Oh god. Where do I even begin sorting these thoughts? Well, let's just get this out of the way:
SPOILERS. SERIOUSLY. DON'T READ BEYOND THIS POINT IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED THIS YET.
For real, Life Is Strange is certainly a contender for my Game of the Year, and the finale continued its trend of making me feel a diverse range of emotions (but mostly, sad). It's impossible to talk about it without getting into specifics, and if you haven't played it, I recommend you close this, download it, play it, and then come back. Don't deprive yourself of such a great story.
Let's start by backtracking a little bit to the events closing out Episode 4. When we last left our heroine Max Caulfield, she had been captured by the psychotic Mr. Jefferson and Chloe once again lay dead somewhere. The post credits scene was this disturbing sequence where we could see Jefferson filling his needle with a drug while a presumably tied up Max begged for mercy off screen.
And so, we dive right into it. The episode starts with Max coming to in the Dark Room, desperately trying to figure out how to get out of this situation. There isn't really much she can do, and her time rewind powers won't help much. Instead, she's able to focus on some pictures and jump into that moment of time. (I don't think I mentioned it last time, but on top of being able to rewind time, she can also transport herself back even further in time by looking at photographs - or moments of time captured.)
Most of the game is split into two main sections. There's the constant back and forth through large chunks of time as she tries to get out of her captivity. But it gets kind of confusing, and the effects of her timeline changes are unpredictable. At times, she finds herself coming to right back in the thick of things in the Dark Room. All of this is ultimately to find some way to save Chloe for a forth time.
The second big chunk of the game is this super weird dream sequence (or something?) that kind of doesn't make much sense, but it's weird in a really cool and interesting way. I suppose that this part of the game might be kind of "polarizing" among players, with some loving it and some hating it. (It does get really weird.) Personally, I was pretty into it. These sequences take place after Max figures out how to save Chloe, and she gets a huge headache which causes her to pass out as the giant tornado closes in on Arcadia Bay.
What I generally appreciated about the weirdness is that, for as weird as it is, it does make some sense. A lot of the things echoed in her mind are her insecurities and doubts. Many events of the past are replayed here, reminding players of their adventures with Max and Chloe. At times, other characters show up to question the choices Max has made - or more precisely, the choices you made.
Now it's time to get into the bigger specifics of what makes all of this work, so again, play the game first!
I think it was a pretty common thought among fans that the game might end with Chloe dying. Certainly, that seemed a likely outcome. It had been noted how frequently she seems to bite the bullet throughout the series. Everything starts when you encounter her getting shot and killed by Nathan in the bathroom way back in Episode 1. Then she gets stuck on the train tracks and gets run over in Episode 2. And then she's seemingly killed off for good at the end of Episode 4. With most of Episode 5 about finding a way to bring her back again, and with more weird stuff happening in Arcadia Bay, it certainly seemed like maybe Chloe was just destined to die, no matter how much effort you put into fixing it.
It all ultimately culminates in one of the biggest and most profound choices of the series. After figuring out how to "fix" the time line so Chloe is alive, she and Max kind of figure out what had been assumed for a while, but never really discussed: the weird stuff - the snow in July, the beached whales, the unexpected eclipse, the two moons, and the giant twister - were connected to Max's timeline altering powers.
As an aside, I really appreciated that they didn't really explain that very much. Sometimes less is more, and if they had spent too much time getting too into the nitty gritty details of how Max's powers were causing these super natural events, it could have come off as too "explainy," and likely would have been widely open up nitpicking. Instead, they just sort of go, "These things are connected!" and that's all there is to it. There doesn't need to be a greater explanation.
Anyway, Chloe gives you one last choice to make, and it's a doozy. With the tornado fast approaching Arcadia Bay, already having killed a bunch of people, she asks you to back in time to that first moment you "fix" the time line - when Chloe was killed in the bathroom. Worse, she asks you to let Nathan kill her. Interfering in the first place is exactly what caused this storm. And if Max doesn't go back to let it play out as it originally did, many more people in Arcadia Bay would die.
That's basically the choice: do you go back and let Chloe die, or do you let the storm hit Arcadia Bay and just move forward from there?
There are a number of angles I want to approach this from, so let's just break it down one step at a time.
First and foremost, this was yet another "Oooooooh man, WHY!?" choice to make. Life Is Strange does choices better than perhaps any other video game out there. It's done better than the decisions in Mass Effect, and it's far superior to anything in a TellTale game - especially The Walking Dead. This wasn't the first time I groaned very loudly, then took my time really mulling over the options. Sacrifice Chloe? Sacrifice Arcadia Bay? I feel like this should be an easy choice, but...it wasn't.
