Arcadia Bay has been built, filmed and packed back into the lorries. Prime Video’s live-action Life is Strange series has wrapped, according to cinematographer Vincent De Paula, who marked the end of the shoot on Instagram earlier this month. Cameras had been rolling in Vancouver since late June, with the schedule originally pencilled in to run until mid-October, so the production appears to have finished a touch early. Amazon itself hasn’t made a song and dance of it yet, and there’s still no trailer, no first footage beyond a poster and no release date, though 2027 is the widely expected window.
The show adapts the 2015 Dontnod game that Square Enix turned into a franchise. Broadway performer Tatum Grace Hopkins, making her television debut, plays Max Caulfield, the photography student at Blackwell Academy who discovers she can rewind time while saving the life of her childhood best friend, Chloe Price. Chloe is played by Maisy Stella of Nashville and My Old Ass. Tom Cullen, Leisha Hailey, Raúl Castillo, Owen Teague and Billy Barratt (Bring Her Back) fill out the cast.
Behind the camera, the line-up is more promising than video game adaptations usually manage. Charlie Covell, whose The End of the F***ing World proved a deft hand with damaged teenagers on the run, is showrunner, writing alongside Mackenzie Dohr. Karyn Kusama directed the first two episodes and executive produces through her Familystyle banner. She is a sound choice for a story about two young women, a small town and something rotten underneath, having made Girlfight, The Invitation and the once-maligned, now-adored Jennifer’s Body, as well as helming episodes of Yellowjackets. She cheerfully admitted to Polygon that she isn’t a gamer, but watched playthroughs to see how the story bends with different choices. Lauren Wolkstein, Silas Howard and Daisy von Scherler Mayer directed the remaining episodes, and Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap is producing alongside Square Enix, Story Kitchen and Amazon MGM Studios.
Filming in Vancouver feels right. The city has stood in for every rain-sodden town in the Pacific Northwest since Mulder first waved a torch into a forest, and the game never hid its debt to Twin Peaks, with its missing girl, its diner and its lingering sense that the town itself is up to something. LuckyChap’s Natalie Berkus has already talked about the series as a multi-season proposition.
That ambition runs headlong into the adaptation’s trickiest problem. The game’s appeal lay in its choices, culminating in a final decision that players still argue about a decade on, and which we won’t spoil for the three people who haven’t played it. Television doesn’t do branching paths. Covell has to pick one road through Arcadia Bay and live with it, knowing half the audience took the other.
Prime Video has already struck gold with Fallout and has God of War and Tomb Raider in the works, so it is clearly happy to keep raiding the games cupboard. Life is Strange is a quieter, sadder proposition than any of those, which might be its best weapon. The game’s whole conceit was the power to undo your mistakes. The people in the edit suite get no such button, so here’s hoping they got it right first time.
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