Editor’s note: today is the five-year anniversary of the first Life is Strange game’s release.
When the first episode of Life is Strange came out in 2015, I was only a year older than its teenage protagonist, Max. Its story follows the student photographer as she suddenly develops time manipulating superpowers. After using them to save the life of her childhood friend Chloe, the two set out to solve the darker mysteries of their hometown. But there’s a storm coming, and when it hits in the game’s finale, Max is forced to make a choice: Does she commit to her choices and let Arcadia Bay fall? Or does she travel back and resolve to never use her powers, letting Chloe die?
Life is Strange is full of choices that feel like they matter both to Max and the world around her. Max is both our viewpoint character and our narrator, and she comments on each tiny interaction. It’s the time travel mechanic that makes choices particularly weighty, however. Every choice you make, you feel out the immediate consequence of it, and can rewind and make a different one. At significant moments, Max will often question the repercussions of her actions out loud, and wonder if she should have gone another way. In those moments, you can go back and change your mind as many times as you like. She knows that her powers are a responsibility, but she’s uncertain how best to interpret the choices in front of her.
Max’s anxiety over her responsibilities is a very teenage experience – even without having superpowers. It’s a time where every decision feels like it has life or death stakes. Everything feels as if you don’t do everything right then you’ve ruined your life before it’s even really started.
When you share Max’s viewpoint, it’s explicitly a teenage viewpoint, and part of that is an emotionally biased sense of stakes. When we see her use time powers to fix a minor social mishap, she’s using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Her voiceover and her diary, however, tell us that these tiny things really are world-alteringly important to her.
We know that things matter in Arcadia Bay in a wider way, however, because the game tells us so outside of Max’s narration. We get a Telltale-style butterfly that says in its own way, Arcadia Bay will remember this. Max forms her own impression of an event, whether it’s funny to mock Victoria, or it feels better to be kind to her. The game says, “This will matter, somewhere, outside of your first feelings about it.” At the end of each episode, there’s a summary of all the choices you made, including ones you may not have realized were choices at the time.
Here’s what playing this game five years later made me realize: Max’s choices were never really the ones that mattered when it came to moving the story forward, or the wider world of Arcadia Bay.
The story is consistently driven by the malicious or negligent actions of the adult men in the story. Max’s art teacher, Mark Jefferson, has been drugging his students to photograph in a vulnerable state. It’s a student he was grooming to follow in his footsteps that accidentally kills the girl whose “missing” posters cover Arcadia Bay. Jefferson then murders three more teenagers before kidnapping Max in an attempt to cover this up. When Max tries to report death threats to her school principal, Raymond Wells, he refuses to act because it would affect his reputation. The Prescott family, especially the adults, are a malevolent presence in the town, said to “own the police” and fund Jefferson’s hellish photography bunker.
Each of these characters and more have a significant influence on Arcadia Bay. Max and Chloe spend most of their time following the threads they leave behind. Life is Strange uses Max’s biased perspective to impose a sense of responsibility, but she was never affecting external change as much as it feels. The most meaningful choices she does make, repeatedly and from the very first time she uses her powers, are to help Chloe.
The final episode makes the difference between Max’s perceived influence and the real world of Arcadia Bay explicitly clear. Max ends up in a nightmarescape, and finds it a place where she is berated for making choices – for having made any choices at all, because she had power and she used it “wrongly.”
She sees visions of her friends taunting her for her failures. They blame her for their own troubles, and suggest her existence is simply embarrassing. In one section, there’s a stealth sequence where she’s stalked by many of the game’s men, including her friend Warren. Jefferson’s murder threats, whose taunts are surreally juvenile in this place, are equal to the pressure of a guy with a crush. Don’t you have time to go see a movie with me? What about now? What about now? In this space, Max doesn’t know how to prioritize plausible threats. They’re all just too much to deal with.
In a moment in this sequence, directly preceding the final choice, Max has a conversation with a version of herself from another timeline. Alternate!Max questions her motivations and challenges her on her trustworthiness. Much like the taunts from the visions of her friends, I don’t believe we’re meant to accept it as literally true that this is a Max from an alternate timeline. The conversation they have with each other is classic negative self-talk. The nightmarescape takes place exclusively in Max’s emotional experience – it’s a reflection of her fears, and biased by the ways she’s failed to cope.
The conflict here is that the storm exists in Arcadia Bay in the wider world. The ending at the lighthouse does posit Max’s biases as literally true. This is all her fault, and her choices are the only ones that have mattered all this time. In the end, she has to choose between trusting her choices and watching a town fall, or undoing everything and watching Chloe die. All this, despite the fact that she is both one of the least malicious and, ultimately, one of the less-influential actors in the story.
I didn’t see this when I first played Life is Strange. I shared Max’s perspective: making choices is so much, and you can screw up and break everything by accident. Back then, I cried and chose to sacrifice Chloe, because I believed personal sacrifice was more mature. The game rewarded me for it! If the presence of the final choice could be biased by Max’s perspective, the epilogue explicitly confirms otherwise. It really was all her fault. Max and Chloe shared a final kiss, and then all the narrative loose ends were wrapped up. In comparison, the ending where we choose to stay with Chloe shuffles you awkwardly out the door.
Replaying the game as an adult, I can’t find the same emotional weight in this ending. It shows me two traumatized teenagers deciding that their love will destroy their town, and says “this is true, actually.” It’s a tragedy they reach that conclusion, in the face of violence and police corruption, but it’s baffling that the game world bakes it into its reality. Life is Strange isn’t only played through the viewpoint of a teenager – it requires that lens to hold.
Thank you to Ruth Cassidy for contributing this piece on Life is Strange! Their contribution was made possible by you, our lovely readers!
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