2455: Not-So-Super Max

I finally got around to finishing the last episode of Life is Strange yesterday. My final feelings about the whole thing were… overall positive, but a little mixed in a number of areas. Personally speaking, I didn’t feel it was the utter masterpiece most critics made it out to be; in fact, there were a number of aspects in the final episode that I found fundamentally unsatisfying and downright awkward. More on those in a moment; let’s talk more generally.

SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS FOR LIFE IS STRANGE AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

For the unfamiliar, Life is Strange is a five-part episodic adventure game series developed by French developer Dontnod and published by Square Enix. The story concerns a teenage girl named Max, who discovers that she has the ability to rewind time and, as a result, change the outcome of events that unfold around her. Her discovery of this power comes during a particularly traumatic moment: she witnesses the murder of another young woman named Chloe, who was her best friend growing up, but from whom she had grown estranged over the last few years.

Max saves Chloe using her power to warn her of the imminent attack before it happens, and thus the story proper begins, concerning Max and Chloe rekindling their friendship with one another and subsequently investigating the disappearance of a local girl named Rachel Amber. Along the way, Max has the opportunity to make numerous decisions (and make them again if she’s not happy with the immediate consequences, though after she’s left the immediate area she’s no longer able to reverse time) that ultimately affect the way each episode plays out, though the underlying story is relatively “fixed” in nature.

Later in the narrative, Max gains the ability to manipulate time in a more profound way by focusing on photographs, allowing herself to “relive” an earlier moment in time — by years in some cases — and change the way things unfolded. The most significant example of this is when she travels back to her childhood with Chloe and prevents Chloe’s father from leaving the house on the day when, in the “prime” timeline, he would have ended up dying in a car accident. It transpires that this single change has a significant impact on the future, with Chloe turning from the rebellious young teenager with blue hair into a tired young woman paralysed from the neck down thanks to her getting in a car accident of her own. Max ultimately reverses her meddling in this instance, reverting the timeline back to how it was before.

The idea of choice and consequence is a key one in Life is Strange, and indeed the choices you make can have significant repercussions. Particularly important choices are presented rather dramatically by the action freezing and some throbbing, tense music playing as you’re forced to select between two options, neither of which are obviously “the good one”. The game uses these dramatic choices sparingly, ensuring that they have plenty of impact when they do come up; throughout the story, more minor choices affect the fates of secondary characters in various ways, though these can still be significant, with many of them ending up as matters of life and death.

The biggest beef I have with Life is Strange is that despite all this buildup of choice and consequence being super-important, the game utterly wimps out in its final episode by implying that the right thing to do from the outset would have been… nothing at all. From the beginning of the game, Max is troubled by nightmares about a devastating tornado coming to wreck her hometown of Arcadia Bay, and in the final episode it finally happens for real, with Max suddenly being absolutely convinced (for no apparent reason, and with no real evidence) that it’s her fault for meddling with time more than she should have. However, the game makes no attempt to explain quite how Max fiddling around with the lives of Arcadia Bay’s residents results in a supernatural-appearing tornado that looks set to kill everyone; it mumbles something about “chaos theory” but doesn’t attempt to elaborate on this in the slightest.

Worse, the game doesn’t even make any attempt to explain how Max came to have her time manipulation powers in the first place. Here, it doesn’t even mumble something sotto voce, it simply doesn’t address it. At all. I guess this leaves things a little open to interpretation at the end; one possible interpretation of it all could be that the whole series is one big “what if?” scenario in Max’s head, with her going over the traumatic events of witnessing Chloe’s murder and conjecturing what might have happened if she had intervened. This theory is undermined, however, by the fact that you’re given a choice at the end of the game to either revert things back to how they were before Max saved Chloe, thereby preventing all the tornado nonsense, or to do the opposite and save Chloe at the expense of the entire town. Assuming this option is “real”, we’re presumably meant to accept that the events we witnessed were, in fact, real, and not all taking place in Max’s mind.

