Life is Strange Ranking: A
…I am never playing a game like this again. I don’t think a game has ever gut-punched me so hard, so many times before. Or elicited such a storm of emotion (no pun intended). But that’s why I’m giving this game such a high score. It’s kind of like how I hate horror movies, since I don’t like being scared, but if I saw a horror movie and it scared the everfucking fucklights out of me, I’d have to tell you it was a great horror movie because it elicited such a strong reaction.
I guess I’ll just write down my thoughts as they come to me. My thoughts on this game aren’t neatly organized (see above). It’ll be like stream-of-consciousness, except with proper grammar.
Let’s start with the protagonist, Maxine (Max) Caulfield. This girl. Has to be. One of the most AMAZING protagonists ever. I resonate with her on so many levels. She’s shy, nerdy, introverted, geeky, socially awkward… Warren, the guy who, as Chloe says, is “so fucking in love with” Max, has great taste. I actually relate to Warren a lot too – he’s also nerdy and socially awkward. One of the first gut-punches in the game came from the fact that Max is unequivocally uninterested in him at the beginning of the game and, given my own experiences in the romance sphere…
Whether she grows to like him is something the player decides. I chose against Warren during my first playthrough in favor of Chloe, since the game focuses way more on Max and Chloe’s relationship (romantic or platonic), so I kind of gut-punched myself. My second playthrough I let Max slowly accept Warren, which mirrored my own reaction to Warren in real life. He as a character really grew on me during my first playthrough as I saw how much he reflected me in real life and how he’s a genuinely kind person who really steps it up for the girl he loves.
And that brings me to the shipping war in the fandom over these two. Sheesh I have never seen a shipping war like this before. People who ship Max/Chloe go out of their way to shit on people who ship Max/Warren. Like damn. I’m comparing to, say, Resident Evil, where we’ve got Leon/Claire versus Leon/Ada…and the banter between the two groups is mostly civil with a smattering of that weird joke about Chris trying to get Leon to marry Claire in order to continue the Redfield bloodline. Here? These people are downright vicious and will bend over backwards to paint Warren as the most horrible and twisted human being ever just because he’s a rival to Chloe for Max’s affection.
I should probably talk more about the game than about fandom shipping wars. Anyway, Max is a photography major in high school/college. Like, she’s 18, which would suggest early college, but her school, Blackwell, is a high school that she just got into less than a month ago. Whatever. Anyway, one day, she has a vision of a giant waterspout annihilating Arcadia Bay while in her photography class. Freaked out, she goes to the bathroom after class and witnesses a murder, after which she instinctively reaches out and rewinds time and space so she ends up back in class before the event. The beginning of the game has you go to the bathroom and stop the murder. From here on out, Max can rewind time, which allows her to do all sorts of things. Because she keeps all knowledge and objects on her when she manipulates time, she can, say, talk to someone, rewind time, and steer the conversation in a different direction. Or see a girl named Alyssa get hit in the head with various items, rewind time, and warn her before she gets hit. Seriously, it’s a running joke or something with Alyssa.
Max can only rewind a few minutes, so at some point your choices will stick and you’ll need to live with them. Maybe you got a great short-term result, but 1-2 episodes later, the long-term result isn’t so great. For example, you see a security guard harassing your friend, so you can either take a picture of him and stay out of the confrontation or step in immediately to stop him. The latter makes your friend happy, but it means you have no evidence against him later. Why she can’t take a picture, rewind, and then step in is…video game logic.
And here’s my first main gripe against the game. Despite this entire (great) setup, the game is still very much on rails. The story will play out the same regardless and there are only 2 endings; furthermore, which ending you get depends exclusively on one single choice at the end. To drive the point home, the main plot of the game involves trying to find a girl who went missing 6 months ago named Rachel Amber. Spoilers: you find her body buried in a junkyard and learn your photography professor, Jefferson, was behind it. So I was hoping on a second playthrough I could make choices to bust Jefferson and have the story play out differently…but no. If you know where to look, you can actually figure out Jefferson is the one behind Rachel’s murder (and not any of the red herrings the game throws at you), but you can’t act on that information at all.
Jefferson is one twisted fuck. He likes to kidnap and drug girls so he can take pictures of them in helpless, bound, and sexually suggestive positions. He succeeds in capturing Max at the end of the fourth episode and I felt sick and dirty afterward. Like I said, this game really got a reaction out of me.
So…let’s rewind (see what I did there?) and go episode by episode. Episode 1 (Monday) is nice. No gut-punches. Mostly just dealing with normal high school life. Blackwell is full of the usual high school archetypes, like alpha bitch Victoria, rich snob Nathan, nerd Warren, jock Logan…etc. Eventually you find that the girl you prevented the murder of is Max’s best friend Chloe from 5 years ago. See, Max used to live in Arcadia Bay, but moved to Seattle 5 years ago and is just now returning to go to Blackwell. For some reason, she neglected to talk to her best friend for this entire time, so this reunion is their first since she left. Okay.
During these 5 years, Chloe befriended Rachel. Then Rachel disappeared and Chloe is desperate to find her. She recruits Max in this endeavor, so now Max has 2 general “quests”: help Chloe find Rachel and figure out what’s up with that giant waterspout she saw at the beginning of the game. The episode ends with a snowfall despite the temperature being 80 deg F.
Episode 1 choices:
Episode 2 (Tuesday). Major gut-punch. This episode focuses on Kate Marsh. Now Kate is a conservative Christian who supports abstinence. Some time ago, she got drugged at a party and then a bunch of guys took advantage of her and videotaped it. Victoria then spread the video on the Internet. Obviously, this is wrecking Kate’s life, and she responds in the end of the episode by trying to commit suicide.
I…have many real-life experiences with suicide. I think this episode would gut-punch anyone, but me? It hit me particularly hard. Now in my first playthrough, I managed to talk Kate down from going through with it, saving her, and I thought that was just how the story played out. I’d find out later that, no, you can actually fail and she’ll kill herself. It’s apparently really hard to save her. Well, I did it, and she ends up in the hospital afterward. It’s a scene I’m intimately familiar with in real life. Fucking hell.
This episode ends with a solar eclipse that wasn’t supposed to happen.
Oh, and by the way, in this episode, Max and Chloe lie down on some train tracks and Max eventually has to save Chloe from an oncoming train when Chloe’s foot gets stuck in the tracks. Why the complete hell would you ever lie down on train tracks? They must know trains actively use those tracks – they live in the town and you can hear trains when they pass by. Hell, a train passes through right before this scene.
Episode 2 choices:
Episode 3 (Wednesday) has another gut-punch, but not as major as in Episode 2 (at least to me). Max resolves to find out what happened to Rachel, as signs point to Kate’s experience being related. Their first step is to break into the Principal’s office at night to search his files, whereupon they find Nathan is unhinged but the school’s covering it up because he’s rich and his family keeps giving the school money. They then inexplicably decide to go play in the pool. The first time I went through the game, I was actually really tense during the break-in. Like I said, the game managed to affect me and I felt actual fear that they’d get caught or something. They get through the Principal’s files without issue…then go play in the pool. Look, between this and the train tracks, I'm pretty unimpressed. Max is still awesome though.
Worse, they do this without preparing towels of any kind, implying they just get dressed in their regular clothes while still soaking wet from the pool. This doesn’t seem like a big deal (I mean, it is to me, but maybe that's just me) except Max comments that the pool is heavily chlorinated, so she and her clothes smell like chlorine after getting dressed. Chloe’s stepdad is the security guard at Blackwell (David) and he sees them next morning after failing to find them during the break-in and I thought there was going to be a plot point where he smells the chlorine and deduces they were at the pool. He doesn’t, but…this entire sequence is just so dumb.
Anyway, they get away and decide to break into Frank’s RV next to investigate his connection with Rachel. Max needs to pull some rewind shenanigans to get his RV keys and here’s another troll opportunity. You can literally walk up to him, grab his beer, and spill it all over him for no reason except to piss him off (he tries to kill you right after, so you’ll have to rewind). Funnier still, you can grab his plate of beans and pour them onto the floor, after which he goes, “I WAS EATING THOSE BEANS!” and slips on the floor on the beans when trying to get up to attack Max. Max is such a troll I love her.
