Life Is Strange: Chapter 5 and Afterthoughts (Spoilers)

Warning: This blog entry contains spoilers for Life is Strange.

So, when we left off, Chloe was dead (again), and I had been drugged by my teacher.  

I wake up strapped to a chair, in Mark's "Dark Room" (which is more well-lit than it sounds).  I manage to look at some nearby photos, and use them to time travel to a few hours earlier, when I was still captive and having my picture taken.  As crazed photographer Mark tries to capture my innocence in film, he tells me all about his evil plans.  Jeez, he monologues worse than Syndrome.

I manage to get him to show me the first selfie I took in Episode 1, and use it to travel back to the beginning of the game.  While there I send a text to David, telling him where to find Mark's Dark Room.  Then I go forward in time to see the results.  Chloe lives!  Mark arrested!  I've won the photography contest, and am on a plane to San Francisco to have my work shown in a gallery!  Life is Perfect (TM), roll credits!

Um... roll credits?

Whoops, I forgot there's still a superstorm headed for Arcadia Bay.  Well, I can't very well be in San Francisco when that happens, what will happen to Chloe?  So I focus on my winning photograph to go back in time to when I took it, then destroy the photo while I'm there... Whoops, I think I broke Time.

Back to the present, and I'm back in Mark's chair.  Wait, so I had to win the contest for him to be arrested?  Oh, because after I destroyed my own work, Mark burned my other photos, which I had previously used to go back in time, so now I never went back in time to get him arrested... MY BRAIN HURTS!

David to the rescue; I never thought I'd be happy to see him.  Of course, I have to give him six or seven warnings to let him survive the encounter.  Then I steal Mark's car and book it to the diner to meet Warren, so I can use a photo of his to go back in time again.  Maneuvering through the storm was intense, like last episode's party scene, it was full of sensory overload.  

I meet Warren and use the photograph, warn Chloe in the past, and do my best to fix everything in the past, present, and future.  But all my time traveling catches up with me, and I end up in a psychedelic nightmare world.  

If you ever played through "The Park", you might remember the final area where you walk through increasingly maddening versions of your own house.  Walking through Max's endless dorm halls had a similar feel (note, "The Park" and Episode 5 of "Life is Strange" were both released in the same month, so I doubt either one actually copied the other).  

Several mindscrews later, I get to walk past the game's events like they were scenes in a museum, until I finally catch up with real time.  Chloe and I have a good talk, and we realize that all the weather problems started when I began messing with time.  The only way to keep everything bad from happening was to go back to the beginning and let Chloe die.

I swear I stared at this screen for 10 minutes.

And then the big moment came.  Now, I’ve known about this game’s ending for a couple of years now.  It was spoiled for me a long time ago, probably by some YouTube video about video game endings.  I might have been more careful about avoiding spoilers, but at the time I had no idea I’d ever play the game.  Come to think of it, the ending of LiS is actually one of the first things I learned about the game, just like the first thing I heard about Metroid is that you turn out to be a woman.

So I knew what was coming, but that didn't make the choice any easier.  I was so ready to say "Screw Arcadia Falls" and skip town with Chloe.  But I couldn't do it.  "The needs of the many..." and all that crap.  I couldn't live with an entire town on my conscience.  Damn it.  I have since viewed the "Chloe Lives" ending on YouTube, and I think I made the right choice.  Leaving the town in that condition would have made me feel like a monster.

Anyway... now that I've finally finished the game, I thought I’d throw out some final thoughts.

After a while, I actually found the time-rewinding aspect to be a little annoying.  I was enjoying the story so much that the rewind puzzles felt intrusive.  Which is weird, because that’s the one gimmick that’s supposed to make the game so unique.  Remember the later episodes of Herman’s Head, when they didn’t show his inner thoughts as often, and when they did it felt forced?  No?  Wait, am I the only one who remembers that show existed?  Okay, remember the second season of Bosom Buddies, when the writers realized that Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari were funny enough without the cross-dressing joke, so they deemphasized the show’s entire concept?  Still no?  Wait, am I getting old, or do I just have obscure tastes?

Anyway, the time-rewinding thing is probably the game’s biggest draw, assuming you’re on the game’s marketing team.  But I found myself so engrossed by the story, the visuals, the music, and the characterization that I didn’t want the story interrupted by rewind puzzles. 

With that in mind, maybe I'll end up enjoying "Before the Storm" even more than LiS.  I doubt it, though.  It's hard to really enjoy a story when I know both main characters are walking corpses.  I've blogged before about my dislike for downer endings, though sometimes they are necessary. 

Come to think of it, Life is Strange combines two of my least favorite things - downer endings, and plots where the conflict was caused by the protagonist.  The latter is annoying because it makes the entire story pointless - the outcome would have been the same if the hero had just sat on their hands.  It's one of the reasons I never enjoyed the Doctor Who spinoff "Torchwood" - not only was it full of downer endings, but several conflicts only happened because the "heroes" decided to play around with the alien tech they'd acquired.

But there are exceptions to every rule, and I can put up with the above tropes if the story is well written.  Chloe was fated to die from the beginning.  Yeah, fate's a bitch, and Chloe doesn't deserve living under such a curse.  But the story works.  Life is Strange was enjoyable from beginning to end, and a megahappy ending would have just felt trite.  

Excellent game.

My choices: