Life is Strange - Chapter Eight
This concludes Life is Strange. What a ride. The universe was not kind to Max.
Max woke up, drugged in Nathan's weird bunker with Mark looming over her. But he was not prepared for dealing time powers. By using her rewind, Max was able to engineer a scenario where she was able to time jump with one of her old photos. She used that chance to end up back in her classroom on the first day. There she was able to comfort Kate when she really needed it, hand in her contest photo, set Victoria on a better path and - most importantly - warn David about Mark and Nathan.
After that, Max woke up on a plane with her principal en route to San Francisco, having won the contest and orchestrated the downfall of her enemies. But, while at the gallery, Max gets a call from Chloe who is in the middle of the storm Max predicted. Realising that she hasn't saved Arcadia Bay yet, Max uses the photo she entered in the contest to travel further back in time again and prevent herself from winning by destroying it. Unfortunately for her, this changed the timeline in a way that put them right back in the bunker.
Just as Mark was about to drug Max again, David arrived having still been warned by her in this timeline. Mark got the jump on him and decked him with some photo equipment, but Max was able to user her time fuckery to rewind and talk David through the fight to make sure he won and was able to free her. She then left the bunker ASAP and drove into town with Mark's car.
In town, everything was a fucking mess. The giant tornado was happening, buildings were wrecked and people were dead. Max used her power to save as many people as she could, eventually finding the diner where Warren and Joyce were holed up. She explained everything to Warren, who realised the storm was caused by Max messing with the timeline too much, then used his photo from the night of the party to jump back. There she told Chloe what had happened and stopped her from going after Nathan, saving her in the process. She explained to tell her everything when she woke up in the reset timeline.
The timeline stabilised itself and Max came to standing on the beach with Chloe. Chloe filled Max in on what had happened, telling her she had instructed her to get them to the lighthouse for safety. But things immediately go sour as Max passes out and wakes up in the classroom on the first day again... sort of. It quickly becomes apparent that shit is not normal. Birds divebombed the window en masse, everyone disappeared and then shit started flowing backwards. Max made her way through the chaos, stepping through a doorway into a weird distorted time scape. She used her powers to make it through a legion of Jeffersons, Warrans, Wells and Davids and found herself suddenly inside a snow globe, watching the scene where Chloe's dad eventually left to his death play out again as a bystander.
Inside the snow globe, her phone went off and she was treated to a bunch of strange texts from people (and a dog) in the various timelines. The Pompidou one was hilarious, but the Rachel one was fucking ominous. The scenes played out and suddenly Max was in a diner having a conversation with an alternate version of herself who tried to sew doubt in her mind about everything and was just generally cruel. Chloe showed up and saved Max though, blinking her to another distorted timescape where Max walked through her memories with Chloe until she eventually came to outside the lighthouse with the real Chloe again.
There, Max explained what had happened and how the storm was her fault. Chloe realised that everything was happening as it was because Max saved her life in the very beginning and that the numerous times she came close to death or actually did die through the timelines was the universe trying to rebalance itself. Chloe then convinced Max to use the one photo they had left, the one Max took in the bathroom that day, to go back to the very beginning to let her die. Max did it, creating a timeline where the storm never happened and Nathan and Mark both got arrested for their crimes.
So, this was a narrative-heavy game and that is very much my jam. It's also a good example of a time travel story done well, which is something very hard to do since it is literally universe breaking. Granted, the implications about destiny and fate this version of time travel have are very unpleasant to consider even if they do allow the universe to retain internal consistency. The story itself is clever and well written and Chekhov would be proud of the use of foreshadowing and how everything that shows up across the timelines gets used - although some of the foreshadowing is very vague.
The twist villain wasn't necessarily something I predicted, but he wasn't a surprise either. As I said earlier, he clearly had a bigger part to play in the story than what the game wanted us to believe based purely on his screen time - and the options for what that part was were running out. The characters were mostly well-written, especially Max and David. That man is tragic. His stepdaughter is too, but Chloe is genuinely unlikeable for about half of the game. She improves a lot in the second half of the game leading up to her sacrifice (or at least attempted one since you can let the town get destroyed instead), but I don't like that a lot of her bad behaviour early on is excused based on her unfortunate circumstances. The game does get props for not doing a 180 on Nathan though. It could have been easy to make him just another victim, and he was a victim in some ways, but unlike Chloe he isn't let off the hook for his actions... granted they were much worse. Some character did feel a bit tropey, Max included, but overall, this wasn't a bad thing really. I think some of it was done on purpose even. I liked the use of photos as symbolism too. It was a bit heavy-handed maybe, but I don't care. I will say though, that some of the dialogue was bad. I explained how earlier. I'll add to that though by saying sometimes the flow was off based on the choices you made in the conversations or felt kind of generally out of place. Not enough to badly hurt the story, but I noticed.
Mechanically, the trial-and-error puzzle approach using Max's time powers was really fucking cool. It was clever and it gave you multiple chances to get outcomes you wanted, but you almost always had to work for those outcomes regardless of your ability to rewind. There wasn't a lot of controlling to do besides walking around and interacting with people and objects outside of the two stealth sections, but that's fine. There didn't need to be. Against the odds though, the controls still felt clunky sometimes. For one, despite being told a controller would improve my experience, the game refused to interact with my controller. Distances and angles with the mouse interaction could also get funky sometimes. It wasn't too bad but, again, it was an issue that was there.
The visuals and audio in the game were solid too. There were some very striking images - especially around the beach at sunset. The devastation caused by the storm in the fifth episode was also really well done, you could feel the intensity of the storm. Unfortunately though, the tornado itself did look kind of cartoonish. The voice acting all around was very good, which was important for the way the game was built, and the soundtrack was great and I liked how it was integrated into things through items in the environment (speakers, TVs, phones etc) a lot.
Life is Strange is definitely a flawed game, but it has a hell of a lot going for it too. It's not perfect, but I liked it a lot and I'm interested in trying out the prequel and the new instalment, True Colours too.
Story: 7/10
Visuals: 6/10
Soundtrack: 9/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Total Score: 29/40