Anyway, you find Frank and Rachel were actually an item. Chloe gets enraged because Rachel never told her and lashes out at Max, saying that ever since her dad died (right around the time Max moved to Seattle and inexplicably stopped talking to Chloe), her life has been absolute shit.
Immediately after this, Max finds she has the power to travel much further into the past provided she has a photo of the time and place she wants to travel to. She has a photo of Chloe’s dad right before he went out to die in a car accident, so she uses it to travel back to her 13-year-old self and stop him from leaving. She reawakens in the present day where the timeline is now drastically different – she’s now an alpha bitch and Chloe’s dad is alive…but Chloe is now paralyzed from the neck down because she herself got into a car accident sometime in the 5 intervening years. Well that sucks.
In this episode, birds drop dead from the sky and a whole bunch of whales beach themselves.
Episode 3 choices:
Episode 4 (Thursday) is incredibly stressful, but first, a gut-punch. Remember how Chloe’s paralyzed from the neck down? She’s also dying. So she asks Max to euthanize her with morphine. Regardless of how you choose to respond to this, Max decides enough is enough and rewinds time back to when Chloe’s dad died and this time lets it happen, thereby returning the timeline to normal. I can’t even imagine the emotional trauma she’s going through right now and it’s going to get worse.
Back in the present day, Max and Chloe go to visit Kate in the hospital. I was really happy they put this sequence in the game. It shows how much Max cares about her friend and how Kate is recovering from her depression. With my own experiences, it’s still heartbreaking, but I’m glad we got to see it in-game nonetheless.
Next up, the girls break into Nathan’s room to find evidence against him. On the way out, Nathan confronts them, menacing Max the same way as he did in Episode 1 after Max reported him to the Principal (despite, you know, the Principal doing jack-all about it). At that time, Warren stands up for Max and gets beaten up for it. This time, Warren shows up and defends Max again by proceeding to beat the everloving fuck out of Nathan. It is glorious. I mean this is a no-holds-barred beatdown.
After that, the girls go talk to Frank. Frank, as I mentioned, is a drug dealer and Nathan must’ve gotten his drugs that he used on Kate from him. Max suspects something similar happened with Rachel. So they ask the dangerous drug dealer for help. I had to play this sequence a few times before I could get it so nobody gets hurt. Doing this also makes Frank mellow out considerably. He’s not a completely bad guy.
Now comes the culmination of all the girls’ investigative work. The player gets to piece together all the clues they’ve collected thus far in a pretty clever sequence. You deduce that Nathan did indeed buy drugs from Frank the night of the party where Kate was drugged and, using David’s paranoid stalking, determine that he went to a shady barn out in the boonies afterward. Now in this sequence, the evidence also tells a discerning player that Jefferson was also at that barn at the same time, but (1) most players won’t see it as they’re focused on Nathan and (2) even players who figure this out can’t do anything with this information.
This barn is hiding a bomb shelter underground. Inside this shelter is the Dark Room, a creepy-ass photography studio where Jefferson takes his kidnapped victims and ties them up to take pictures of. I felt an intense dread and horror when exploring the Dark Room. Whatever the designers did to convey how fucked up this room is, it worked. Now nothing in the Dark Room implicates Jefferson directly, but there are binders full of the pictures he and Nathan took. In particular, they find Rachel’s binder, depicting the junkyard, so they drive there and find her body using the location in the binder.
Chloe loses it and decides she’s going to go to the Vortex Club party that night to kill Nathan. Max goes along with her (she either wants to help her or stop her – I don’t quite know) and, to make a long story short, they fall into a trap devised by Jefferson. Jefferson drugs Max, knocking her out before she can use her powers, and shoots Chloe right in the head. This scene…made me ill.
At the end of Episode 4, a double moon appears in the sky for a short while.
Episode 4 choices:
Episode 5 (Friday) is easily my least favorite episode and contains some more high-octane gut-punches. First, you use Max’s photo-rewind power to go back to when Jefferson is creepily taking pictures of a bound Max. You use it again to return to the beginning of the week via a selfie she took and kept in her diary. This time, Max texts David anonymously about everything she’s learned before turning in a picture for a photography contest. Back in the present day in the altered timeline, Max is traveling to San Francisco, having won the contest; David gets Jefferson and Nathan arrested pretty much right at the beginning of the week (so, among other things, Chloe doesn’t get killed); and at the contest, everyone is all over Max’s photo, heaping praise upon her for her artistry. This ending is just so…amazing. So how much of a gut-punch is it when Max realizes that the waterspout she envisioned is now hitting Arcadia Bay and it kills Chloe mid-phone-call.
So she uses her contest entry to travel back in time again, back to when she first took it (before the week begins). She rips it apart, hoping that everything will happen as it did, except she won’t be in San Francisco as she can’t win a contest she didn’t enter. I’m honestly unsure what her plan was – even if this worked (it doesn’t), all that does is put her in Arcadia Bay during the storm. She doesn’t know how to stop it whether she’s in Arcadia Bay or not. If she simply wants to go back and warn Chloe…well, she did that already. She told Chloe at the beginning of the week.
Anyway…this plan doesn’t work and she ends up in the Dark Room again…somehow. This time, Jefferson has burned her diary, so she has no picture she can use to escape. Luckily, David has found the Dark Room…somehow, and he saves her. More specifically, he barges in and Jefferson murders him, but you can rewind time and distract Jefferson so David knocks him out.
Max exits the Dark Room and beholds the storm outside. She remembers that Warren took a picture of her at the Vortex Club party and decides she can use that to go back in time. She drives into town and this is my favorite sequence in the game – on the way to the diner where Warren is, Max can save the lives of no less than 4 people from the storm. It’s just her walking through a chaotic storm saving people and being a badass.
Okay then. Max meets up with Warren, gets the photo, and travels back in time to right before the Vortex Club party. This time, she warns Chloe about Jefferson, so they don’t fall into his trap. David gets Jefferson arrested and Max returns to the present day…at the lighthouse, watching the storm approach Arcadia Bay. Again, she saved Chloe, but has exactly no clue what to do about the storm.
What follows is my least favorite part of the game and probably the sole reason I gave it an A and not an S. Max passes out and has a nightmare. It’s a playable sequence and, honestly, it’s incredibly unsettling, just like a nightmare should be. There’s this bathroom you end up in with a keypad lock and if you examine the lock and exit the screen, suddenly there are insane numbers scrawled all over the room. I got some The Shining vibes from the whole thing. That’s not why I hate this sequence, though.
The nightmare also has a long stealth sequence. You have to run through some areas patrolled by warped versions of people in Max’s life. They have flashlights and if they manage to shine a light on Max, you need to rewind and find a way past them. The sequence is annoying and it bugged out once or twice for me, meaning I had to do it multiple times. Moreover, the entire nightmare doesn’t really serve much purpose. All it tells us is that this girl is having a nightmare…which of course she would – she went through hell this past week. I’d be shocked if this were the only nightmare she’ll ever have about getting godlike powers, seeing people die (including her best friend, multiple times), and getting drugged and kidnapped by a professor she looked up to who turned out to be a twisted psychopath. I’ve seen people analyze this sequence in detail, trying to make insightful comments about Max’s subconscious, but honestly? It’s a nightmare. Try analyzing your real-life nightmares and see how far you get before you start sounding like a crazy loon. The best one can do is make broad strokes, like what I said above. Traumatic experience = warped dreams about those experiences.
In particular, Warren is in Max’s nightmare. Like everyone else, he’s far more creepy in the nightmare with very aggressive dialogue. You can find his locker where he has a bunch of photoshopped pictures and a doll of Max. I’ve seen people use this as justification for how Warren is obviously a deranged sexual predator. Remember I said how people bend over backwards to hate on Warren? This is why. To drive the point home, I’m going to list a few other things that happen in the nightmare at random.
There are other examples. But can you even begin to say that these point to any sort of reality in Max’s life? She loves her twisted professor who kidnapped and drugged her? She’s worried about Frank’s dog being her enemy (or that Frank’s dog is literate and can use technology)? She regrets saving her friend from fucking suicide? She thinks Chloe wants to hook up with someone who violated her? This is sickening. Goddamnit people – this is a nightmare sequence. It’s a series of images from Max’s memory warped to be unsettling, creepy, and horrific. Exactly none of it has any bearing on reality, Warren’s aggression included.
