#but it keeps like. promising more than it delivers? i guess?like s1 finale was fun but before and after that idk

[smallhatlogan]

Every time someone starts crying in Invincible it looks so silly I think if you need to animate someone crying you can't just go straight to rivers of tears falling out of their eyes while they look slightly sad or it's really hard to take seriously

[brakken]

I finished Life is Strange: Before the Storm Episode 3.

Thoughts below the cut...

-spoilers for Before the Storm and Life is Strange-

In a lot of ways, it was very close.

I think Deck Nine have done an incredible job with telling a story that essentially didn’t need to be told.  I appreciate the effort and dedication to make it feel like the same Arcadia Bay we’re familiar with. I love that it’s embellished further in some places, even when it’s just hinting at something. I’m truly grateful for some of the ways that Before the Storm has augmented its predecessor. And I’d like to give HUGE praise to Rhianna Devries for delivering a great performance as Chloe.

There is a lot to like in this game - though I think it became weaker with each episode.

The main plot pieces of the previous episodes rely a bit on their promise of a big payoff, and that sadly isn’t here in ep. 3. In the first episode’s ending, the mystery woman sits and smiles as a wildfire blazes. Mid-ep. 2, she exits Frank’s van, turns, and gives Chloe an unsympathetic look. By the end of that episode, she’s revealed to be Rachel’s birth mother, and when we discover her backstory in ep. 3, we find out she’s a recovering addict and just wants to meet her daughter. All these elements, to me, were speaking of a deeper conclusion than what we got. We’ve seen fragments of a manipulative nature in Rachel - how much of that is an inherited trait? What was Sera’s involvement with Damon and Frank if she claimed to be sober? Where was all this leading to?

When we finally encounter her properly, she’s a damsel for us to rescue, and when we converse, she’s only used to re-affirm the father’s plea - to cast more immediate doubt onto the final choice. I didn’t see the ending where she reunites with Rachel, but I saw that the timestamp on youtube puts it at 48 seconds of content, so I can’t imagine she’s elaborated on much, there.

It’s a shame because I think there was a lot of strong storytelling being done on the Rachel angle, and I felt that having a plot that wasn’t too connected to the original game was the right move. But all-in-all it pulled too much focus away from Chloe.

I’ve talked about why I was finding choices difficult in this prequel. How I felt conflicted about what Chloe would do, vs what I thought was best for her, vs where I knew the story would eventually end up. The final choice echoed this, too. In an odd way I found this one more difficult than the final choice of LiS. There, I knew there was no way I’d let go of Chloe. But here, even though the consequences were less severe (read: void, since we know it changes nothing), I still found it tricky. The story had been leaning very heavily on protecting Rachel from the truth in this episode, to the point where it practically seemed unavoidable. I remembered Chloe’s graffiti from the original game: ‘everybody lies, no exceptions’. I pondered on Chloe’s insecurities and inability to face hard truths. So I picked the lie.

And then I immediately remembered how hurt Chloe is when she discovers Rachel had been in a secret relationship with Frank. How she trusted Rachel with everything and no-one else. How isolated they both were. I sat with my decision and watched those events play out, while already planning to replay the whole episode just to alter my final choice.

Which I did. And while I felt picking the truth was in line with my version of Chloe, I was let down by the ending. I was let down when everything played out almost exactly the same.

There was a lot of hubbub about the first game’s ending - receiving criticism for not taking your choices throughout into account. While I understand the sentiment, this wasn’t a huge factor for my opinion on the final choice. What I appreciated about it (compared to games like The Walking Dead S1, and The Wolf Among Us) was that the endings were notably different from one another. This style of game seems built on choices that are arguably meaningless, but Life is Strange gave us one that mattered - a final branched path.

Before the Storm clearly took the criticism of the first game in mind and tried to craft the endings to avoid that. But in doing so, it became an ending with even less meaning, at least for me. Instead of the final choice leading down severely different roads, all it changes is how the closing montage begins. Does Rachel sit with her family, happy but oblivious? Or do her parents argue and punish themselves for her learning the truth? The rest of the montage scenes are either unchanged or specific only to earlier choices. It left me unsatisfied because it turned it all into one grey ending. It became the end of an episode, not the end of the full game. It made me feel like the final, most important decision was just one more yes/no option.

I get why it’s like this, and I get why from a production standpoint, any more nuance wouldn’t be feasible. But I wish there had been something more to both decisions. I think it’s really great that there is an epilogue for each of the smaller stories, that change depending on how you played them. But they need to be second-tier to Chloe and Rachel’s epilogue - all of which remained the same, save for the beginning.

I would have liked to see a callback to the wildfire, somehow. There’s a moment in the hospital where a firefighter mentions that it simply put itself out. Another small hint to the supernatural aspect of Rachel. I loved all these little hints, and I loved that they never trespassed too far over canon or over Chloe’s journey. But to better solidify the different endings, maybe it could have been played with more. If you tell Rachel the truth, the fire surges up again from her torment. And if you lie, it extinguishes fully, calmed by her ignorance, maybe we see some green returning to the park... or maybe it’s put out by a sudden onset of rain. The fire is over, but the storm is coming.

