Life is Strange 2 - Episode 5 (Spoilers)

Disclaimer:  This blog contains major spoilers for “Life is Strange 2”.

Wow.  Okay, so quick summary:

The chapter begins with Daniel and Sean living with their mother in an off-the-grid trailer park in the Arizona desert.  The finally decide to leave when they learn the police are getting close.  They arrive at the border wall, Daniel makes a hole in it, but they get arrested before they can cross the border.  Daniel breaks them out of jail, drive to an actual border crossing, and find a police roadblock waiting for them.  Then you make your final choice - surrender to the police, or use Daniel's powers to plow through the roadblock.

In the previous LiS games, your earlier choices didn't make much difference.  You could be a bastard or a saint all the way through the game, and you still got the same binary choice at the end.  In LiS2, you still only get two choices, but the way you've raised Daniel affects his decisions as well.  So you end up with four possible endings, and three additional variations based on your relationship with other characters.  I've watched all the endings now, and none of them are what I would call happy endings.

In my playthrough, I chose to drive through the roadblock.  But once we had a clear path, thanks to my moral guidance, Daniel jumped out of the car and surrendered.  Sean went on to live in Mexico alone, while Daniel went to live with his grandparents in America.  It jumps forward a few years, Daniel still has powers but has learned to keep them a secret.  He gets a postcard from Sean, letting him know he's doing okay.  They both live happy lives, just not together.

There was a really nice bit of fanservice in this chapter regarding the first Life is Strange game.  At the trailer park there is a man named David.  I had a couple of conversations with him before I realized who he was.  He mentioned that he had a daughter who occasionally visits, and he mentioned that his wife had died.  This flew over my head until I had a opportunity to explore his trailer.  Yep, it is indeed David Madsen, Chloe's stepdouche.

You find out that he and Chloe have made peace since the first game, and he's grown into a much better person.  If you hang around his trailer, you even get to hear his side of a phone call with Chloe.  You can even read a letter written to him from Victoria Chase.  I assume that if I'd picked the "I Sacrificed Chloe" option when it asks you at the beginning of the game, a few of his scenes would play out differently here.

Some final thoughts about the full game:
LiS2 is so full of establishing shots and filler, it probably could have been three chapters instead of five.  I don't know if that would have been a good idea, though.  A big part of the game's emotional weight depends on the player growing attached to the characters, and that's just not something you can do at high speeds.  But as it is, it still has pacing problems.

The politics can be heavy handed, and are not subtle.  Since I share its political beliefs, it's not offensive to me, but others will find it too preachy.  In my opinion, the game doesn't really take sides so much as show you the experience of a specific pair of Hispanic kids, but some of the bigoted characters are such over-the-top strawmen that it's hard not to see a political agenda.  And that's fine, there's a million other video games out there that make no political statement at all, so the haters can just go play those.

I've not heard any news of a "Life is Strange 3" yet, but I hope the series continues.  This development team's next game is called "Tell Me Why", and it looks right up my alley.  So look forward to reading my babbles about that.  Unfortunately it's being produced by XBox Game Studios, so I'll probably have to play it on the PC instead of the PS4.

My recaps of previous chapters:
Life is Strange 2 - Episode 1
Life is Strange 2 - Episode 2
Life is Strange 2 - Episode 3
Life is Strange 2 - Episode 4
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit

And what the heck, here's links to my blogs on the earlier games:
LiS 1-1, LiS 1-2, LiS 1-3, LiS 1-4, LiS 1-5, LiS:BtS

Some screenshots:

My choices: