Lauren on Life is Strange, 1.3 Chaos Theory - Video Game Review

photo from Steam

Beware: here there be spoilers.

Life is Strange, episode three, "Chaos Theory,” begins the same day as episode two. Night has fallen on a school shocked by the attempted suicide (if you’re lucky) of Kate Marsh. Students are rethinking their behavior toward Kate during the past few days, and Max is sneaking out.

The events of the day have (somehow) convinced her and Chloe that there is a connection between what happened to Kate and Rachel Amber’s disappearance, so the two of them break into the principal’s office and go through his files, looking for clues, though what the clues are for is not really clear.

After deciding whether or not to steal five thousand dollars from the school, the girls decide to break into the school’s swimming pool and take a dip, leading to an irritating game of cat-and-mouse with the school’s security guards. This section of the game was pretty week since there’s relatively little forward motion on the story and almost no character building to it. I personally felt that it was just so the developers could get the girls in their underwear, and when I showed the section to a friend, she concurred. The whole swimming bit just seems like fan service for the boys who might happen to play the game – a disappointing turn for a game with so much emphasis on female characters with agency and important relationships.

 

photo from lifeisstrange.com

The next part of the episode plays out in the Price house where Chloe takes some heat from her mom so Max can sneak into the garage and snoop through David Madsen’s (Chloe’s step-father’s) things for more of those nebulous clues. When she gets back inside, he arrives home, tired and grumpy from a night of trying to chase down the students who broke into the school’s pool. Max is then faced with the choice of backing Chloe’s vitriolic (but not unfounded) attack on her stepfather, or trying to smooth things over. Either choice will still lead to a fight with Chloe and the revelation that she’s angry with her biological father for getting into a car accident and dying.

And here I found myself wondering what on Earth the game was up to (in a good way). Unhappy Max finds herself staring at the last picture of herself and Chloe together when they were happy and carefree. And suddenly, Max is five years in the past, watching the last day of Chloe's father's life unfold, but this time, she's got the power to change it, and she goes for it with the confidence that it's what Chloe would want.

But there are always consequences and the change Max made has had big ones. She didn't just change Chloe's life, but her own as well. When she snaps back to the present, she finds that she's in a totally different group at school. She immediately goes to see Chloe and finds out just what she's done. Chloe's dad is alive, and Chloe is paralyzed, wheelchair bound, and dying of respiratory failure.

photo from lifeisstrange.com

 The game sticks faithfully to the imagery it had established for Max and Chloe, and capitalizes on the connection to the natural world that's been a big part of the weirdness going on in Arcadia Bay. Throughout the episode, dead birds are strewn everywhere, a good sign that something is terribly wrong. After Max changes the timeline, a pod of whales beaches itself in the harbor.

While it's a logical fallacy to assume that an event occurring after another event must have been caused by the first event, it seems pretty likely that Max's meddling is the cause of all the weirdness.

I have a terrible feeling that everything Max does is only making things worse and that the game is going to have to cycle back to the beginning, where Max will have to choose not to interfere in Chloe's death. This is me making a prediction. I think I'm worried because I'm starting to like Chloe. In fact, she's the character I like best in the game despite her volatile temperament. It might have to do with the fact that she's the best voiced character in the game (in my opinion) as well as the most fleshed out. My favorite characters always die, though, so Chloe is in grave danger!

 

photo from lifeisstrange.com

Since we just passed the halfway point in the game, I thought I'd do a quick list of my likes and dislikes:

I like:

Chloe - she's kind of a jerk, but she's interesting and is stuck in a really sucky situation, so there's a lot of room for growth and change here.

Warren - He's a smart and genuinely sweet guy who likes Max, and is respectful about it. He doesn't creep on her the way a lot of love interests do to a female protagonist (unintentionally perhaps) in other games, books, movies, and TV shows.

The mechanics of Max's time travel - it works nicely for the puzzle-solving aspects of the game, creating some fun game-play, like blowing up, and then un-blowing up the principal's door.

The themes- I mean this both broadly (friendship, pursuing one's dream, etc) and really specifically, like the doe being associated with Max, the color blue, and the blue butterfly, with Chloe, and the destruction of nature progressing through the episodes.

The mix of regular and extraordinary - I like the way the kids are concerned with the social and practical problems of being in high school as well as the troubling vision of ultimate destruction that Max had and the out of the ordinary trouble that Chloe found herself in.

I dislike:

Max - she's inconsistent, makes terrible decisions, isn't well voiced, and we would never be friends (alas!).

Long, pointless cinematics - there are weird scenes in the game, especially when Max is waking up, where I have no control of the game, but nothing is happening. I find these moments frustrating because I'm being shown that nothing is happening, but I can't do anything to get things started.

Big decisions that come to nothing - Since the timeline was reset, nothing I chose matters now. Unless Max puts things back again in a future episode, all agency that I was given meant nothing. Before this, not seeing the consequences of choices was at least understandable, because certain things were sure to play out in the future.

The choices - actually, despite having choices like turn in or don't turn in Nathan Prescott, there are a lot of places where things happen that I would have liked to choose anything else, like breaking into the swimming pool. Being forced into something that stupid made me grumpy. I realize that the writers are trying to tell a story with some accompanying game play, but there are moments when I think they'd have done better just to make a movie since they're forcing certain things anyway.

