Spoilers for the original Life Is Strange game.

Context

What follows is one of my lengthy posts about fiction and stuff. This is mostly a stream of thought, often rambling about random things or wandering of philosophy. All of it is personal interpretation and opinion. Feel free to discuss, agree, disagree and expand. Enjoy.

I am a big fan of the original Life Is Strange game. I played only episode 1 of LIS2 and haven't played True Colors, but this might be only relevant to LIS1 anyway. I played the game twice, years ago now (2017 I think), and most of my thoughts are from back then, so it might get muddy.

For the sake of transparency, I should disclose that I worked at Dontnod at one point, after LIS1 was completed, and without direct input on the games.

Foreword

There is one dialogue in Life Is Strange that made me consider the player experience in a new way. It is an exchange between Max and another version of herself, in the nightmares toward the end of the game.

Life Is Strange Episode 5

Alternate Max: "Oh, so you want help? Thought you could control everybody and everything, huh? Twist time around your fingers?"

Max (choice: Wasn't my choice... / I tried to help...): "I tried to help... I only wanted to do the right thing."

Alternate Max: "No, you only wanted to be popular. And once you got these amazing powers, your big plan was to trick people into thinking you give a rat's ass."

Max (choice: I do care. / That's true.): "I do care! That's why I was trying to make friends..."

Alternate Max: "By telling people what they want to hear? You were just looking for a shortcut, because you can't make friends on your own."

Max: "That's not true. I have great friends. And I've used my powers for good."

Alternate Max: "Please, stop playing innocent. You're a goddamn hypocrite. You've left a trail of death and suffering behind you."

There are probably many ways to interpret and dissect such a dialogue. The sentence that caught my attention is "You only wanted to be popular." Because what nightmare Max says is kind of true: Max did a lot of things to get people to like her, and used her power both to save people and to make friends.

The fascinating thing about this description of Max, is that it is in great part attributable to the player's choices. If you play the game again with that in mind, the experience changes considerably, notably in how you make choices. Because Max is not responsible for what is happening, you are.

Choices and their impacts

This might be the most repeated negative argument about LIS, and many other similar games: choices do not matter. I strongly disagree with this opinion. Sure, there are only two different endings, and changes brought by player choices are generally small compared to the overall story. But the choices themselves do matter, notably regarding you experiencing them. And that is true regardless of the results being overwritten, if only because Max remembers.

There is this notion in life, which I like to sum up with this Stormlight quote: "Journey before destination." What your choices are, and why you pick them, can be as important, possibly more important, than their results. Think about the decisions the game prompts you to make, and really ask yourself if they do not matter.

In LIS, you choose between having a student expelled, a dad lose his job and a teacher damage his reputation. You can decide to try to shoot someone. You can choose to kiss your best friend. You can let your friend severely beat up another student. You must answer to your best friend asking you to assist them in committing suicide. And more. All these decisions might not be impactful or even meaningful, but they still happen. To me personally, Chloe asking us to kill her is at the very least thought-provoking and makes me deeply emotional, despite the outcome being made irrelevant one minute later by switching to another reality.

I believe it is important to highlight how meaningful choices are in LIS, and that the game and its story are about more than who you sacrifice in the end.

School life

In the early parts of the game, the story is mostly about Max being a student. She hangs out with friends, talks with the staff and with other students, goes to class, enjoys her free time. There might be little to worry about, even when she suddenly discovered herself a superpower. Max focuses on talking to people around her and on trying out her new time travel abilities.

Many of the early choices are optional, you can skip past them if you want. However, one would expect most players to at least explore a bit and try out the power, because that is what we are meant to do, that is what the game is about, right? Thus, you can peek at Dana's pregnancy test, you can fake compassion for Taylor's mother, you can manipulate Brooke to use her drone. There are many such occurrences, from innocent tricks to improve a friendship to questionable decisions to earn goodwill from others. Funnily, Max is called nosy repeatedly, despite looking like a shy and problem-free teenager.

