![]() That’s what it always was: closure, not a new beginning. Max is gifted a chance at personal closure through supernatural means. You can’t go home again and Chloe’s death represents the death of Max’s youth and the end of all the guilt and complex feelings she has about it. In my eyes Max was given her powers in order to spend one last week with Chloe and discover truth about Amber, but it was never going to last. ![]() That’s always been the ending of the game for me, on my first playthrough and my latest. I like unhappy endings, or rather bittersweet endings. One of the great pleasures/horrors of the final episode of that show is seeing Cooper totally at a loss, lost in slippery time and alternate realities with no fixed point (“what year is it?”), like Jeffries before him, and that’s the point I wanted Max to get to. The game is in love with Twin Peaks and counts the series as a key inspiration but was released before Twin Peaks: The Return aired so I try and pay homage to that show myself in how I play. I’ll have David fail multiple times in his fight with Jefferson, have Max think she can’t win, only to then create the ultimate victory I already planned from the beginning. It’s dramatic, and that’s where the entertainment comes from on a rewatch, even if I’m seeing characters I love in distress. The way I play, I have her go down temporal paths I know will result in failure just to rewind and choose others in order to build appropriate emotion and motivation. Max struggles until she realises the one thing she has to do. I have an outcome of my playthrough of Life is Strange that I want to reach but I want to characters to fight against it. “Should I do this or do they think I think I should do this and so I shouldn’t?” You’re liable to tangle yourself in logic knots over something as small as whether to water a plant or not. But playing the metanarrative is a dangerous game, trying to get into the heads of the developers who are trying to get into the player’s head. Even so, I feel I separated myself from the story to an even greater degree than is expected when I let Alyssa die mainly as foreshadowing for another death at the end of the game. This balance of locked narrative, control, and player agency in video game storytelling to key to any game but is greatly expanded in a game where the player can rewind and do things over-and-over. I’m in Max’s shoes but her time travelling powers allow the player to be the architect of the story rather than just a piece. This isn’t a matter of whether I am invested in the story but rather where I am invested. I began to play like I was the storyteller. ![]() I realised I wasn’t playing the narrative but rather the metanarrative, seeing the code and shaping the story towards specific outcomes I knew I could reach. ![]() But when playing the recently-released remastered version I thought I’d take on a new outlook. For years the game has been a story I experienced and remembered from Max’s point-of-view. I fell in love with the characters, the story, and the melancholic atmosphere that makes you want to cry and smile simultaneously before spending the next week listening to nothing but Phoebe Bridgers and not getting out of bed. It’s perhaps the game I became most invested in on my first playthrough. Life is Strange is an emotional experience. On the path to the ending, my ending, she learns a vital lesson from Alyssa’s death. Max is failing and struggling and can’t save everyone. Max’s inability to save her friend the one time it meant life or death is a cosmic joke and thematic statement I wanted to make in my playthrough. I had Max save Alyssa each time knowing that, come the final episode, I was going to have Max watch her die. Now, Life is Strange a narrative game where the player can control, to a degree, the outcome of events, so in actuality I’m the storyteller and I want the most dramatic story I can conjure. But while I control Max’s movements, hear her thoughts, and choose her course of action, I’m not really Max when playing Life is Strange. Now it’s not that Max, the playable protagonist of Life is Strange, wants Alyssa to die. And then, when it really mattered, did I save Alyssa from the burning building? No, of course not. I saved Alyssa from being pushed into the pool. I saved Alyssa from being splashed by the car. I saved Alyssa from being hit by the roll of toilet paper. ![]() I saved Alyssa from being hit by the football. ![]()
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