Just…the implications of what people are saying about this nightmare sicken me. A lot. And I guess it isn’t entirely fair to blame the game for this, but the nightmare sequence in and of itself isn’t all that useful and the stealth segments are really annoying, so I’m leaving my score as is.
There is one great part of the stealth sequence. Nightmare-Frank walks around threatening to cut Max with his knife and discussing how much Chloe hates her. He also has this line: “Those were my beans, Max! Those were my FUCKING beans!” The way he says it is also hilarious. As a side-note, the voice actors in this game really hit it out of the park. Kudos to all of them.
Max wakes up eventually. She and Chloe are at the lighthouse, overlooking the storm about to hit Arcadia Bay. Now at this point in the game, everyone (Max included) is working on the hypothesis that Max using her temporal powers messed up the space-time continuum so much that it caused this storm. It caused the snowfall in Episode 1. It caused the eclipse in Episode 2. It killed the birds and beached the whales. It caused the double moon. And it culminated in this.
I don’t buy that. We’ll get to why later. For now, Chloe says that Max should use a picture she took right before she saved Chloe from getting killed in the bathroom (at the very beginning of the game) and this time…let her die. So in this new timeline, Max won’t have used her powers and will therefore not cause the waterspout. And here’s the final choice in the game: do as Chloe says or rip up the picture, letting Chloe live while the storm destroys the town.
…This isn’t a choice, people. Think about this from Chloe’s perspective. This girl is troubled and…sometimes a bitch, but she’s not a bad person. Not at all. So how will she feel for the rest of her life knowing an entire town died so she could live? Even if you consider that people might survive the storm, their livelihoods and belongings are probably destroyed. People will lose family members to this storm, a feeling Chloe knows better than most. Her mother dies in the storm. Chloe will not be okay with this for the rest of her life. And she isn’t exactly in a great position emotionally and mentally to begin with.
Now let’s look at this from Max’s perspective. She’s going to have to live with her decision of sacrificing an entire town, most of whose inhabitants don’t deserve to die, to save one person. How is she going to be okay with this? How will she live with herself?
So…yeah. Max does as Chloe says. She goes back to the bathroom at the beginning of the game. She hears Nathan and Chloe walk in. She hears him shoot her. And she does nothing except curl up and cry in the corner. It was heartbreaking to watch. Look, I might just be overreacting…I mean, it’s a video game, but…I just have no words for how sad this scene is.
In this final timeline, Nathan gets arrested immediately after murdering Chloe. He tells the police about Jefferson, so they shut down his creepy operation. And in the present day, Max awakens at the lighthouse and attends Chloe’s funeral. The storm never comes.
Episode 5 choices:
Alright…I’m going to go ahead and nitpick a few things to lighten the mood before I continue. Umm, let’s see…alright. Why is Max taking Algebra? She’s a high school senior or college freshman. Isn’t that late for taking Algebra? And it says “Algebra,” not “Algebra II” or “Linear Algebra.” What is “Math Lab?” You can make a lab class out of math? Out of algebra? Why does Max never sleep with covers on? She even says it’s getting chilly and she leaves her room window open. Why doesn’t Warren wear any safety goggles? Why does the science teacher let him do chemical experiments without goggles? How, when he adds sodium/potassium/chlorine, does he do it by pouring liquid from a beaker into another? 2 of those are solid and the last is a gas at room temperature. How and why do Nathan and Chloe get into the girls’ bathroom at the beginning of the game? Nathan’s a guy and Chloe (who really doesn’t blend in to any crowd) doesn’t go to school at Blackwell. If the deadline for entering that photo contest is Monday, how is the event showcasing the winners the following Friday? How does someone plan this kind of trip? You enter a contest Monday, find out you won Thursday night, and fly to San Francisco the next day to be honored? Isn’t that short notice? Why does Jefferson announce the winner of the contest Thursday night at what amounts to a frat party? Shouldn’t that be some sort of more formal school event? How is Max a hipster? She doesn’t even have glasses. That…that’s what makes a hipster, right? No? Alright, scratch that last one.
Anyway…let’s talk about that waterspout. Like I said, the end of the game has everyone assuming Max’s use of her powers caused it. I don’t think that’s possible for a simple reason: Max has a vision of the storm before she uses or even knows she has her powers. The vision is the very first thing that happens in the game. Also, consider the timeline where Chloe’s paralyzed and her dad is alive. In that timeline, Max doesn’t have temporal powers that we know of – it would be unlikely, in fact, as Max’s powers awakened upon her seeing Chloe get shot, which doesn’t happen in that timeline. But, the freak snowfall and the eclipse happen in that timeline as well, suggesting the storm is still on course. Finally, if you choose to sacrifice Chloe, Max does so by traveling back in time again – so if using her time powers caused the storm, how is using her time powers some more supposed to stop it? It’s hard to imagine that she messed up the space-time continuum to cause a massive storm, messed up the space-time continuum some more by going back to before she messed up the space-time continuum in the first place, and just stopped messing up the space-time continuum afterward and that magically solves everything. Did that sentence make sense? If not, it’s because it isn’t supposed to. Max’s powers and their use causing the storm doesn’t add up to me.
We do know one thing, unequivocally: Chloe’s death stops the storm, at least if she dies at the beginning of the week. So I actually think that Chloe herself is the cause of the storm. Not consciously – she’s not evil. I mean she has a power, like Max, but she’s not aware of it and it has nothing to do with time travel. Her power has to do with destruction.
Sound crazy? Maybe it is, but bear with me. At the end of Episode 1, Chloe says that Arcadia Bay has taken everything she ever loved away from her: her dad, Max, Rachel…and she wishes she could bomb the town and turn it to plate glass. That line triggers one of Max’s visions about the upcoming storm. If Chloe is the cause of the storm and she says something like that, it would make sense that Max would get a vision of the storm from her directly.
Now Chloe isn’t totally cereal. She even says so later. But her fury against the town – against the life she was given – is very real. And if Chloe has some destructive power she’s unaware of, her subconscious rage could conceivably create and/or summon this gigantic storm to destroy the town she hates so much. It then follows that her death would stop the storm.
Think about the signs leading up to the storm. Snowfall despite the heat, like Chloe remaining cold and aloof even with her mother and David trying to make her life better. Hell, she’s like that to Max sometimes. A solar eclipse? A shadow covering light? How about birds falling from the sky or whales on the beach? Chloe lost her wings long ago and any majesty she had in life is long gone. All the signs invoke the symbol of light succumbing to darkness or hope succumbing to despair. They’re all very relevant to Chloe’s character.
Even alternate (paralyzed) Chloe has this theme going on. She’s not overtly punk, but she’s bitter about her condition. She tells Max she hates not being able to wipe herself after the bathroom. Alternate Chloe also summoning such a storm isn’t that farfetched either.
Now let’s consider the timeline where we actually see the storm – the final one before Max uses Warren’s picture to travel back in time. The storm’s hitting Arcadia Bay, but Chloe’s dead. Actually…we don’t know that. Remember how Max’s ability works with pictures: she travels back to when the picture was taken and inhabits her past body, she’s able to interact with her immediate surroundings for a few minutes, and then she reawakens in the resultant present day. Max traveled back to when she took her winning photo and ripped it in half. She awakened in the Dark Room. What happens in-between is unknown, including whether Jefferson killed Chloe. Max can tell David that Jefferson did kill Chloe, but Max is going off information she knows from a different timeline. To support this, consider that Jefferson has Chloe’s necklace in the Dark Room. If Jefferson had killed Chloe in the junkyard as he did in the original timeline, why would he take her necklace? Jefferson’s unlikely to give Chloe a second glance after killing her, much less jack her stuff. It’s more likely that, for some reason, Max was wearing Chloe’s necklace and Jefferson took it off her before beginning his photo session, meaning that more changed in this timeline than we know. Max certainly didn't have Chloe's necklace in the original timeline.
Here’s some more evidence that this timeline is different from the original timeline. When Max is driving to town, she receives a voicemail from Nathan that he sent Thursday night at 9 pm. Now in the original timeline, on Thursday night, Jefferson killed Nathan and then texted Chloe from Nathan’s phone, which lured them to the junkyard where he drugged Max and killed Chloe. If things happened the same way, Max would have received Nathan’s voicemail Thursday night, because Nathan sent the voicemail before Jefferson killed him. Clearly, that isn’t the case in this timeline, as she doesn’t get it until Friday afternoon or so when the storm is hitting the town.
