Another day, another video game adaptation announcement. I’m tired, you’re tired, we’re all tired.Call of Duty’s movie was announced last week,which I immediately called stupid, and just days later, Prime Video hasannounced that it’s greenlit aLife is Strange television adaptation. Charlie Covell, who wrote all 16 episodes of The End of the F***ing World and created Netflix's Kaos, will serve as showrunner and executive producer.

At this early stage, it’s unclear who or what this show is going to actually be about. One could reasonably expect that it would tackle Max Caulfield and Chloe Price’s story, given it’s based on the video game and a screenshot of them was included in the announcement, but the gameis episodic and has followed multiple protagonists over its lifetime. The series could follow a similar track, with an anthology telling different stories each season.

This Is Bound To Be A Controversial Project

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Already, the show is courting controversy. According to Christian Devine, who wrote the first two games in the series and the spin-off The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, the show isn’t involving the game’s original creators.

Perhaps this isn’t so surprising – the rights belong to Square Enix, and Don’t Nod, the original developers of the series,left the series behind in order to have more creative control over the games it makes. Deck Nine, which succeeded it, has reportedly had internal problems with crunch and harassment within the studio.

While it’s not unusual for Square Enix to leave Don’t Nod out of the equation, it does feel a little stinky that the IP’s creators and the original writers of the story won’t be consulted at all about the adaptation. Most adaptations, after all, are made in collaboration with the people that understand them best, and who understands the original game better than Don’t Nod?

Will The Adaptation Choose Bay Or Bae?

Via Metro

Another thing that immediately strikes me as worrying is that as a television show, the adaptation will very obviously have to remove player interactivity from the equation. As fans of the series will be aware, Life is Strange is entirely predicated on player choice. Character development, and the status of several relationships are determined by players, and its fans haveverystrong feelings about the game’s climactic choice: Bay or Bae.

Spoilers for a decade-old game follow, but at the end of Life is Strange, Max is forced to make a huge choice. She either sacrifices her home of Arcadia Bay to save her best friend’s (and maybe girlfriend’s, depending on your choices) life, or she sacrifices Chloe’s life to save the town and everybody in it.

Whichever choice Max chooses in this adaptation will be controversial. Fans of the series are vocal about their feelings about Chloe –there was a firestorm over the latest game,Life is Strange: Double Exposure, because some players felt that the characters were misunderstood by Deck Nine and that the characters deserved better than the fate the developer wrote for them.

Other people feel strongly about the Bay ending, me included. It feels absurd to me that Max would sacrifice the lives of everybody she knows to save the life of her friend (who isn’t even a very good friend to her), but a lot of people disagree, and that’s fine.

Regardless, canonising one over the other is bound to upsetsomebody. Canonising any choice at all kind of defeats the purpose of the game entirely, too, but that’s the case with many adaptations. A lot of adaptations are perfectly fine ideas on their faces, because they’re based on linear games with set narratives, but Life is Strange is not. We don’t even know what the show will be like yet, but what we do know is that it’s going to annoy a lot of fans regardless of how it’s handled.

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Life is Strange

Adventure Systems 8.0/10 OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 81/100 Critics Rec: 76% Released January 30, 2015 ESRB M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Drugs and Alcohol Developer(s) Dontnod Entertainment Publisher(s) Square Enix Engine unreal engine 3, unreal engine 4
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DON'TNOD Entertainment, Feral Interactive, and Square Enix bring you a story rich game about a young woman's life where player chocies matter and determine how the story goes. An indie hit, the game also features a defining soundtrack that sets the atmosphere for the story.

Life is Strange is an award-winning and critically acclaimed episodic adventure game that allows the player to rewind time and affect the past, present and future. Critics describe it as Twin Peaks meets Heavy Rain or Gone Home meets The Walking Dead but with time travel.

Follow the story of Max Caulfield, a photography senior who discovers she can rewind time while saving her best friend Chloe Price.
The pair soon find themselves investigating the mysterious disappearance of fellow student Rachel Amber, uncovering a dark side to life in Arcadia Bay. Meanwhile, Max must quickly learn that changing the past can sometimes lead to a devastating future.

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