Games have long been introducing these sort of moral choices into the fold, but they've all been relatively simple. BioShock gave us the option to harvest Little Sisters for more Adam now, or we could rescue them and gain more Adam later. It was basically good versus evil. And there wasn't exactly much reason to care about the fate of Little Sisters. The Walking Dead often presented scenarios in which you had to pick which characters to save, but lacked much power behind them. When you're confronted with saving Sean or saving Duck, it doesn't matter. Sean dies either way; Duck lives either way. Choice is meaningless. Then later, we are forced to rescue either Carly or Doug. But there's no power there because we only get one measly conversation with each of them. That choice is basically a coin flip. (And also meaningless since whoever you save dies at the same point in Episode 3 anyway.) Mass Effect is a little better in that way when you have to choose between rescuing Ashley or saving Kaiden, again at the cost of the other. In this scenario, we have history with those characters. They're both part of our crew, and we've presumably had many conversations with them. It's still a little weak though, in part because they're both the brave and heroic soldier. They both knew they could die in combat when they joined the Alliance military. Plus, they aren't exactly the most interesting squad mates in the game, so it isn't much of a loss if you didn't use either of them in your party much.
At its core, the final decision of Life Is Strange is a classic thought experiment, and something people regularly debate. Would you sacrifice one life to save a hundred? Would you let a hundred people die if it meant saving 100,000? That hypothetical scenario is fairly straight forward for a lot of people, but in order to be so, you must break the lives down into numbers. It's mathematics, clean and simple. Of course a hundred lives are more valuable than one. One hundred is greater than one.
What this decision here does though is put context behind those lives. Would you sacrifice one life to save an entire town if that one life you were sacrificing was your very best friend? Would you sacrifice that one life if you knew the person and had an emotional connection to them? Even more, what if you spent a huge amount of time and energy specifically trying to keep that one person alive? And now you're being asked to sacrifice them? Is that one versus one hundred still that simple? It isn't very often that that hypothetical situation accounts for such connections and human emotion. Life Is Strange does though. That's what makes it tough. (It took me about ten minute to finally reach a conclusion.)
It's hugely and entirely heartbreaking. I was sad for Chloe, and I was sad for Max, and I was sad for Joyce and David. It seemed like they had finally figured out a way to make everything perfect, but doing so created the storm. There are some things you just can't change, no matter what. And there are things that just can't be "fixed." Sometimes, things just have to move forward, for better or worse.
If much of the focus on photography was about capturing a moment in time, then most of what Max is trying to accomplish is the same. Everything she does is about stopping time from moving on. Any time something drastic changes, she seeks to change it. In essence, she's trying to stop time from moving, like a photograph.
What makes this decision even more painful is the connection it has to the other major decision at the beginning of Episode 4. In that time line, Chloe is paralyzed and slowly dying. She's also very depressed as she feels like a huge burden on everyone. She asks you to kill her and put her out of her misery. When that choice came up, I just couldn't do it. I refused. I was unwilling to be the person who "pulled the plug" on her, as it were. And yet flash forward to the end, and they managed to present a scenario in which I suddenly had to agree. It was a tough pill to swallow, and felt all the more tragic as a result.
I don't know why, but I had some strange idea that this might end on an upbeat note. Maybe it's that the tone of the first couple episodes were so innocent, and Max is so pure and such a good person, I guess I just naively thought that she would find some way to have her cake and eat it too. Boy was I wrong. It makes sense though. Mr. Jefferson's whole schtick as a psychopath photographer was that he loved capturing that moment when someone young loses their innocence. The game functions pretty much the same, slowly removing the innocence from it until there's little left.
The final episode is sweet, strange, and horribly gut wrenching, but it's also nearly perfect. It works in a lot of the mechanics that made the game so strong in the first place. There's more "photo jumping" than ever. Time rewind is back and perhaps more significant than before. There are limited choices, but it features one of the biggest and toughest decisions to make in the whole series. There's still some uplifting moments with Max interacting with Warren and Joyce and even reconciling with David.
The general rule of thumb is to abandon hope that your game will have a great ending. It's hard to make a great ending to something people pour hours of their time into. I can probably count the number of games with a good ending on one hand. Yet I can't think of a game with a more emotional ending than Life Is Strange. I can't think of a game that made me feel such a complex set of emotions at the same time. I admittedly get a bit teary when I watch the series finales of my favorite shows, and I felt the same way here. It was just one big punch in the stomach.
Max is no longer innocent, and the game stopped being so well before the finale. But that time with an innocent Max and an innocent Life Is Strange is what makes that change so compelling and emotional. All of that is what makes Life Is Strange such a great game. Easily my Game of the Year, hands down.
Now I just need to figure out what I did with my tissues...
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