Next, how did David find the Dark Room to save Max? Someone must have told him where she is, especially if Joyce kicked him out of their house and he’s, in his own words, feeling sorry for himself at a hotel. The only person who knows about the Dark Room who would tell David is Chloe, and she would do it in a surreptitious way because she would likely hate the idea of directly asking David for help (similar to how Max texts David in the timeline where she won the contest – she did it via anonymous tip). From David’s perspective, he would’ve gotten an anonymous tip, then piece together what information he could based on Max’s and Chloe’s own investigation, then find the Dark Room. He would still have no idea where Chloe is.
But let’s ignore all this and assume Chloe’s dead. Well, let’s look at the storm itself. From Max’s visions, the narrowest part of the waterspout, right where it contacts the water, is about as large as the entire town of Arcadia Bay. A storm this size would absolutely obliterate the town long before it even got close to land. In-game, we see the storm is very destructive, but it’s nowhere near unnatural. Max is able to drive into town during the storm. Hell, one of her idiot classmates is on the street trying to take a picture of the cyclone. Remember the vision Max had at the beginning of the game? The waterspout picked up a boat and hurled it into the lighthouse with enough force to break the top of the lighthouse apart. If that storm were hitting Arcadia Bay, there would be exactly no way a human could stand outside and be anywhere near okay. The point is, if Chloe died on Thursday, the storm would already be on course, but would begin severely weakening due to her death. Hence, the storm we see in-game isn’t as apocalyptic as Max’s visions predicted.
So that’s what I think. Chloe subconsciously caused the storm. Max foresaw it on Monday because Chloe is still alive then. Chloe dying would have averted it, but Max saves her life and therefore inadvertently keeps the storm on course to destroy the town. Her powers themselves have nothing to do with the storm.
I think I’ve written enough. This has to be the longest review I’ve ever written for a game. It’s…an experience, totally. Too bad the game designers are currently suffering at the hands of Max and her divine retribution. Don’t mess with Max, bitches.
…I am never playing a game like this again. I don’t think a game has ever gut-punched me so hard, so many times before. Or elicited such a storm of emotion (no pun intended). But that’s why I’m giving this game such a high score. It’s kind of like how I hate horror movies, since I don’t like being scared, but if I saw a horror movie and it scared the everfucking fucklights out of me, I’d have to tell you it was a great horror movie because it elicited such a strong reaction.
I guess I’ll just write down my thoughts as they come to me. My thoughts on this game aren’t neatly organized (see above). It’ll be like stream-of-consciousness, except with proper grammar.
Let’s start with the protagonist, Maxine (Max) Caulfield. This girl. Has to be. One of the most AMAZING protagonists ever. I resonate with her on so many levels. She’s shy, nerdy, introverted, geeky, socially awkward… Warren, the guy who, as Chloe says, is “so fucking in love with” Max, has great taste. I actually relate to Warren a lot too – he’s also nerdy and socially awkward. One of the first gut-punches in the game came from the fact that Max is unequivocally uninterested in him at the beginning of the game and, given my own experiences in the romance sphere…
Whether she grows to like him is something the player decides. I chose against Warren during my first playthrough in favor of Chloe, since the game focuses way more on Max and Chloe’s relationship (romantic or platonic), so I kind of gut-punched myself. My second playthrough I let Max slowly accept Warren, which mirrored my own reaction to Warren in real life. He as a character really grew on me during my first playthrough as I saw how much he reflected me in real life and how he’s a genuinely kind person who really steps it up for the girl he loves.
And that brings me to the shipping war in the fandom over these two. Sheesh I have never seen a shipping war like this before. People who ship Max/Chloe go out of their way to shit on people who ship Max/Warren. Like damn. I’m comparing to, say, Resident Evil, where we’ve got Leon/Claire versus Leon/Ada…and the banter between the two groups is mostly civil with a smattering of that weird joke about Chris trying to get Leon to marry Claire in order to continue the Redfield bloodline. Here? These people are downright vicious and will bend over backwards to paint Warren as the most horrible and twisted human being ever just because he’s a rival to Chloe for Max’s affection.
I should probably talk more about the game than about fandom shipping wars. Anyway, Max is a photography major in high school/college. Like, she’s 18, which would suggest early college, but her school, Blackwell, is a high school that she just got into less than a month ago. Whatever. Anyway, one day, she has a vision of a giant waterspout annihilating Arcadia Bay while in her photography class. Freaked out, she goes to the bathroom after class and witnesses a murder, after which she instinctively reaches out and rewinds time and space so she ends up back in class before the event. The beginning of the game has you go to the bathroom and stop the murder. From here on out, Max can rewind time, which allows her to do all sorts of things. Because she keeps all knowledge and objects on her when she manipulates time, she can, say, talk to someone, rewind time, and steer the conversation in a different direction. Or see a girl named Alyssa get hit in the head with various items, rewind time, and warn her before she gets hit. Seriously, it’s a running joke or something with Alyssa.
Max can only rewind a few minutes, so at some point your choices will stick and you’ll need to live with them. Maybe you got a great short-term result, but 1-2 episodes later, the long-term result isn’t so great. For example, you see a security guard harassing your friend, so you can either take a picture of him and stay out of the confrontation or step in immediately to stop him. The latter makes your friend happy, but it means you have no evidence against him later. Why she can’t take a picture, rewind, and then step in is…video game logic.
And here’s my first main gripe against the game. Despite this entire (great) setup, the game is still very much on rails. The story will play out the same regardless and there are only 2 endings; furthermore, which ending you get depends exclusively on one single choice at the end. To drive the point home, the main plot of the game involves trying to find a girl who went missing 6 months ago named Rachel Amber. Spoilers: you find her body buried in a junkyard and learn your photography professor, Jefferson, was behind it. So I was hoping on a second playthrough I could make choices to bust Jefferson and have the story play out differently…but no. If you know where to look, you can actually figure out Jefferson is the one behind Rachel’s murder (and not any of the red herrings the game throws at you), but you can’t act on that information at all.
Jefferson is one twisted fuck. He likes to kidnap and drug girls so he can take pictures of them in helpless, bound, and sexually suggestive positions. He succeeds in capturing Max at the end of the fourth episode and I felt sick and dirty afterward. Like I said, this game really got a reaction out of me.
So…let’s rewind (see what I did there?) and go episode by episode. Episode 1 (Monday) is nice. No gut-punches. Mostly just dealing with normal high school life. Blackwell is full of the usual high school archetypes, like alpha bitch Victoria, rich snob Nathan, nerd Warren, jock Logan…etc. Eventually you find that the girl you prevented the murder of is Max’s best friend Chloe from 5 years ago. See, Max used to live in Arcadia Bay, but moved to Seattle 5 years ago and is just now returning to go to Blackwell. For some reason, she neglected to talk to her best friend for this entire time, so this reunion is their first since she left. Okay.
During these 5 years, Chloe befriended Rachel. Then Rachel disappeared and Chloe is desperate to find her. She recruits Max in this endeavor, so now Max has 2 general “quests”: help Chloe find Rachel and figure out what’s up with that giant waterspout she saw at the beginning of the game. The episode ends with a snowfall despite the temperature being 80 deg F.
Episode 1 choices:
- Reported Nathan for having a gun at school (he’s the guy who kills/almost kills Chloe). This actually came across to me as a dumb choice, since no matter what Max tells the Principal, he suspects her of some sort of wrongdoing. Reporting Nathan does help her case against him in Episode 2, though.
- Made fun of Victoria. Uhh, come on, the bitch had it coming. Max expresses remorse throughout the game from doing this, but me? I’m not as nice as Max is.
- Stepped in to stop David (the security guard) from harassing Kate. Kate is depressed from events we’ll find out more about in the next episode. She really doesn’t need further harassment from anyone. Again, taking a picture and then rewinding to intervene would’ve been the smart thing to do, but…
- Stayed hidden during David’s and Chloe’s confrontation. That…seemed like the smart thing to do. Not to mention Chloe herself says to do this.
- Let Daniel draw Max. Why not?
- Signed Ms. Grant’s petition. Surveillance cameras everywhere? Not my thing.
- Helped Alyssa. Of course I’d save her from a football in the head.
