Life Is Strange: True Colors hands Alex Chen a power that hurts to use. She feels what everyone around her feels, and the game makes that a mechanic, not a mood.
Trailer, via スクウェア・エニックス.
Haven Springs, Colorado
Deck Nine developed True Colors and Square Enix published it. It came out on 10 September 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Google Stadia. The Nintendo Switch version followed on 7 December 2021.
Alex leaves a foster care group home after eight years to reunite with her brother Gabriel “Gabe” Chen in Haven Springs, a small mining town deep in the mountains of Colorado. Most of the town works for Typhon, a mining company. Within a day of her arrival, she has met:
- park ranger Ryan Lucan
- radio DJ Steph Gingrich
- bar owner Jed Lucan
- flower shop owner Eleanor Lethe
- Gabe’s girlfriend Charlotte Harmon
The Empathy Power
Alex reads emotions as colorful auras. Some characters carry more intense auras, marking trauma or hardship. When Alex interacts with them, the game creates a “nova” that transforms the world around her and the character to reflect that trauma. The player works out what caused the feeling and chooses whether Alex comforts the person.
The cost is real. Alex can be “infected” by the emotions she absorbs. Her power is not a puzzle key. It is a wound she keeps reopening.
Gabe Dies, and Typhon Covers It Up
Gabe takes Alex to his apartment and offers it to her. Mac Loudon, Typhon’s mine safety manager, interrupts them and attacks Gabe, wrongly believing Gabe is involved with his girlfriend Riley. Alex’s emotions snap, and she attacks Mac to defend her brother.
Later, Ryan tells Alex and Gabe that Charlotte’s son Ethan has gone missing. The three search the forest. Gabe calls Typhon to cancel a scheduled blast in the nearby mountain. Alex rescues Ethan. The blast goes ahead anyway, and the landslide knocks Gabe into a canyon. He falls to his death.
Alex uses her power on Mac, who worked the night of the explosion and claims he never received Gabe’s call. She learns the truth:
- Mac tried to act on the call.
- His superiors at Typhon overruled him and let the blast go off.
- The company is covering up its role and forcing Mac to stay quiet.
With Ryan and Steph, Alex steals a USB drive from Typhon operations director Diane Jacobs. The town’s secrets run through the company that employs it.
What Works and What Drags
The characters carry this game. Alex, Gabe, Ryan, and Steph are written like people with lives that continue offscreen, and the voice acting and facial animation sell the small moments. The empathy mechanic is the best idea in the series: a power that costs the person using it, tied to a mystery that is really about a company burying a death.
The complaints land too. Pacing sags in the middle chapters. Haven Springs repeats its environments. And the choices matter less than the series has trained players to expect, which undercuts the one thing these games sell hardest.
True Colors released in full rather than chapter by chapter, and that was the right call. The story holds together as one arc instead of five cliffhangers. The trade is that nothing forces you to sit with a decision for a month, and the seams show.
The Switch port arriving three months later is the version to avoid if you have another platform. The other releases are the ones to play.
What matters here is Alex. A psychic who cannot stop feeling other people is a better engine for this series than time travel ever was, because the mystery and the mechanic are the same thing. The pacing and the soft choices keep True Colors from the top of the series. The empathy does not.
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