Life is Strange: True Colors puts players inside the mind of Alex, a young woman who can feel other people’s feelings as a physical, visible force. The game arrived in 2021 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC, developed by Deck Nine and published by Square Enix. It asks a simple question: what happens when you can feel what all around you feel, but your own pain stays unspoken? Five years have passed since the game’s release, and the question still holds weight.
Trailer, via スクウェア・エニックス.
Alex Comes to Haven Springs
Alex arrives in the small mountain town of Haven Springs to see her brother again after years apart, years spent in foster care while he built a life without her. The time back together is short. Her brother dies in what the town calls an accident, and Alex stays behind to find out what really happened to him. She carries a heavy load of her own history, and the town does not make it easy for her to put that load down.
That loss sits at the center of the whole story. Every choice Alex makes afterward, every person she talks to, ties back to the need to know the truth about her brother’s death. The game does not let that need fade into the background. It stays with Alex from the first scene to the last, shaping how she reads every room she walks into and every face she meets.
Haven Springs itself does a great deal of work here. It is small enough that its people know each other by name, and warm enough that a player may, for a while, forget that something under the surface is wrong. The town is not just a setting. It is a character in its own right, with its own history, its own secrets, and its own reasons for wanting the truth to stay buried.
Alex’s Power
Alex’s gift lets her read other characters’ feelings as color and sound, and, at certain points, briefly take on those feelings as her own. It is a quieter power than the time travel used by Max, the lead character of the first Life is Strange, but it fits a story built around grief and connection rather than mystery for its own sake. The power is not a weapon. It is a way of understanding, and the game treats it that way.
The gift surfaces in different forms across the game:
- Reading the strongest feeling inside a person through color and sound
- Briefly taking on another person’s feelings to see the world as they do
- Calming a strong reaction or urging it into the open during conversation
- Unlocking buried memories tied to strong feelings from the past
None of this plays as loud or showy. It works because it stays small and close to the people it touches, letting quiet scenes carry as much weight as the big ones. A single conversation can hold more tension than a chase scene, and the game trusts the player to feel that tension without pushing it.
Deck Nine Builds a Full Game
Life is Strange: True Colors was built by Deck Nine, the studio behind Life is Strange: Before the Storm. The choice to release the full game as one piece, rather than splitting it into episodes released over time, marked a change for the series. Players could move through all five chapters back to back, without a wait between them. That change was a statement of confidence from the studio.
That change in structure alters the pace of the story in a way the earlier games did not allow. The chapters still stand apart from one another, each with its own shape and its own turning point, but nothing outside the story itself forces a pause. A player who wants to keep going can keep going. A player who wants to stop can stop. The story does not beg for attention; it earns it.
| Episode | Title |
|---|---|
| 1 | Side A |
| 2 | Lanterns |
| 3 | Monster or Mortal |
| 4 | Flicker |
| 5 | Side B |
Each chapter pushes Alex’s search for the truth forward while giving the people of Haven Springs room to show who they are. The chapter titles themselves carry meaning. They point to light, to choice, to the small moments that define a life. The structure gives the story room to breathe, and the story uses that room well.
The People Around Her
An old friend from Alex’s past, one carried over from Life is Strange: Before the Storm, runs the local record shop and becomes one of the people Alex leans on most in town. Other residents of Haven Springs fill out the mystery around her brother’s death, each holding a piece of the truth and a reason of their own to keep it hidden. The town is full of people with their own grief, their own guilt, and their own small hopes.
The writing leans on these ties between people more than it leans on any single twist. Conversations move at a human pace, not a rushed one. Characters do not explain themselves all at once. They open up slowly, when they are ready, and the game respects that timing.
Silence gets used well too.
A pause in a conversation can say more than a line of dialogue. The game understands that, and it gives its actors room to work with that silence.
Music in the Record Shop
Music matters to this series, and Life is Strange: True Colors keeps that tradition alive. The record shop at the center of town, and Alex’s own habit of playing guitar, give the soundtrack a reason to exist inside the story rather than sitting behind it as background noise. Songs come from characters, not from nowhere.
That said, the mystery plot does not always match the strength of the writing built around Alex and the people she meets. Some late reveals move fast, faster than the patient pace set earlier in the game, and a few threads get tied off with less weight than their setup promised they would carry. The ending does not land every note it reaches for.
Still, the core of the story holds up. The loss of her brother drives every choice a player makes as Alex, and the game never loses sight of that loss, even when the plot around it speeds up near the end. The emotional truth of the story stays steady.
Life is Strange: True Colors does not change what this series does at its core. It builds on it. Alex’s power gives players a new way into choices, memory scenes, and quiet moments of exploration that already defined the earlier games, without asking a returning player to start over from nothing. The game stands on its own, and it stands tall.