- Erased the insults on Kate’s slate. It’s pretty much a no-brainer that I’d want to spare a friend from more harassment, even if Kate weren’t horrifically depressed (and she is).
- Watered Lisa the plant. The first time I went through the game, I watered her twice and that actually kills her. HOW? HOW DO YOU KILL A PLANT BY WATERING IT TOO MUCH?
- Didn’t touch Dana’s pregnancy test. Or…more specifically, I picked it up, she got mad at me because of course she didn’t like me violating her privacy right in front of her face, then rewound so I could talk to her about it. Honestly, I’d have preferred to ignore the pregnancy test completely – it’s a very personal matter anyway, but it opens up dialogue and ends up being a supportive moment for Dana, so…
- Didn’t mess up Victoria’s photos. So Max sneaks into her room to gather evidence of her bitchery. She has the option of rearranging Victoria’s wall photos to resemble a middle finger, which is hilarious, but my first instinct when sneaking into somewhere I’m not supposed to be is to leave no evidence.
- Didn’t write on a dirty RV. Ew.
- Saved the bird. Long story short, you see a bird fly directly into a window and die. Okay, full disclosure, the first time I went through the game, I forgot about Max’s rewind powers (you know, the entire premise of the entire game) and couldn’t figure out how to save the bird. Only much later did I realize you can just rewind time and open the window. Man I’m an idiot.
- Didn’t break Chloe’s snow globe. I mean…of course I didn’t. Why the hell would I?
- Didn’t leave evidence after going through David’s stuff. See what I said above about not leaving evidence.
- Read David’s files. Yeah, of course I did. Why wouldn’t I, especially when I can (and did) read them and then rewind so technically, nobody touched any of his files.
Episode 2 (Tuesday). Major gut-punch. This episode focuses on Kate Marsh. Now Kate is a conservative Christian who supports abstinence. Some time ago, she got drugged at a party and then a bunch of guys took advantage of her and videotaped it. Victoria then spread the video on the Internet. Obviously, this is wrecking Kate’s life, and she responds in the end of the episode by trying to commit suicide.
I…have many real-life experiences with suicide. I think this episode would gut-punch anyone, but me? It hit me particularly hard. Now in my first playthrough, I managed to talk Kate down from going through with it, saving her, and I thought that was just how the story played out. I’d find out later that, no, you can actually fail and she’ll kill herself. It’s apparently really hard to save her. Well, I did it, and she ends up in the hospital afterward. It’s a scene I’m intimately familiar with in real life. Fucking hell.
This episode ends with a solar eclipse that wasn’t supposed to happen.
Oh, and by the way, in this episode, Max and Chloe lie down on some train tracks and Max eventually has to save Chloe from an oncoming train when Chloe’s foot gets stuck in the tracks. Why the complete hell would you ever lie down on train tracks? They must know trains actively use those tracks – they live in the town and you can hear trains when they pass by. Hell, a train passes through right before this scene.
Episode 2 choices:
- Told Kate to wait for more proof before going to the police. Kate knows that Nathan was the one who drugged her. She asks Max whether she should go to the police. Now…Nathan’s family is so rich I felt like her levying this accusation would just get her nowhere at best. Unfortunately, this is what happens in real life a lot, which disgusts me. This choice actually has little to no consequences, as far as I can tell…Kate’s suicide attempt at the end of the episode occurs before she does anything with the police anyway.
- Answered Kate’s call. Yeah, why wouldn’t I? Chloe is like “come on let’s go to my car with me instead” but (1) I’m not ignoring a call from a friend who is fucking depressed out of her mind and (2) why the complete hell can’t I just take the call and walk to Chloe’s car with her at the same time?
- Tried to shoot Frank. Frank will be important later – long story short, he’s a drug dealer. He pulls a knife on Chloe while Max has a gun in her hand, courtesy of Chloe. Umm…a knife-wielding drug dealer menacing 2 girls at a junkyard? That’s a dangerous situation. Frank doesn’t back down, so…yeah, if in real life I felt my life were in enough danger that I’m going to pull a gun on someone, I’m not going to hold back.
- Saved Kate’s life. This scene wasn’t pleasant for me.
- Blamed Nathan. After the suicide attempt, the Principal asks Max who caused Kate’s downward spiral. You can blame David, the security guard, but since I didn’t take his picture, Max has no evidence. You can blame Jefferson, who at this point in the game isn’t really under suspicion for anything except maybe being insensitive to Kate’s cry for help. Nathan…was the one who drugged her. You’ll later find out he did this under Jefferson’s supervision, but (1) Max doesn’t know this yet, and despite how many people claim to have seen this plot twist, the statistics say a whopping 16% of people chose to blame Jefferson, so LOL; and (2) blaming Jefferson pretty much does nothing in the grand scheme of things. Blame Nathan and at least he gets suspended. Fuck this guy.
- Didn’t water Lisa the plant. Again, watering her twice over 2 days KILLS HER WHY.
- Helped Alyssa. This time someone throws a roll of toilet paper out of the bathroom for no discernible reason and it hits her in the back of the head. Whatever.
- Erased the link to Kate’s video. Victoria, after spreading the video on the Internet, writes the link to the video on the bathroom mirror so people will go watch it. How much of a bitch is this bitch? Fucking fuck.
- Was friendly with Taylor. Taylor…is Victoria’s friend and honestly doesn’t come across as very sympathetic, since you see her joining Victoria in bullying Kate. She does later show remorse, so…sure, she gets a second chance. For the record, Victoria also shows remorse, except I couldn’t ever tell whether she were being genuine.
- Accepted Warren’s invitation. He asks Max on a date. I wish a girl I liked would say yes to me at some point…
- Didn’t write “Max was here” in Chloe’s hideout. I…didn’t really see a reason to?
- Managed to stop the train without messing up the tracks. I actually don’t know how to mess up the tracks. I always pulled it off without messing them up.
- Didn’t gain entry to the Vortex Club. The Vortex Club is Victoria and Nathan’s elitist club. Why the fuck would I want to join it?
- Helped Warren. He asks Max for help on a chemistry experiment. Now Max isn’t particularly good at science, so I’m forced to assume Warren is just using this as an excuse to talk to Max. He asks her whether he should add sodium or potassium…and that’s it. He says nothing about what he’s trying to do, or what he’s adding these reagents to…nothing. He’s also not wearing any fucking safety goggles. Come on. Anyway, you can tell him to add sodium, which does nothing. You can tell him to add potassium, which gives off a slight puff. You can troll him by telling him to add “a shitload” of potassium, in which case the beaker explodes in his sans goggles face. Max is such a troll I love her. Anyway…the correct answer is to go ask the teacher, who tells you to add chlorine instead (why she’s giving you the answer I have no earthly clue), then rewind and tell Warren to add chlorine.
- Tell Jefferson about David harassing Kate. I did this but it does pretty much nothing.
Episode 3 (Wednesday) has another gut-punch, but not as major as in Episode 2 (at least to me). Max resolves to find out what happened to Rachel, as signs point to Kate’s experience being related. Their first step is to break into the Principal’s office at night to search his files, whereupon they find Nathan is unhinged but the school’s covering it up because he’s rich and his family keeps giving the school money. They then inexplicably decide to go play in the pool. The first time I went through the game, I was actually really tense during the break-in. Like I said, the game managed to affect me and I felt actual fear that they’d get caught or something. They get through the Principal’s files without issue…then go play in the pool. Look, between this and the train tracks, I'm pretty unimpressed. Max is still awesome though.
Worse, they do this without preparing towels of any kind, implying they just get dressed in their regular clothes while still soaking wet from the pool. This doesn’t seem like a big deal (I mean, it is to me, but maybe that's just me) except Max comments that the pool is heavily chlorinated, so she and her clothes smell like chlorine after getting dressed. Chloe’s stepdad is the security guard at Blackwell (David) and he sees them next morning after failing to find them during the break-in and I thought there was going to be a plot point where he smells the chlorine and deduces they were at the pool. He doesn’t, but…this entire sequence is just so dumb.
Anyway, they get away and decide to break into Frank’s RV next to investigate his connection with Rachel. Max needs to pull some rewind shenanigans to get his RV keys and here’s another troll opportunity. You can literally walk up to him, grab his beer, and spill it all over him for no reason except to piss him off (he tries to kill you right after, so you’ll have to rewind). Funnier still, you can grab his plate of beans and pour them onto the floor, after which he goes, “I WAS EATING THOSE BEANS!” and slips on the floor on the beans when trying to get up to attack Max. Max is such a troll I love her.
