After going through half of Life Is Strange, you’re already made aware of just how serious the subject matter is about to get. It comes as no surprise when you’re yet again upset by what you see.
Even if you aren’t phased by Kate’s suicide attempt, you’ll surely be shaken up by the alternate timelines Max rips open during yet another attempt to fix everything. Max uses a photograph of her and Chloe to travel back to the day when Chloe’s father William dies in a car accident. Max prevents the accident by delaying William just a few precious minutes, but as she travels back to her future, triumphant in her victory, she realizes she’s made a horrible mistake – it’s not William who gets in an accident, but Chloe, and she ends up paralyzed from the neck down, her respiratory system slowly failing, knowing that eventually she will suffocate to death. Chloe, so happy to see Max after three long years, asks that the day’s memory be her last. Chloe asks Max to assist in her suicide.
At this point, I had to turn off the game. I couldn’t handle it. I needed a good few hours to calm down and deal with what I had just done. I made Max help her, I assisted in killing my best friend. But it was what she wanted. I felt horrible. I cried. Max can’t handle this reality, either – she once again goes back to the day William dies, and lets him walk out the door knowing that he’ll meet his doom. I don’t think I’ve ever been more upset about a game in my entire life.
But things pick up even more after this. Max and Chloe find Rachel dead, buried in the junkyard, and Chloe collapses into tears and cries out in anguish while she says how much she loved Rachel. And now, Chloe is angry. She’s angry and sad and overcome with fury, rightful in her rage. They had been gathering clues since they met up in the beginning, they have reason to believe that Nathan Prescott is the culprit, and that Victoria Chase is to be the next victim.
The Vortex Party. Max finds Victoria and can either warn her or brush her off. Depending on how you treated Victoria earlier, she may not even believe you if you decide to warn her. But after you exit the party, you revisit the junkyard to check if the evidence (Rachel’s body) is still there, and you get ambushed.
This attack sets the last events in motion. You’re met with the one who started it all, the one who drugged and killed Rachel, the one who did the same with Kate and let her live with the fallout, the one who decided you were the next victim instead. In an attempt to go back and prevent all of this now that she knows the real culprit, not Nathan Prescott, Max uses her photo to go back to the very beginning and rips open multiple realities all at once. Chaos ensues, and she is trapped in a world where everything and nothing makes sense. Every time she tried to fix something, she created and abandoned a reality, and is confronted by another of herself and chastised. She’s told how selfish she is, how she only wanted to help herself, not others.
The storm hits. Max escapes from the Dark Room, the bunker where the psychopath drugged and photographed girls against their will. She drives to Arcadia Bay and attempts to save every person she comes across along the way. But the maelstrom is barreling down, and there’s nothing Max can do. Except one thing.
Max took a photograph at the very beginning – a vibrant blue butterfly in the girls’ bathroom, right before Nathan burst in. Right before Chloe was shot.
Chloe makes the connection. She spent the whole game avoiding death. She’d been saved too many times for it to be coincidence. She was meant to die. When Max kept saving her, the storm kept building. Now the tornado is going to destroy all of Arcadia Bay, unless Max makes her final choice: sacrifice the town and everyone in it, or sacrifice her best friend.
Ashley Burch, Chloe’s voice actress, then delivers an emotional, heart-wrenching last monologue.
“Max, you finally came back to me this week, and…you did nothing but show me your love and friendship. You made me smile and laugh like I haven’t done in years. Wherever I end up after this…in whatever reality…all those moments between us were real, and they’ll always be ours. No matter what you choose, I know you’ll make the right decision.”
I listened. I shook my head and let the thoughts race. And then I sacrificed her.
Max relives the beginning scene, crouching behind a stall as she hears the gunshot, crying.
The ending credits scene for my choice was a funeral, Spanish Sahara by Foals playing over top. I broke into tears like Chloe had done in the junkyard, and I felt hollow.
I’ve never encountered a game that made me feel as much as Life Is Strange. I don’t know if that’s a testament to how well the game is written or if I’m just susceptible to the subject matter. Either way, I would be surprised if someone had no reaction to such a hard-hitting string of emotional punches. I understand that this kind of game isn’t for everybody, and I understand I spoiled a lot of it, but I refuse not to recommend it anyway.
Life Is Strange is like a playable indie movie. The story is engaging, the characters are likeable, and both endings are well done and provoke strong emotion. Delicate yet mature, Life Is Strange is a palette of aesthetic and practical beauty that opens the shutters of modern interactive storytelling and reveals something truly great.