Whether you are introvert yourself or not, it seems the typical course of actions would be to try to make friends with people around you, especially when you are in a character's head with no knowledge about all of them, and just want to play and to explore. Horribly, I could even argue saving Chloe is the selfish desire to keep her friend around (and love interest, for the returning player), although there is no choice there, at least beyond the ending, and that there is no need for reasons to save someone's life, whoever they may be.

Saving Kate

There is one crucial moment about Max using her power, with Kate's suicide attempt. While the power enables Max to be there, it does not allow her to freely manipulate Kate, leaving only their friendship and Max's instincts.

Is Kate meant to be saved? Is Kate fated to suffer abuse and end up going on that roof? It does not really matter, even if the questions made sense in the first place. What this moment is about is you, the player, being faced with a tragic and complicated situation, where you are alone trying to save a girl from killing herself, and you do not get another try if you fail.

Beyond that specific event, there are times when Max could not be there in the first place, and cannot change what happened, such as when Kate was abused. There are times where Max makes a choice and does not know its consequences, when gathering evidence, going to the police, answering Kate on the phone. Even with the power, Max cannot really know the full impact of her decisions, as she does not know what is going on. I do not think it is a happenstance that several choices are not easy, or clear, regardless of any ability to retry.

Everyday hero

Max was granted a superpower over the flow of time. Why, who and how are not answered. She grows into a hero, she gets celebrated as an everyday hero within the story. Yet, from a distance, Max is playing with powers beyond her understanding, and putting everyone at risk whenever she changes time, regardless of it being for selfish or selfless reasons.

Superhero stories are plenty, and often portrays honorable persons, the good guys, winning. But having power does not make you right, and there are no universal good and evil. At her core, Max is not a hero, nor a villain. She is a teenager bestowed with something incomprehensible. She acts heroically, solves crimes and saves people. She also makes mistakes, screws up and causes the reality to start unravelling. Max is even aware of that, with her convincing Chloe to take shelter instead of acting recklessly against Nathan.

The way LIS is played, it puts you in command of this. You are the one being a hero, and you are the one doing the screwups. The outcome matters not, it is just a tale. What goes through your head does matter however. In this, LIS offers a personal and compelling experience for the player, which can get you to do reconsider things, to do a bit of soul-searching. I would argue this is quite uncommon in fiction, where video games are the interactive media, but even they often puts you on rails or simply let you do whatever will entertain you, with no fear of consequences.

Of course, the whole situation with Jefferson is horrible, and his victims deserve justice. But the game is not about him or his crimes. It is about you making changes to the timeline. It is not about who is good, who is evil, who should be saved. It is about the responsibility of altering reality, through means beyond human abilities and understanding. And, in a plain way, LIS is about making choices all along your life, considering them and assuming them. Living with yourself and your decisions. By the end of LIS, not much of the events Max went through transpired in the way she remembers, but the experience stays with her, forever.

The nightmare

The nightmare at the end of the game, with all its confusion and awkwardness, possibly succeeds in reinforcing the overall twisty and ephemeral atmosphere in LIS. No tale is absolute truth nor has definitive meaning.

The game sits you down so that you can think deeply about the full impact of your actions. You are no longer an all powerful being, able to fix any mistake, you look at all that happened, related to your power and how its use affected events, in good ways and in bad ways. In the end, after so many times preventing fate from taking Chloe's life, you get faced with a cruel alternative, everyone dying and the town being destroyed. It is fitting that Max faces herself, not some supernatural entity, as she is dealing with internal turmoil rather than making a deal with fate.

The conclusion walks you through the story again, with a path decorated by events from the week that Max and Chloe spent together. Again, it is about the journey, about moments, about choices. Not about the result.

Afterword

Max is not a blank slate, and might act similarly to whatever the player decides, on her own. However, it is heavily implied she goes through a full transformation over the game, notably with Jefferson saying she developed from nerd to hero within a week.

I believe we can consider the player makes some of the choices over whatever Max's wishes would be, and guides her on a path that may not be her own, affecting in small or large part what becomes of Max and Arcadia Bay. Of course, to a large extent, the game itself restricts you to what the story is supposed to be, but you have some leeway. In any case, it is a compelling thought experiment.