Anyway, you find Frank and Rachel were actually an item. Chloe gets enraged because Rachel never told her and lashes out at Max, saying that ever since her dad died (right around the time Max moved to Seattle and inexplicably stopped talking to Chloe), her life has been absolute shit.
Immediately after this, Max finds she has the power to travel much further into the past provided she has a photo of the time and place she wants to travel to. She has a photo of Chloe’s dad right before he went out to die in a car accident, so she uses it to travel back to her 13-year-old self and stop him from leaving. She reawakens in the present day where the timeline is now drastically different – she’s now an alpha bitch and Chloe’s dad is alive…but Chloe is now paralyzed from the neck down because she herself got into a car accident sometime in the 5 intervening years. Well that sucks.
In this episode, birds drop dead from the sky and a whole bunch of whales beach themselves.
Episode 3 choices:
- Stole money from the Principal’s office. He’s got an envelope containing ~$5000 in cash and it’s labeled “handicapped fund.” Now…somehow, that actually is the handicapped fund, but (1) why would someone just have that much cash lying around for a school project and (2) we later find that the Principal never intended to spend the money on handicapped accessibility anyway. So I let Chloe steal it so she can pay Frank back sometime – she owes him money and he’s extra dangerous because of it.
- Didn’t kiss Chloe. I did it during my first playthrough and didn’t do it during my second.
- Sided with David against Chloe. I’ll be honest – I only did this the second playthrough since I knew that David isn’t actually a bad guy and he’s actually trying to figure out the same thing Max and Chloe are. He’s just complete ass at not being an ass about it.
- Kept Frank’s dog from harm. So to distract Frank’s dog when Max breaks into his RV, she can either throw a bone into the street so the dog gets hit by a goddamn semi-truck or throw it into the parking lot where…he doesn’t get hit by a goddamn semi-truck. That was an easy choice.
- Chloe has David’s gun. Frank takes the gun from Max if she doesn’t try to shoot him. But I did have her try to shoot him, so…
- Lisa is alive. She didn’t drown in too much water and NO, I’M NEVER GETTING OVER THIS HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO OVER-WATER A PLANT.
- Didn’t change Warren’s grade. During the break-in to the school, you can change Warren’s exam grade from minus to plus. I’m not going to cheat for someone and honestly…wouldn’t the teacher notice if there’s an exam where enough questions are wrong to warrant an A-minus but it has an A-plus?
- Not on the Vortex Club party list. Why would I be?
- Erased some names on the Vortex Club party list. The game doesn’t let you choose specific names, so I think Max just screws over some random people on the guest list. Max is such a troll I love her.
- Erased the voicemail from the police telling David that Chloe’s car was in the Blackwell parking lot during the break-in. I mean…whatever (it has zero effect on anything).
- Helped Alyssa. This time some car drives past and splashes water on her. Poor girl.
- Warned the homeless woman about the coming storm. A bunch of people have hypotheses about who this homeless woman is. I don’t particularly care because she has like no impact on the story at all.
- Took a photo after traveling back in time. Why not?
- Didn’t leave a mark on past-Chloe’s fireplace. Why would I?
Episode 4 (Thursday) is incredibly stressful, but first, a gut-punch. Remember how Chloe’s paralyzed from the neck down? She’s also dying. So she asks Max to euthanize her with morphine. Regardless of how you choose to respond to this, Max decides enough is enough and rewinds time back to when Chloe’s dad died and this time lets it happen, thereby returning the timeline to normal. I can’t even imagine the emotional trauma she’s going through right now and it’s going to get worse.
Back in the present day, Max and Chloe go to visit Kate in the hospital. I was really happy they put this sequence in the game. It shows how much Max cares about her friend and how Kate is recovering from her depression. With my own experiences, it’s still heartbreaking, but I’m glad we got to see it in-game nonetheless.
Next up, the girls break into Nathan’s room to find evidence against him. On the way out, Nathan confronts them, menacing Max the same way as he did in Episode 1 after Max reported him to the Principal (despite, you know, the Principal doing jack-all about it). At that time, Warren stands up for Max and gets beaten up for it. This time, Warren shows up and defends Max again by proceeding to beat the everloving fuck out of Nathan. It is glorious. I mean this is a no-holds-barred beatdown.
After that, the girls go talk to Frank. Frank, as I mentioned, is a drug dealer and Nathan must’ve gotten his drugs that he used on Kate from him. Max suspects something similar happened with Rachel. So they ask the dangerous drug dealer for help. I had to play this sequence a few times before I could get it so nobody gets hurt. Doing this also makes Frank mellow out considerably. He’s not a completely bad guy.
Now comes the culmination of all the girls’ investigative work. The player gets to piece together all the clues they’ve collected thus far in a pretty clever sequence. You deduce that Nathan did indeed buy drugs from Frank the night of the party where Kate was drugged and, using David’s paranoid stalking, determine that he went to a shady barn out in the boonies afterward. Now in this sequence, the evidence also tells a discerning player that Jefferson was also at that barn at the same time, but (1) most players won’t see it as they’re focused on Nathan and (2) even players who figure this out can’t do anything with this information.
This barn is hiding a bomb shelter underground. Inside this shelter is the Dark Room, a creepy-ass photography studio where Jefferson takes his kidnapped victims and ties them up to take pictures of. I felt an intense dread and horror when exploring the Dark Room. Whatever the designers did to convey how fucked up this room is, it worked. Now nothing in the Dark Room implicates Jefferson directly, but there are binders full of the pictures he and Nathan took. In particular, they find Rachel’s binder, depicting the junkyard, so they drive there and find her body using the location in the binder.
Chloe loses it and decides she’s going to go to the Vortex Club party that night to kill Nathan. Max goes along with her (she either wants to help her or stop her – I don’t quite know) and, to make a long story short, they fall into a trap devised by Jefferson. Jefferson drugs Max, knocking her out before she can use her powers, and shoots Chloe right in the head. This scene…made me ill.
At the end of Episode 4, a double moon appears in the sky for a short while.
Episode 4 choices:
- Accepted alternate Chloe’s request to euthanize her. There’re all sorts of things one could say about this choice, so I’ll just leave it at that.
- Remember that no-holds-barred beatdown? You can actually stop Warren. I didn’t. Besides the fact that Nathan had it coming for a variety of reasons, Nathan again pulls out a fucking gun and we know he’s not above using it.
- Got through the Frank conversation without anyone getting hurt. Like I said, took a few tries.
- Didn’t warn Victoria. So in the Dark Room, you find an empty binder with Victoria’s name on it, suggesting that she’s next to be kidnapped and brought there. Max has the option of warning her. I didn’t because Victoria wouldn’t believe her anyway. What I did do is tear Victoria a new one for being such a fucking bitch. To drive the point home, her response to Max’s anger that her bullying of Kate drove her to near-suicide is an indignant “I’m not perfect, ok?”
- Saved the blue jay. This is a very inconsequential choice, but you can let a blue jay fly away or keep it trapped in the house to die. Why would I kill an innocent bird?
- Didn’t disturb a bird’s nest in David’s garage. Again…not a hard choice.
- Found David’s code to get into his locker full of his secret files. I actually don’t know how else to get into the locker since I’ve always used the code – the game literally gives it to you earlier on.
- Kate helped Max find Nathan’s room. If she’s alive, she does this (as far as I can tell).
- Convinced Daniel to go to the Vortex Club party. Honestly, I only did this because I knew beforehand that he’ll successfully ask Brooke out at the party if he goes. Yeah, I want everyone to have happy romantic endings. Sue me.
- Don’t actually sue me. I’m not rich.
- Left a message on Warren’s slate. Max will write, “Are you made of copper and tellurium? Because you’re CuTe.” ZOMG THIS GIRL. *turns into a fanboy puddle
- Figured out Nathan’s PIN code to his phone. This dude needs better security awareness. His PIN is his birthday.
- Helped Alyssa again. This time, at the party, 2 guys are having a swordfight with large foam noodle-things and one accidentally hits her, causing her to fall into the pool. Oh, and by the way, the party is a bunch of drunk high school students at an indoor pool set up with electronic sound equipment. What the complete hell is wrong with these people?