I’ve been trying to think what I would change about this game, even in small ways, that would make it overall a stronger piece of LiS story. I think I would have given Frank’s role to someone else - probably someone new. A few of the reappearing characters from the first game felt forced in solely because we knew they were familiar with Chloe before she reunited with Max, and while I appreciate the attempt to have Frank break out of that cameo feeling, I actually think he would have been better off on the sidelines. His portrayal in this feels inconsistent and uncharacteristic to how we meet him in the original. Here, he protects Chloe from a villain with a knife, while in his first scene in LiS, he pulls a knife on her. I think if they’d kept Frank in the margins, with more of that drug dealer presence, and given his role to, say, Thunder the bouncer, or even someone entirely new, the narrative would have been stronger. It would allow them to keep Frank true to Chloe’s later opinion of him, and also keep the players guessing as to the fate of this new character. There’s no threat when Frank is grappling with Damon because we know he survives. But with someone different, heck, maybe if you choose badly then they are actually put in danger.

I’m don’t like looking at this as an alternate timeline - I think that’s sorta unfair to Max’s role and influence on the story. So as far as recurring characters go, I think Joyce and David are used the best, both in consistent portrayal and how they affect Chloe here. 

Due in part to their indeterminate fate, I think it’s BtS’s original characters that stand out most for me. I had a lot of fun interacting with Steph and Mikey, and figuring out how to handle the Drew situation. Skip’s story was cute, and it was cool to see Samantha involved with a pre-established character. Just a shame that most of this was sidestory stuff or inconsequential.

I’m glad they took Eliot in a different direction from Warren, though I’m not really sure what it was they wanted, there. A consistent theme in the game is the subtle and sometimes overt ways that Rachel manipulates people to get what she wants, and how Chloe’s regard for her is potentially hurting as much as it is healing. Eliot confronts Chloe about this directly, but it soon spirals into his ulterior motives and he becomes a threat. While I thought this was consistent with the way he’d been portrayed in earlier segments, and I understand that villainising that opinion works to delude Chloe further - I also wonder if it would have been more interesting to have Eliot genuinely concerned for her safety. I wonder what sort of player choices we would be given in that situation, and if the developers could still have convinced us to side with Rachel.

I think setting this story over three days was a mistake. I had this same feeling in the first game, but the reason it worked there was because Max and Chloe were reuniting. There were years of backstory that were coming up to the surface in that short week, and so all the events, all the emotions, had that much extra weight and believability because of it. Rachel and Chloe however, are meeting essentially for the first time, and their budding connection feels rushed over the course of BtS - culminating in Chloe making life-changing decisions for Rachel and risking her own life on day three of knowing her. Maybe it was intentional - maybe this was to exemplify the irresistible magnetism of Rachel. But I still think if it had been set over three weeks or even three months, there’d be more room to accommodate the relationship. As it stands, it’s all too close to Max and Chloe, with none of the history that makes it effective.

The post-credits sting just felt... mean. And not in a clever, foreboding way. If they wanted to close out with a reminder of where the story goes, they could do it with rumbling thunder, or a rain cloud off the coast of the lighthouse. Because this game wasn’t called ‘Life is Strange: Before Rachel Gets Kidnapped and Killed’. Rachel was more than her fate, and so was the original game. That ending put me back in the worst place that the first game takes you, and that just upset me.

I’m... not actually sure what Life is Strange is without Max. Maybe that’s why this game felt like it couldn’t ever truly hit the mark for me, even with my grievances over the original. Even though it was a game about saving Chloe, LiS was all told through Max’s lens - often literally. The parts of BtS that I was latching onto most were those that mentioned her. Chloe’s journal, her old texts, the dream segments...

And while I’m on that subject - I felt the metaphors got a bit confusing in this episode. My understanding of William’s dialogue in ep.2′s dream segment was a warning of the burning passion Chloe felt for Rachel (the fire), and a promise of the stronger connection to come with Max (the stars). Yet in ep.3, stars are also connected to Rachel, making her the storm, the fire, and the night sky. I just... felt like we lost a bit of focus there, or maybe I just interpreted it wrong. And was the Raven kinda absent from most of this ep?

I’ve been considering doing another full playthrough to see if anything becomes clearer, this time with all different choices (something I found impossible in the original LiS). We’ll see. I’ll let it rest for now, and see what ‘Farewell’ brings.

Even with all my hangups about both games, it’s always a shame to leave that world. There’s so much I love about it just on sensory levels.

My favourite moments from this episode were:

-Sera’s backstory. Loved the callback to the viewfinder.

-Playing tabletop again. I teared up when the story began reflecting the LiS ending.

-Seeing Chloe happy, even if it’s temporary.

Deck Nine pulled the weight with this game. While I’d predicted I would come away conflicted no matter what, I’m still thankful for the parts that they got right.

Wishing and hoping for great things to come.

As always, thank you to anyone who took the time to read these thoughts. Here’s a drawing <3