I have a few smaller beefs with the game, too, chief of which is with Chloe herself. Max sets up Chloe to be this sort of wonderful person that she’s delighted to reconnect with after a long time, but Chloe’s depiction in the game is as a thoroughly obnoxious, deeply dislikeable young woman who is rebelling more for the sake of rebellion than anything else. She’s not set up to be sympathetic at all, and more than once I found myself wondering why Max was being so patient and understanding with her; they just didn’t seem to be a good “fit” for one another at all. It’s a little more understandable when we see Chloe and Max in their younger days — or in the parallel timeline where Chloe is paralysed and doesn’t go through a rebellious phase — but in what we are presumably supposed to assume is the “prime” timeline, Chloe is a character I found hard to feel anything positive for, and Max’s repeated attempts to “save” her just became frustrating after a while.

Elsewhere in the writing, we have some cliched high school drama, which isn’t bad in and of itself — aside from it being the usual, predictable “rich girls dislike nerdy/intelligent/arty girls” stuff we’ve been seeing since Clueless and Mean Girls — and some ham-fisted attempts at social commentary, usually through graffiti you find scrawled around various places. “Max is a feminazi” is the one that bugged me the most: at no point throughout the narrative do you ever get the impression that Max is an active feminist or indeed activist of any kind — she’s a pretty easygoing, friendly sort of person, even to people who are shitheads towards her; the inclusion of this particular piece of graffiti felt more like an attempt to demonstrate the sort of things “bad people” in general say, using the Internet as a reference point. It was jarring and, like many things in the series as a whole, didn’t seem to quite fit.

I think probably the strangest thing was the “reveal” of who the real villain is. Throughout the story, we’re set up to believe that Nathan Prescott, son of the local property tycoon and generally a little shit, is the “big bad”. Indeed, the fact that him shooting Chloe in the first episode sets the whole chain of events into motion seems to confirm this. However, at the end of the fourth episode, the real villain is revealed to be Max’s photography teacher Mr Jefferson, who prior to this point has demonstrated no real villainous tendencies — a fact which the writers apparently knew, as they shoehorn in an awkward “you should have seen this right from the beginning, I was dropping all the hints” conversation in the final episode that sadly doesn’t actually offer any convincing evidence that yes, we should have seen this coming.

Jefferson doesn’t appear to have any particularly clear motivations for what he does, either, aside from “he wants to do bad things to young women”, presumably Just Because He’s a White Man. He’s revealed to have been “manipulating” Nathan, but it’s not explained how or why; presumably we’re supposed to infer that it’s something to do with Nathan’s powerful family connections, though why Jefferson, a successful and celebrated artist, needs the assistance of a local property tycoon is anyone’s guess. Furthermore, it’s never quite explained whether the “Dark Room”, in which Jefferson (and possibly Nathan?) tortured, photographed and killed young women — including Rachel Amber, the girl Max and Chloe were on the trail of — belongs to the Prescotts or to Jefferson himself, or why it’s there in the first place.

Ultimately the whole thing fell a bit flat for me in this final episode with so many unresolved plot threads, and the fact that the “right” thing to do as the last decision in the game was strongly implied to be “undo everything you’ve been doing for the last five episodes because Chaos Theory or something” felt like a bit of a slap in the face, particularly after the emphatic message at the start of every episode that Your Choices Have Meaningful Consequences.

I’m aware that this all sounds quite negative, but on the whole, I’m glad I played Life is Strange and I certainly don’t think it was bad. It was well shot and directed, nicely stylised and had some genuinely emotional moments throughout, but there were far too many holes and inconsistencies in it by the end for me to walk away feeling like it was an emotional, narrative masterpiece on the same level as something like The Fruit of Grisaia. It was a mid-tier narrative-centric adventure for me at best: worth playing, but with significant room for improvement, and outdone in almost every regard by quite a lot of other narrative-centric games and visual novels I could mention.

I sincerely hope Dontnod learn from the things they could have done better with this work and wow us all with something a bit more coherent-feeling in the future; there’s a firm foundation to work from here — the raggedy edges just need tidying up a bit.