say. Couldn't understand a single word to any song in the game, God forbid with all their accessibility options they should bother to add subtitles for them.
Your character's mother is both the best character in the game and the most refreshing and meaningful use of a mother character I have ever seen in a game. It's rare enough in video games to get a living mother character, having one whose entire character is based around defying the societal expectations of motherhood was amazing to see even before she became the character in the game to most heavily support your fight against the racist systems and policing of the US government, even understanding and using her own position as a white woman to help you.
It's pretty screwed up seeing a lot of the talk on forums, guides, let's plays most people seem to have a very disturbing propagandized view of morality that's been forced on people from a young age with bad TV, games, and cartoons. Where doing things like surrendering to the police and letting the abusive justice system jail you for 15 years is seen as the "good" and "high morality" ending, whereas hurting the poor police trying to kill you and then hurting the armed gang members threatening you in Mexico means you are actually a big meanie who doesn't care about "morality" instead caring about dumb things like not dying or being jailed by a white supremacist justice system or the life of your family. Even framing the other choice as being taught to put himself and you first over society is so limiting and unfortunate. Even your brother ends up being raised by your blatantly racist and heavily Christian indoctrinated Grandparents. Worse that through some of the subtle visuals during these endings the game seems to be saying that good person and bad person end is the way they view them, in the same series where they seem frequently happy to redeem or make heroes out of abusive fathers. Visuals aside by never actually allowing you to teach your brother anything about the world, don't kill animals or advertise your powers should not mean to obey an exploitative and racist society, you are forced into terrible end game decisions by trying to be a decent person and crossing the border immediately tying you into gang violence is also unfortunate. If the game does one thing very well it is its portrayal of how deeply racism is ingrained in the country, it's people, and those who face it and that so many people would finish the game taking the worse possible choice as the good and high morality "redemption" ending when you have nothing to redeem is extremely unfortunate.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1265191052052295680
Really nice notebook, like in the original game, with photographs replaced by sketches containing notes with each one detailing the events that have happened in between episodes and additional character details. Though, your artwork has less overall meaning and story significance than Max's photos from the original game. A lot of good small character moments with the supporting cast, their lives, what they have dealt with, finding their place in the world. Your mom and a guy you meet on the road in the first episode (Brody) are both great characters with more to find out about them by looking at your mom's letters or Brody's website and articles. It runs the gamut of different types of racism in that almost everyone you meet may be blatantly violently or verbally racist, they can hold up racist power structures through their jobs or actions, show more subtle displays of racism towards you, racists aid or work directly with state laws and police to hinder or threaten you, and you often find even people that seem nice and willing to help you are likely the exact kind of people that created the kind of world that lead to the situation you are in in the first place. Most of the people you meet behave and speak much more like normal people compared to the first Life Is Strange. Although this is typically all the exception to dealing with your idiot brother and his pointless superpowers.
Daniel's powers just make everything awkward and take the focus off what is more interesting like police violence, subtle and aggressive distrust of nonwhite/poor/outsiders by the more ideal white trash American citizens while playing as two half Mexican brothers, sexuality (unfortunately only when starting a relationship with the girl and not the guy, for some reason), religious cults, dealing with death of and reconnecting with your lost family, etc. The police shooting at the start was made odd enough to begin with by including a lot of pointless events around it and the dead cop take a much stranger turn when that entire area of the neighborhood took massive damage and cop cars are flipped over and all that just becomes the afterthought. You being told you killed a cop because an entire area was hit by magical massive blunt force trauma over a period of about 15 seconds just makes everyone look stupid. Your grandpa just saying, "noticed some strange things about your brother being able to move things with his mind, don't tell Grandma." Max's powers in the first game work well since the story is based around them and they can't just be used however you want and aggressively to get out of situations, but here the powers tends to make the other parts of the game worse, create plotholes, and worse you can remove any powers from this game completely and have the same plot with very few changes. Not wasting time to instead focusing on more meaningful personal, political, and thematic plot points. The game shows you all the things your brother can do but then a guy has a gun and now he's just useless and can't even hold a skinny guy in place because if he could we couldn't have a cliffhanger before the getting to the next contrived plot point that this will create.
