Turn back the clock
Because Life is Strange, the brand new, episodic adventure game from Remember Me developer Dontnod, isn't taking the grandiose, superheroic approach to temporal tomfoolery. Rather, it integrates its clock-bothering malarkey into an otherwise entirely naturalistic tale of estranged childhood friendships, troubled parent/offspring relationships, and the strains of becoming an adult amid the numerous traumas of school, small towns, and non-ideal peer groups.
The careless screwing over of a friend with a panicked, badly thought-out dialogue choice can be undone. The whole preceding scenario can be struck from the record by going back a little further. Environmental puzzle solutions can be reverse-engineered by coming to understand their causality backwards. And all of this is wrapped up in a quietly thoughtful--but thankfully non-angsty--vibe of underplayed humanity. However much the game's core mechanic might flagrantly break the fundamental laws of physics, it's all to the end of making little, but hopefully far reaching, improvements in its very real characters' very real lives.
