Ark of the Lost Angels

So, I finished Life is Strange after writing about the first three episodes last week. Actually, I finished it starting several hours after my classes ended last Wednesday, after I got home from trivia. I started around eleven, playing through until roughly or three in the morning. “Why would you do something so mightily stupid?” I hear you asking. Well, I’ll tell you.

It’s a damn good game.

I’ve loved many games in my time, and my top spot will always belong to Halo because of Halo 3, but this game has secured a coveted position in my top five of all time. It’s emotionally impactful, the design is superb, the characters are great, and the atmosphere is wonderful. I’m about to dig in like it’s Thanksgiving and we just watched my high school win the big game (yes, my high school plays a football game on Thanksgiving). This is going to be a big one, with plenty of details, and bigger than my usual posts, just because I have so much to say about this game. I’m writing this with the expectation that you, my dear reader, have played Life is Strange. If you haven’t, then bookmark this page, go finish it, cry your eyes out, come back and see what I have to say about it. I tell you this because, I’m going to give spoilers, and they’re going to start now. 

To start off with, I want to give a shout out to Dontnod Entertainment for bringing such a wonderful game to life. If you told me a French company could create a believable American high school and evoke the indie-rock-infused, hipster-styled, faux nostalgia for the Pacific Northwest in fall, I’d have laughed you out of the room. I’d have been wrong. Despite the collection of people I’d have found annoying, Blackwell Academy is the type of place I’d have loved to have gone for high school (had my high school not been as exceptional as it was). An arts school that rewards creativity but has the feeling of a normal high school and not an overwhelming air of smugness and superiority is such a desirable place. That focus on the arts is also why I identified with protagonist Max Caulfield.

I’m a photographer myself, so Max’s love of photography, and the use of photographic symbolism and photography as a device (and an interesting collectible) was relatable to me. The music choice, and having the music be so prevalent in terms of Max’s characterization and the flavor of the world was also so meaningful to me. Writing may be my chosen focus, but music and photography are extremely involved mistresses with my life. The use of them as game mechanics was appealing.

The choices were also interesting. I’m no stranger to a choice-based game, as I’m a great lover of Mass Effect, and although the emotional decisions in this game were not stuff like who to romance or which race to sacrifice (let’s be honest, the real answer to the two of those is the same blue haired punk rocker girl with a rusted truck, but I’m getting ahead of myself here), they still got me thinking almost constantly. I tried to play Max in a way that was helpful to everyone, and in my first run through of the game, that didn’t always play out in my favor. I got Kate, Frank (and Pompidou), and Victoria killed. With Kate, it was because I did a bad job of snooping and making decisions in the conversation trying to talk her down. I got Frank killed because I forgot I could rewind time after Chloe shot him and his dog.The core mechanic of the game dropped from my memory, and I left the area in shock, and then I remembered, “Oh crap! I can rewind time and not have killed Frank!” That kind of emotional response to a game, that puts you into the mindset of the characters reacting to that situation

I played through the game twice, to try and rectify some problems with my first run through, namely saving Kate, Frank (and Pompidou), and Victoria, but also by stealing the money from the principal’s office and shooting at Frank earlier to make Chloe happier, but I still refused to ignore Kate’s call in the diner. This time, I told Kate to go to the police, because it’s what she needed to hear. The first time, when I told her to wait and gather evidence, she did not take it well. The reason I picked it is because I’d rather hear, “We’re going to make sure we get this person who did this to you dead to rights so there’s no way he can evade justice” myself, because going into a situation half-cocked with dodgy evidence at best doesn’t help make one a credible accuser, and if you’re going to come for someone as well-connected as Nathan Prescott is (who is the one believed to have drugged Kate), you best come correct.

The dynamic between Chloe and Max is, well, so relatable it hurts. I’ve reconnected with old friends after a long time of not really talking, and trying to rekindle things will bring some bitterness and sorrow, but also the elation of being back together. Things will be awkward one moment and just like old times the next. I learned who Chloe is now, and was in the past, with the conversations and the contrasts she and Max would make about their previous lives together and what happened in the intervening five years allows the character to meet Chloe as a character and get a glimpse into how Max has developed, compared to her current self. It provides a further point of comparison for the development of both characters at the end of the game.

