A butterfly flaps its wings and a rich creep with a gun kills a blue-haired girl. In DONTNOD’s Life is Strange, the player follows photography student Max Caulfield’s move back to her hometown, Arcadia Bay. She captures a shot of a butterfly in a bathroom – a glimpse of blue brightening the mundane – before the gun rings out. Then she reaches out a hand and twists back time. 

Quite a few fans, including me, think that Max is autistic. There are plenty of canonical hints that she’s neurodivergent – most clearly her placement on an Individualised Education Programme, designed for disabled students. She’s shy and socially anxious, hiding in the bathroom after being called on in class so that ‘nobody can see my meltdown.’ In her journal, she describes trying hard to ‘climb out’ of her ‘cocoon’. She’s also hyper-fixated on her camera, doodling it and never without it. Max explains, ‘maybe it’s a way for me to be part of the world, but at a safe distance.’ 

Still, I don’t know how much of my interpretation of Max is down to the choice element of the game, or whether I have written myself onto her character. Untangling myself from her in a Life is Strange playthrough seems impossible. That’s part of what can be so moving in games, the porousness between player and character. There’s a confusion of perspective that places you into Max’s social world, riling against the insults she faces right alongside her. 

“Why do you care? Why are you even asking me? You never talk, you just zone out with your camera.” A girl called Juliet Watson demands, adding to a litany of judgments that follow Max around. Her teacher’s reports ‘find her too nervous and nosy’ and, even if you choose to be nice to Victoria, she’ll declare ‘I hate that “I’m so quirky” crap.’

As insiders to Max ‘zoning out’ with her camera, players of Life is Strange know that Juliet’s accusation of disinterest is way off. Max is always engaged, scrutinising fragments of her surroundings – words from a missing girl etched on a desk, graffiti, a letter in a bin – and mapping her world outwards from there. She sees from different angles and through a different lens, constructing an understanding of the dark mystery unfolding in Arcadia Bay.

Juliet says Max is zoning out. She’s viewing Max through a lens that doesn’t fit, and a few years before Life is Strange was released Damien Milton explained why. He described the ‘double empathy problem’, which argues that when people with different experiences of the world interact, they struggle to empathise with each other. This lack of reciprocity, which occurs mutually when autistic and neurotypical people interact, is often solely attributed to the autistic party. Milton summarised the empathetic inequity at play: ‘many autistic people have indeed gained a greater level of insight into non-AS society’, he claims ‘due to the need to survive and potentially thrive in a non-AS culture. Conversely, the non-AS person has no pertinent personal requirement to understand the mind of the ‘autistic person’.’ 

“That’s why I’m talking to you now,” Max placates Juliet. An infuriatingly common example of an autist forced to accommodate and apologise for a miscommunication which Milton shows as very much mutual. But Max’s character also challenges the norm, subverting the often default status of the neurotypical perspective. Nothing captures this better than her photography. 

Clara Törnvell describes typical photographic depictions of autism as ‘close-ups of faces and eyes […] such images are not so much a metaphor for autism itself as they illustrate the neurotypical’s attempt to understand and solve its “mystery”. These are the images of a photographer encroaching on the autist with the camera in search of the true, hidden individual inside’. Max disrupts this. In her prize-winning ‘Everyday Heroes’ shot, she stands in front of a wall of her own polaroids. We see dozens of snapshot moments from around Arcadia Bay, bound together behind Max’s silhouette. We see how uniquely situated she is in her environment, constantly reacting to it, reaching to understand it and capture it on camera. We see the world through autistic eyes, and her in her own terms. 

 Max’s camera gravitates towards Chloe, who she spends most of the game saving. Their lifelong friendship is cast under the shadow of Max’s difficulty communicating during her years away in Seattle. Max chastises herself for this, asking in her journal, ‘What do you say to your best friend after five years of silence?’ Her regret is clear: ‘I feel so lame for not staying in touch… or even text.’ With texting acting as a huge obstacle to Max’s relationships, she finds other ways to communicate her love to Chloe. Her special interest, the camera, works as a tool to aid communication. She captures pictures of Chloe as she sees her, loose and relaxed, dancing or aiming a gun at the sky. 

Max’s powers manifested to keep Chloe safe, and their connection is the driving force of the game. They fall in love, unless, inexplicably, you ship Max with Warren. As her connection with Chloe deepens, Max slowly begins to unmask and grow in confidence. She enters her photo into the competition when, days before, she was terrified to. She tells a certain someone to “eat shit and die”. You can’t help but be proud.

But when Max rewinds time, a small animated spiral tracks her progress backwards. She relives the same conversations, again and again, until they go right. The social anxiety underneath the metaphor isn’t hidden very deep. Superpowers are one of the great ways Life is Strange depicts neurodivergent experiences of the world. Thankfully, not in the probably-well-meaning but profoundly irritating and unhelpful cliché – ‘your autism is your superpower’. Instead, these powers imaginatively push the player into navigating the world in new social and sensory ways. 

 Life is Strange: True Colors, the most recent fixture of the franchise, symbolises autistic experiences of affective empathy (the ability to mirror or share in someone’s feelings) as colourful auras radiating off characters. These are visible only to the protagonist, Alex Chen. If the feelings are too intense, Alex assumes their emotional state herself. She gets overloaded, her world and body turn on her. At one point in the game, Alex is stranded in the mountains, trying to rescue a boy. His fear is overwhelming and violent. Underneath her, the shadows in the ravine shift, its jaws opening and threatening to consume her. She can’t move. It’s one of the most artistic and stressful representations of sensory and emotional overload I’ve ever seen.

Just as Alex’s sensory and emotive experiences of the world can overwhelm and suffocate, Life is Strange depicts similarly oppressive institutions. As players, our choices constrict with the systematic ableism Alex endures. Dr Lynn of the Helping Hands Group Home asks Alex at the start of the game, right before she moves in with her brother, “Does he know about your… issues?” Alex’s powers are only referred to euphemistically. Dr Lynn can’t look straight at her, she will only pathologize. She attempts to control Alex, clear in their text chain announcing random room visits and her tone creased with worry as she asks, “so you would be working with people?” Alex is misjudged and mislabelled by the institutions she’s forced to exist in. Her story is scarred by institutional ableism even after she escapes the group home. She only begins to heal as she finds real connection and kinship with her brother and friends. 

By tangling the player up in different social perspectives and sensory experiences, Life is Strange prompts empathy. Even if it’s just subtly, a little at a time, maybe encouragement like this can help to begin decentring the neurotypical perspective as the automatic norm, or at least chip away at it.