The dialogue - and this is the biggest one for me. I sometimes get the feeling that whoever wrote the lines didn't really know the story that well. Things like David Madsen calling the high school a college, put me off. As far as I know, the terms aren't interchangeable. The way lines seemed stitched together so that statements wouldn't fit together. This was really bad in the scene where I had to talk Kate off the roof. One line from Max seemed to have convinced her to live, and then Max suddenly reverted to begging Kate to come down, and Kate made statements that contradicted things she'd just said. It definitely tarnished an otherwise powerful moment.

Click here to see the previous episode.

Lauren on Life is Strange, 1.2 Out of Time - Video Game Review

photo from Steam

Beware: here there be spoilers.

Life is Strange, episode two, "Out of Time," starts the morning after Max’s big adventure in time rewinding begins. Max wakes up after staying up late doing some research on time travel and has to start her day, going through a routine that hasn’t changed, despite her new powers. She’s still an eighteen-year-old, after all.

Her need for a shower puts her in contact with the other girls in the dormitory and she immediately finds a use for her power, rewinding moments and conversations so she can get the optimal outcome, letting her be a little heroic and play peace-keeper too.

The interaction with Max’s classmates also reveals that something is going on around a quiet student named Kate Marsh.

And here, the game really started grappling with difficult material. Oh, there were hints of it in the last episode: Chloe’s strained relationship with her mother, outright hatred of her step-father, and her missing best friend, Rachel Amber, but these hints primarily served to make Chloe a compelling, if not entirely likable character.

In this episode, however, the implications of sexual violence against Kate Marsh brought things to an uncomfortable level for me. This isn’t easy material. It also puts Max in a place she might once have avoided – does she get involved to help Kate, or back away from the situation in order to keep flying under the radar.

More than the mediocre voice acting and crummy dialog, Max’s willingness to run off and play with her powers at Chloe’s request broke the immersion for me. The whole time I was playing through an awkwardly contrived fetch quest in the junk yard and letting Chloe bully Max into doing her bidding, I kept thinking about Kate’s plea: “I need to find out if Nathan Prescott helped me… or hurt me after that party.” This is not something I could walk away from in real life.

photo from lifeisstrange.com

Even while I was saving Chloe (twice) during the morning’s adventure, I kept wondering why Max would cling to someone who borders on emotional abusiveness and is suffering mainly from the consequences of her own actions when she had another friend in desperate need of support and reassurance, a friend who was drugged, filmed, and possibly even raped, whose pain was now being deepened by her sudden notoriety and the hasty judgment of her family.

Of course, I can remember being a teenager, lonely and anxious to be liked. I had a few people who pushed me around like Chloe does with Max, but I don’t see the same vulnerability in Max. Sure she wants to be liked, but she hasn’t shown signs of deep loneliness and need that usually go into a relationship like the one developing between her and Chloe – it just feels a little inconsistent to me.

I was relieved when Max finally got back to campus, and then saddened to see Kate’s plea for help rejected by the photography teacher.

The hopelessness and isolation of Kate’s situation really resonated with me, and I wasn’t sure how much more of Max’s hesitation to help her I could take when there was a call to the girl’s dormitory and I knew before Max got there what I would see.

I had to watch Kate throw herself from the roof twice before Max got herself in gear and made it up to the rooftop where her overused powers sputtered and died, leaving her (and me!) in a horrible situation with no take-backsies. If Kate jumped again, she would be gone for good.

The emotional burden of Max’s exchange with Kate, trying to talk her down from the edge, shows just what a good job the writers did setting the situation up. I could even appreciate what they’d done, having Max fritter her powers away earlier in the day doing things that had kept me somewhat frustrated.

Ultimately, I was lucky that I had paid so much attention to Kate. If her plight hadn’t been so important to me, I might not have had the information I needed to bring her down safely.

I don’t know if it was just me, but saving her didn’t give me a sense of relief or satisfaction. All I could think about was how close she’d come to dying, not because Max had spent all her energy earlier in the day, but because simple things that didn’t involve superhero skills hadn’t been attended to. This was powerful for me, and a little too much like real life, but I think it’s this power in the narrative that will keep me playing despite the bad dialog, the rough voice acting, and my own personality clash with Max.

photo from lifeisstrange.com

Like Kate, I need to know if she was hurt at that party and if (as Max suspects) what happened to her is connected to the disappearance of Rachel Amber. And I need to know that Kate will be ok.

The game closes with a super unlikely event - an unscheduled lunar eclipse. Even with all the weirdness going on, this was a little much for me to buy. Unseasonable snow? Plenty odd, but it worked with the vision of crazy weather the game started with. Short of the apocalypse coming and all life on Earth ending, I have trouble with the idea that the moon itself moved in the heavens to give the people of Arcadia Bay a bad omen.

Still, certain themes seem to be carrying through here. Max's powers aren't the only weird thing going on, and nature has a big part to play in the imagery of the game. Max is still closely tied with the deer pictured on her t-shirt a second day running, and one even appears during her junkyard adventure with Chloe.

Chloe is even more tied to the color blue and, I suspect, to the butterfly Max caught on film in the first episode.

Rachel Amber’s disappearance is always at the edge of everything, suggesting a darkness at the heart of Blackwell Academy.

It will be interesting to see if they can carry these themes through all five episodes in t a meaningful way. In the meantime, I'd really like to hear some other thoughts on the outcome and content of this episode. If you've played it, please let me know what you thought!

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