The game's plot focuses on Maxine Caulfield, a photography student who discovers that she has the ability to rewind time at any moment, leading her every choice to enact the butterfly effect. After having foreseen an approaching storm, Max must take on the responsibility to prevent it from destroying her town. The player's actions will adjust the narrative as it unfolds, and reshape it once allowed to travel back in time. Fetch quests and making environmental changes represent the forms of puzzle solving in addition to using branching choices for conversation.

Development of Life Is Strange began in April 2013. It was formed with an episodic format in mind, for reasons both financial and creative. The developers conducted field research on the setting by travelling to the Pacific Northwest, and subverted known archetypes to make the characters. Player feedback influenced the adjustments made to the episodes. Story and character arc serve as the central point in the game rather than traditional graphic adventure tropes like point-and-click puzzles. The voice recording sessions took place in Los Angeles, California.

During its release, Life Is Strange received generally favourable reviews commending the character development, rewind game mechanic and tackling of taboo subjects. It won the BAFTA Games Award for Best Story, the Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award and The Game Awards’ Games for Impact Award. Common criticisms included the slang that was used, poor lip-syncing in earlier episodes, and tonal inconsistencies in the story. It had sold one million digital copies by the end of July 2015. A digital series based on the game is being developed by Legendary Digital Studios and Square Enix.