Powers aside, Daniel is probably one of the worst character I have ever seen in a game. The 10 year old bases his entire mortality system on the generic black and white style responses you can give and the actions you perform. "Sean, you stole from a white supremacist that hit us both and chained you to a wall during a difficult situation, so I'll just steal from a guy that saved us, helped us, gave us money and presents, and his friendship, stealing is fun." "You let me use my powers, I guess hurting anyone I want is fine." At one point you are basically asked if your dad is in heaven with another of the game's characters that died and you get to choose, yeah or nah. And if you say nah you tell him heaven isn't real and all we have is here and in our memories. And he just goes, oh ok, and a few scenes later is like, "Heaven isn't real Grandma, Sean told me." Next episode tells a guy sharing a story about losing his faith that that seems dumb. Runs into a cult leader an episodes later, "This is my home now I'd I'll just watch them beat you to death because they said you were a sinner." Because like all games that do things like this, Daniel had no previous existence until the day the game started. Was he going to call home one day after moving out, "Dad we never talked about this, is it cool to kill people like we used to do in video games?" You even get the generic, "You'll never lie to me ever again about anything right," choice in the first episode. Though him not wanting anyone to lie doesn't stop him from immediately lying about things in the next episode with no way for your character to say anything connecting those two things.
We help out the physically and verbally abusive dad from Captain Spirit, and the game even brings back the other abusive dad from the first game in a positive light. The main issue I have from these games and a lot of other games with kids is that these kids need to be half their age, they need to be five at most. These games give meaningful choices in the subtly actions of your character and how they view the world, but they do not grant you any ability to create meaningful major plot changes. Which means that a game where you are trying to influence how your brother views the world can have no meaningful choices until the very end of the game because we can only take one path through this story. You have no nuance or ability to explain anything like don't hurt people for no reason, don't hurt animals, and that cops, cult leaders, and white supremacists (who literally just shot you for fun) aren't people so kill as many as you can and have fun doing it.
Some problems with certain events loading properly or continuing correctly without freezing. Some conversations get cut off or don't start properly. Pretty much always involving something that your brother is supposed to find in the location or someone he is supposed to try to talk to. Some of the end chapter results don't even match what happens (about one every chapter for me, though always something minor), some of the visuals don't properly match what happens (having bruises from a fight that in my playthrough never took place, etc). I had no idea what quite a few of the dialogue choices were even implying when it came to what he would actually say. Couldn't understand a single word to any song in the game, God forbid with all their accessibility options they should bother to add subtitles for them.
Your character's mother is both the best character in the game and the most refreshing and meaningful use of a mother character I have ever seen in a game. It's rare enough in video games to get a living mother character, having one whose entire character is based around defying the societal expectations of motherhood was amazing to see even before she became the character in the game to most heavily support your fight against the racist systems and policing of the US government, even understanding and using her own position as a white woman to help you.
It's pretty screwed up seeing a lot of the talk on forums, guides, let's plays most people seem to have a very disturbing propagandized view of morality that's been forced on people from a young age with bad TV, games, and cartoons. Where doing things like surrendering to the police and letting the abusive justice system jail you for 15 years is seen as the "good" and "high morality" ending, whereas hurting the poor police trying to kill you and then hurting the armed gang members threatening you in Mexico means you are actually a big meanie who doesn't care about "morality" instead caring about dumb things like not dying or being jailed by a white supremacist justice system or the life of your family. Even framing the other choice as being taught to put himself and you first over society is so limiting and unfortunate. Even your brother ends up being raised by your blatantly racist and heavily Christian indoctrinated Grandparents. Worse that through some of the subtle visuals during these endings the game seems to be saying that good person and bad person end is the way they view them, in the same series where they seem frequently happy to redeem or make heroes out of abusive fathers. Visuals aside by never actually allowing you to teach your brother anything about the world, don't kill animals or advertise your powers should not mean to obey an exploitative and racist society, you are forced into terrible end game decisions by trying to be a decent person and crossing the border immediately tying you into gang violence is also unfortunate. If the game does one thing very well it is its portrayal of how deeply racism is ingrained in the country, it's people, and those who face it and that so many people would finish the game taking the worse possible choice as the good and high morality "redemption" ending when you have nothing to redeem is extremely unfortunate.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1265191052052295680