Episode 5 (Friday) is easily my least favorite episode and contains some more high-octane gut-punches. First, you use Max’s photo-rewind power to go back to when Jefferson is creepily taking pictures of a bound Max. You use it again to return to the beginning of the week via a selfie she took and kept in her diary. This time, Max texts David anonymously about everything she’s learned before turning in a picture for a photography contest. Back in the present day in the altered timeline, Max is traveling to San Francisco, having won the contest; David gets Jefferson and Nathan arrested pretty much right at the beginning of the week (so, among other things, Chloe doesn’t get killed); and at the contest, everyone is all over Max’s photo, heaping praise upon her for her artistry. This ending is just so…amazing. So how much of a gut-punch is it when Max realizes that the waterspout she envisioned is now hitting Arcadia Bay and it kills Chloe mid-phone-call.
So she uses her contest entry to travel back in time again, back to when she first took it (before the week begins). She rips it apart, hoping that everything will happen as it did, except she won’t be in San Francisco as she can’t win a contest she didn’t enter. I’m honestly unsure what her plan was – even if this worked (it doesn’t), all that does is put her in Arcadia Bay during the storm. She doesn’t know how to stop it whether she’s in Arcadia Bay or not. If she simply wants to go back and warn Chloe…well, she did that already. She told Chloe at the beginning of the week.
Anyway…this plan doesn’t work and she ends up in the Dark Room again…somehow. This time, Jefferson has burned her diary, so she has no picture she can use to escape. Luckily, David has found the Dark Room…somehow, and he saves her. More specifically, he barges in and Jefferson murders him, but you can rewind time and distract Jefferson so David knocks him out.
Max exits the Dark Room and beholds the storm outside. She remembers that Warren took a picture of her at the Vortex Club party and decides she can use that to go back in time. She drives into town and this is my favorite sequence in the game – on the way to the diner where Warren is, Max can save the lives of no less than 4 people from the storm. It’s just her walking through a chaotic storm saving people and being a badass.
Okay then. Max meets up with Warren, gets the photo, and travels back in time to right before the Vortex Club party. This time, she warns Chloe about Jefferson, so they don’t fall into his trap. David gets Jefferson arrested and Max returns to the present day…at the lighthouse, watching the storm approach Arcadia Bay. Again, she saved Chloe, but has exactly no clue what to do about the storm.
What follows is my least favorite part of the game and probably the sole reason I gave it an A and not an S. Max passes out and has a nightmare. It’s a playable sequence and, honestly, it’s incredibly unsettling, just like a nightmare should be. There’s this bathroom you end up in with a keypad lock and if you examine the lock and exit the screen, suddenly there are insane numbers scrawled all over the room. I got some The Shining vibes from the whole thing. That’s not why I hate this sequence, though.
The nightmare also has a long stealth sequence. You have to run through some areas patrolled by warped versions of people in Max’s life. They have flashlights and if they manage to shine a light on Max, you need to rewind and find a way past them. The sequence is annoying and it bugged out once or twice for me, meaning I had to do it multiple times. Moreover, the entire nightmare doesn’t really serve much purpose. All it tells us is that this girl is having a nightmare…which of course she would – she went through hell this past week. I’d be shocked if this were the only nightmare she’ll ever have about getting godlike powers, seeing people die (including her best friend, multiple times), and getting drugged and kidnapped by a professor she looked up to who turned out to be a twisted psychopath. I’ve seen people analyze this sequence in detail, trying to make insightful comments about Max’s subconscious, but honestly? It’s a nightmare. Try analyzing your real-life nightmares and see how far you get before you start sounding like a crazy loon. The best one can do is make broad strokes, like what I said above. Traumatic experience = warped dreams about those experiences.
In particular, Warren is in Max’s nightmare. Like everyone else, he’s far more creepy in the nightmare with very aggressive dialogue. You can find his locker where he has a bunch of photoshopped pictures and a doll of Max. I’ve seen people use this as justification for how Warren is obviously a deranged sexual predator. Remember I said how people bend over backwards to hate on Warren? This is why. To drive the point home, I’m going to list a few other things that happen in the nightmare at random.
- Jefferson asks Max whether she’d like to stay in his Dark Room forever. The only options Max has to respond are along the lines of “yes I love you.”
- Frank’s dog texts Max warning her about not messing with Frank (and asking her for a treat).
- Kate tells Max she hates her for saving her life because now her family will never leave her alone.
- Chloe hooks up with a bunch of different people, including Nathan, the guy who once drugged her in his dorm room (this is why Chloe and Nathan were in the bathroom at the beginning of the game – she was trying to extort money from him to keep quiet).
There are other examples. But can you even begin to say that these point to any sort of reality in Max’s life? She loves her twisted professor who kidnapped and drugged her? She’s worried about Frank’s dog being her enemy (or that Frank’s dog is literate and can use technology)? She regrets saving her friend from fucking suicide? She thinks Chloe wants to hook up with someone who violated her? This is sickening. Goddamnit people – this is a nightmare sequence. It’s a series of images from Max’s memory warped to be unsettling, creepy, and horrific. Exactly none of it has any bearing on reality, Warren’s aggression included.
Just…the implications of what people are saying about this nightmare sicken me. A lot. And I guess it isn’t entirely fair to blame the game for this, but the nightmare sequence in and of itself isn’t all that useful and the stealth segments are really annoying, so I’m leaving my score as is.
There is one great part of the stealth sequence. Nightmare-Frank walks around threatening to cut Max with his knife and discussing how much Chloe hates her. He also has this line: “Those were my beans, Max! Those were my FUCKING beans!” The way he says it is also hilarious. As a side-note, the voice actors in this game really hit it out of the park. Kudos to all of them.
Max wakes up eventually. She and Chloe are at the lighthouse, overlooking the storm about to hit Arcadia Bay. Now at this point in the game, everyone (Max included) is working on the hypothesis that Max using her temporal powers messed up the space-time continuum so much that it caused this storm. It caused the snowfall in Episode 1. It caused the eclipse in Episode 2. It killed the birds and beached the whales. It caused the double moon. And it culminated in this.
I don’t buy that. We’ll get to why later. For now, Chloe says that Max should use a picture she took right before she saved Chloe from getting killed in the bathroom (at the very beginning of the game) and this time…let her die. So in this new timeline, Max won’t have used her powers and will therefore not cause the waterspout. And here’s the final choice in the game: do as Chloe says or rip up the picture, letting Chloe live while the storm destroys the town.
…This isn’t a choice, people. Think about this from Chloe’s perspective. This girl is troubled and…sometimes a bitch, but she’s not a bad person. Not at all. So how will she feel for the rest of her life knowing an entire town died so she could live? Even if you consider that people might survive the storm, their livelihoods and belongings are probably destroyed. People will lose family members to this storm, a feeling Chloe knows better than most. Her mother dies in the storm. Chloe will not be okay with this for the rest of her life. And she isn’t exactly in a great position emotionally and mentally to begin with.
Now let’s look at this from Max’s perspective. She’s going to have to live with her decision of sacrificing an entire town, most of whose inhabitants don’t deserve to die, to save one person. How is she going to be okay with this? How will she live with herself?
So…yeah. Max does as Chloe says. She goes back to the bathroom at the beginning of the game. She hears Nathan and Chloe walk in. She hears him shoot her. And she does nothing except curl up and cry in the corner. It was heartbreaking to watch. Look, I might just be overreacting…I mean, it’s a video game, but…I just have no words for how sad this scene is.
In this final timeline, Nathan gets arrested immediately after murdering Chloe. He tells the police about Jefferson, so they shut down his creepy operation. And in the present day, Max awakens at the lighthouse and attends Chloe’s funeral. The storm never comes.
Episode 5 choices:
- Sacrificed Chloe. See above.
- David got a scar while fighting Jefferson. I…actually don’t know how to avoid him getting a scar.
- David killed Jefferson. You can tell David that Jefferson killed Chloe, after which he’s so distraught he pulls out his gun and shoots Jefferson right in the head. Jefferson deserved it.
- Max saved the trucker, Evan, Alyssa, and the fisherman on the way to the diner. Max the heroine. Max the badass. I pledge allegiance to Max and to the power for which she stands.