So, let’s go ahead and talk about the end of the game. Holy smokes was that an ending out of left field, but an ending out of left field that was telegraphed, but you have to know how to read Morse Code, metaphorically speaking. I think it was brilliant to have the main villain set up to apparently be Nathan Prescott: a spoiled, unstable, rich, entitled jerk. With the earlier ideas of the girls being drugged to be for the purposes of sexual assault being a misdirection for the photography, it’d make sense for Nathan to be the perpetrator. The kind of men like him being responsible for similar incidents have been headlines for years now, and it’s within the cultural awareness. It also serves to cast suspicion away from Mark Jefferson, the affable, competent, young and hip photography teacher that everyone loves and is the star of the faculty at Blackwell Academy, that is really the one pulling the strings of the drugging and kidnapping of young women, and (tying back into the theme of photography) that he is using them as sick, twisted subjects for his photographs. With Max ending up in his studio (the appropriately named Dark Room), and being saved by David Madsen, Blackwell’s head of security, and paranoid stepfather of Chloe, once again brings the idea of expectation versus reality into the forefront of the game. And if you couldn’t tell, I’m setting up some of what I’m going to talk about in a little bit. But first, I gotta get through the ending.

With all of the things I chose, my second playthrough is the one that worked out the way I wanted it to. In summary, I saved Kate and Victoria, I made up with Frank and told him what happened to Rachel Amber (Chloe’s missing friend that kicked the whole story off) but didn’t let him know she was killed by the drugs that he sold to Nathan, I convinced Joyce (Chloe’s mother) to take David back after he revealed that he was getting help for his problems and learning that he really was trying to protect us, and I gave Warren a hug, because even though he got friendzoned by virtue of Max and Chloe being the best couple, he was still a loyal guy and always glad to help out. Those are the kinds of people you want at your back when a giant storm is bearing down on town.

And then there’s Chloe Price. Chloe to me is the result of someone with issues she never confronted trying to be the best she can. Her motivation is to find her missing friend. She cares about others, and she has a desire to protect and preserve because of her father’s pointless death in a car accident before the game takes place. It’s why she comes across as manipulative to Max, because Max has a tool that she can use, and just exacerbates her reckless behavior. It’s telling that she is so easily swayed by “Nathan’s” text about destroying Rachel’s body, because she has been acting emotionally for five years, ever since her father died and Max left town. Chloe cares so deeply for Max and being so emotionally mal-adjusted, she cannot react to it in a way that makes it obvious. The processing of everything that has happened, trusting Max implicitly, all of her growth shows up when she asks Max to sacrifice her to save the town of Arcadia Bay (a conundrum described by the fandom as “Bay or Bae”). She recognizes the depths of her selfishness, and lets it go, thinking clearly for the first time.

But the way I played Max did not agree. I chose, in both playthroughs, to save Chloe. Why? Well, the theory that Max’s time travel causes the storm doesn’t hold water, as her first vision of the storm happens before Max ever uses her powers. Also, the ideas that Max’s powers caused the storm are just guesswork, who is to say in the sacrifice Chloe ending that a funeral happens on Wednesday, and the storm still shows up on Friday anyways? Also, an EF6 classification doesn’t exist, and an EF5 only consists of 0.01% of tornadoes, with only nine ever having been registered in the US. Yes, I looked it up. Also, the damage to the town in the “Sacrifice Arcadia Bay” ending is consistent with a less powerful storm, something that you could see a handful of fatalities from, and some more injuries. That to me means that somebody screwed something up, and the developers have even said the ending is open to interpretation.

To me, the storm ravaging the town, but most of the important people surviving makes sense, despite the game trying to signal otherwise. The optimistic fanboy in me says it’s because I want people to have happy endings, but the writer in me is because it makes thematic sense. It makes no sense for the universe to gift Max the power to manipulate time when using it kills everyone in the area. It also demonstrates the idea that life continually moves forward, nobody’s secrets can remain that way forever, and that people are always more complex than they seem. Aside from Nathan and Jefferson getting busted for their, “extra-curricular activities” the status quo at the beginning of the game is maintained. Max’s actions push everything into the light, she saves Kate and can make nice with Victoria, she can help other people around the town, she can bring David’s issues getting along with Chloe into the open so they can be dealt with and he can move on from his trauma, and Chloe can move on from hers. Letting Chloe die means that the entire point of the game, of Max’s journey, has no real discernible effect to the world at large (aside from Nathan and Jefferson rotting in a mental facility and a prison, respectively). This is incongruous with the little message that shows up right after Max makes a decision: “This choice will have consequences.”

So, my novella on my Life is Strange experience is finally at its end. There’s more to say on it, I could go into geeking out about the mechanics, set design, and soundtrack of the game. I could talk about how the prequel fleshes out Chloe’s character and builds a connection with Rachel that explain’s Chloe’s drive to find out what happened to her. I could also spend ages talking more about Max and Chloe and their dynamic, or Max’s nightmare sequence, or a thousand other things. At some point, I have to shut up though. So, thank you for sticking with me throughout my thoughts, and I hope you’ll see what else I have to say on what comes next, another one of my all time favorites: Bioshock: Infinite.