Home Is Something You Build
Christian Haines, Managing Editor
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Life is Strange: True Colors.
“Home isn’t something you find, it’s something you build.” This line is something like the slogan of Life Is Strange: True Colors, a game in which you play Alex Chen, as she builds a place for herself in the Colorado town of Haven. “Home” glows with a utopian light; it promises happiness, freedom, and security as much as shelter. Home is, as the town name suggests, a haven. However, the value of True Colors lies not in the seductiveness of Haven, though seductive it is, with its flower-strewn bridge, picturesque mountain vistas, and sunny skies. No, the game’s true value – its critical force – comes from undercutting initial impressions of an untroubled home. Haven’s splendor and serenity comes undone not just because of a character’s death (Gabe, Alex’s brother, dies in the first section of True Colors) but also because the town’s history with class struggle and racism refuse to remain in the past.
The town of Haven in all its flowery splendor.
True Colors begins with a homecoming. Alex moves to the town of Haven to reunite with her long-lost brother, after having shuffled from one home to another in the Washington state foster care system. The game slowly unveils how Alex and her brother Gabe lost first their mother and then their father when they were children. Their reunion in the first chapter of the game suggests a distinction between true and false homes, between home as heart-felt connection and home as simple shelter. The townsfolk of Haven immediately welcome Alex, transferring their positive feelings towards her brother to her, seemingly without hesitation or effort. There’s nothing insular to this old mining town, no sense that belonging comes at the cost of exclusion. The record store, pot dispensary, bar/restaurant, and flower shop suggest all the amenities of a neighborhood in Brooklyn or Boulder, but without the rising rents. In fact, Alex never ends up needing to pay rent, a fact to which the game alludes at multiple occasions. Now, that’s utopian.
Home is something you build, but building a place to call one’s own can be a difficult and messy affair. Each game in the Life is Strange features a supernatural power highlighting some existential difficulty involved in living life. In the first game, it’s the power to turn back time, calling attention to the degree to which time’s passage governs life. In True Colors, Alex possesses a version of empathy verging on telepathy; she reads individuals’ intense emotions, represented as colorful glowing auras, dredging up their personal history or memories in the process. It’s tempting to think of home as a place, or bounded space, but Alex’s super-empathy suggests something else, namely, that home is a feeling, or, really, a web of feelings, shared among a group of people with their own differing histories. Home is a social bond, powerful but also fragile, needing to be cultivated and maintained.
Press “A” for super-empathy.
When critics and game designers talk about world-building, they’re typically referring to the setting of a game as opposed to the characters. True Colors shows how world-building can be as much a matter of emotion as a space or a place. The feeling of a place depends on the characters inhabiting it, and vice versa. Alex’s super-empathy literalizes this loop. It turns an implicit aspect of most games into a prismatic array of colors. These glowing beacons function as narrative nodes. They highlight interactions that transform the environments in and surrounding Haven from backdrops for player actions into interactive spaces suffused with social momentum.
Why “social momentum”? Because the narrative arc of True Colors centers on the creation and disturbance of community. Alex is an outsider brought into the fold, only to find her position in the community shaken, first, by her brother’s death, then by the machinations of the Typhon mining company. It turns out that Gabe’s death was a result of a corporate conspiracy to literally bury the dead from a mining accident. By the end of the game, this conspiracy envelops the entire community of Haven, as it turns out that one of the most prominent characters in the game, Jed, was in on it. (Jed is a town hero - supposedly saving folks from the mining accident that he in fact caused – and a father figure for Alex. He lets Alex live rent-free above the bar he owns, gives her a job at the bar, and generally offers comfort to the townsfolk – only to pull a gun on Alex when she digs up too much of the truth in the town’s history.) The heavy-handed name of Haven turns out to be an ironic comment on small-town comforts. It’s a ruse lulling the player into the pleasure and security of the town’s cheerful façade only to reveal the sins of the past.
Alex after almost being killed and making her way through the mines.
There’s a great deal of social and political content to tease out from Life Is Strange: True Colors. Although the game references Alex’s identity as Asian-American only lightly, it’s difficult to ignore the social charge of her confrontation with Jed, the epitome of a rugged white masculinity associated with settler colonialism and the conquest of the Frontier in the United States. Walking through the town, Alex can also read the anxieties and anger of denizens, as they grumble about the hold that the mining corporation Typhon has over their lives. These intertwined histories of racial injustice and class conflict are crystallized in Alex and Gabe’s father, John, who it turns out was one of the miners whose deaths Typhon was trying to cover up. This melodramatic twist in which the serenity of Alex’s new home, her Haven, conceals the tragedies of her past is fitting. It speaks to how True Colors presents conflict in a nested fashion: interpersonal conflicts are nested within transgenerational tragedies, which are in turn nested within histories of injustice spanning decades, even centuries.
Individual feelings and emotions are inextricable from the social and political forces that shape our dispositions towards other people. Individual emotions like fear, shame, anger, and jealousy are eddies in a sea of social feeling. (Shout out to the excellent work of queer and feminist scholars like Lauren Berlant, José Esteban Muñoz, and Sara Ahmed who have repeatedly shown how feelings and emotions are the stuff of social and political conflict.) From this perspective, Alex’s struggle to make Haven home – her efforts to reckon with the injustices of the past, while maintaining connections to her friends and found family in the present – might be read as inextricable from the anti-Asian sentiment of a white working class version of the American west: the friction she encounters when investigating her brother’s death is arguably a product not just of Typhon’s hold on the town’s economy but also the town’s investment in an image of itself as cozy, tight-knit, and (by implication) white.
Music plays a crucial role in True Colors, with Alex covering some notable alt rock songs. But here’s her playing air guitar.
True Colors isn’t a pessimistic or cynical game. Far from it. It never surrenders the utopian appeal of home, even when during the game’s conclusion, it offers Alex the choice to leave Haven behind. The game rewards you in various ways for the connections you make with Haven’s townsfolk. You earn achievements by discovering the memories of other characters in cherished objects. In the climactic scene of the game, how many people side with Alex against Jed depends on how well, or simply how much, the player’s interacted with non-player characters. The game seems to suggest that Haven may yet be a home, but that home in the most utopian sense can only be earned by wrestling with the injustices of the past.