- Didn’t change Joyce’s mind about David (Joyce is Chloe’s mother). I don’t actually know what’s up with this choice. I guess if I didn’t side with David in the previous episode, she kicks him out of the house and you can convince her otherwise?
- Told Frank Rachel is dead. He deserves to know. It also crushed him to know that the drugs Nathan used to overdose Rachel…came from him.
- Kissed Warren. They share an incredibly sweet moment where he’s like “I have to tell you something” and she just goes “shh I already know.” And…yeah, of course she knew. Warren, you’re terrible at hiding your feelings. Not that that’s a bad thing in this case.
Alright…I’m going to go ahead and nitpick a few things to lighten the mood before I continue. Umm, let’s see…alright. Why is Max taking Algebra? She’s a high school senior or college freshman. Isn’t that late for taking Algebra? And it says “Algebra,” not “Algebra II” or “Linear Algebra.” What is “Math Lab?” You can make a lab class out of math? Out of algebra? Why does Max never sleep with covers on? She even says it’s getting chilly and she leaves her room window open. Why doesn’t Warren wear any safety goggles? Why does the science teacher let him do chemical experiments without goggles? How, when he adds sodium/potassium/chlorine, does he do it by pouring liquid from a beaker into another? 2 of those are solid and the last is a gas at room temperature. How and why do Nathan and Chloe get into the girls’ bathroom at the beginning of the game? Nathan’s a guy and Chloe (who really doesn’t blend in to any crowd) doesn’t go to school at Blackwell. If the deadline for entering that photo contest is Monday, how is the event showcasing the winners the following Friday? How does someone plan this kind of trip? You enter a contest Monday, find out you won Thursday night, and fly to San Francisco the next day to be honored? Isn’t that short notice? Why does Jefferson announce the winner of the contest Thursday night at what amounts to a frat party? Shouldn’t that be some sort of more formal school event? How is Max a hipster? She doesn’t even have glasses. That…that’s what makes a hipster, right? No? Alright, scratch that last one.
Anyway…let’s talk about that waterspout. Like I said, the end of the game has everyone assuming Max’s use of her powers caused it. I don’t think that’s possible for a simple reason: Max has a vision of the storm before she uses or even knows she has her powers. The vision is the very first thing that happens in the game. Also, consider the timeline where Chloe’s paralyzed and her dad is alive. In that timeline, Max doesn’t have temporal powers that we know of – it would be unlikely, in fact, as Max’s powers awakened upon her seeing Chloe get shot, which doesn’t happen in that timeline. But, the freak snowfall and the eclipse happen in that timeline as well, suggesting the storm is still on course. Finally, if you choose to sacrifice Chloe, Max does so by traveling back in time again – so if using her time powers caused the storm, how is using her time powers some more supposed to stop it? It’s hard to imagine that she messed up the space-time continuum to cause a massive storm, messed up the space-time continuum some more by going back to before she messed up the space-time continuum in the first place, and just stopped messing up the space-time continuum afterward and that magically solves everything. Did that sentence make sense? If not, it’s because it isn’t supposed to. Max’s powers and their use causing the storm doesn’t add up to me.
We do know one thing, unequivocally: Chloe’s death stops the storm, at least if she dies at the beginning of the week. So I actually think that Chloe herself is the cause of the storm. Not consciously – she’s not evil. I mean she has a power, like Max, but she’s not aware of it and it has nothing to do with time travel. Her power has to do with destruction.
Sound crazy? Maybe it is, but bear with me. At the end of Episode 1, Chloe says that Arcadia Bay has taken everything she ever loved away from her: her dad, Max, Rachel…and she wishes she could bomb the town and turn it to plate glass. That line triggers one of Max’s visions about the upcoming storm. If Chloe is the cause of the storm and she says something like that, it would make sense that Max would get a vision of the storm from her directly.
Now Chloe isn’t totally cereal. She even says so later. But her fury against the town – against the life she was given – is very real. And if Chloe has some destructive power she’s unaware of, her subconscious rage could conceivably create and/or summon this gigantic storm to destroy the town she hates so much. It then follows that her death would stop the storm.
Think about the signs leading up to the storm. Snowfall despite the heat, like Chloe remaining cold and aloof even with her mother and David trying to make her life better. Hell, she’s like that to Max sometimes. A solar eclipse? A shadow covering light? How about birds falling from the sky or whales on the beach? Chloe lost her wings long ago and any majesty she had in life is long gone. All the signs invoke the symbol of light succumbing to darkness or hope succumbing to despair. They’re all very relevant to Chloe’s character.
Even alternate (paralyzed) Chloe has this theme going on. She’s not overtly punk, but she’s bitter about her condition. She tells Max she hates not being able to wipe herself after the bathroom. Alternate Chloe also summoning such a storm isn’t that farfetched either.
Now let’s consider the timeline where we actually see the storm – the final one before Max uses Warren’s picture to travel back in time. The storm’s hitting Arcadia Bay, but Chloe’s dead. Actually…we don’t know that. Remember how Max’s ability works with pictures: she travels back to when the picture was taken and inhabits her past body, she’s able to interact with her immediate surroundings for a few minutes, and then she reawakens in the resultant present day. Max traveled back to when she took her winning photo and ripped it in half. She awakened in the Dark Room. What happens in-between is unknown, including whether Jefferson killed Chloe. Max can tell David that Jefferson did kill Chloe, but Max is going off information she knows from a different timeline. To support this, consider that Jefferson has Chloe’s necklace in the Dark Room. If Jefferson had killed Chloe in the junkyard as he did in the original timeline, why would he take her necklace? Jefferson’s unlikely to give Chloe a second glance after killing her, much less jack her stuff. It’s more likely that, for some reason, Max was wearing Chloe’s necklace and Jefferson took it off her before beginning his photo session, meaning that more changed in this timeline than we know. Max certainly didn't have Chloe's necklace in the original timeline.
Here’s some more evidence that this timeline is different from the original timeline. When Max is driving to town, she receives a voicemail from Nathan that he sent Thursday night at 9 pm. Now in the original timeline, on Thursday night, Jefferson killed Nathan and then texted Chloe from Nathan’s phone, which lured them to the junkyard where he drugged Max and killed Chloe. If things happened the same way, Max would have received Nathan’s voicemail Thursday night, because Nathan sent the voicemail before Jefferson killed him. Clearly, that isn’t the case in this timeline, as she doesn’t get it until Friday afternoon or so when the storm is hitting the town.
Next, how did David find the Dark Room to save Max? Someone must have told him where she is, especially if Joyce kicked him out of their house and he’s, in his own words, feeling sorry for himself at a hotel. The only person who knows about the Dark Room who would tell David is Chloe, and she would do it in a surreptitious way because she would likely hate the idea of directly asking David for help (similar to how Max texts David in the timeline where she won the contest – she did it via anonymous tip). From David’s perspective, he would’ve gotten an anonymous tip, then piece together what information he could based on Max’s and Chloe’s own investigation, then find the Dark Room. He would still have no idea where Chloe is.
But let’s ignore all this and assume Chloe’s dead. Well, let’s look at the storm itself. From Max’s visions, the narrowest part of the waterspout, right where it contacts the water, is about as large as the entire town of Arcadia Bay. A storm this size would absolutely obliterate the town long before it even got close to land. In-game, we see the storm is very destructive, but it’s nowhere near unnatural. Max is able to drive into town during the storm. Hell, one of her idiot classmates is on the street trying to take a picture of the cyclone. Remember the vision Max had at the beginning of the game? The waterspout picked up a boat and hurled it into the lighthouse with enough force to break the top of the lighthouse apart. If that storm were hitting Arcadia Bay, there would be exactly no way a human could stand outside and be anywhere near okay. The point is, if Chloe died on Thursday, the storm would already be on course, but would begin severely weakening due to her death. Hence, the storm we see in-game isn’t as apocalyptic as Max’s visions predicted.
So that’s what I think. Chloe subconsciously caused the storm. Max foresaw it on Monday because Chloe is still alive then. Chloe dying would have averted it, but Max saves her life and therefore inadvertently keeps the storm on course to destroy the town. Her powers themselves have nothing to do with the storm.
I think I’ve written enough. This has to be the longest review I’ve ever written for a game. It’s…an experience, totally. Too bad the game designers are currently suffering at the hands of Max and her divine retribution. Don’t mess with Max, bitches.