The original Life Is Strange game, the one that started it all for the long-running and award-winning series, was a compelling story that featured one of the more consequential ending choices in the choose-your-own-adventure subgenre. It brought all the themes to a fitting and poetic ending that proved to be the best conclusion to any of the games thus far.
Now, before the remastered collection comes out in September, it's worth revisiting that ending to understand exactly what happened in the final moments of the game and the impact it had. Be warned, this piece will contain spoilers for the entirety of the first game.
Spoilers Ahead
Square Enix’s Life Is Strange centers on Maxine "Max" Caulfield, voiced by Hannah Telle, as she returns to the fictional town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon. Max had left with her family years ago and has now returned to discover that, just as she has changed, so too has her hometown. While attending the Blackwell Academy, Max begins experiencing visions of a tornado destroying a lighthouse at the edge of town. She excuses herself from class and runs to the bathroom to gather herself, where she takes a photo of a butterfly. More on that recurring motif later.
While in the bathroom, Max must hide when her classmate Nathan Prescott (Nik Shriner) suddenly busts in. Nathan is muttering to himself and seemingly on edge. Max then overhears him confront her old friend Chloe Price (Ashly Burch) and threaten her with a gun.
Not a moment too soon, Max discovers she has the power to rewind time and is able to save Chloe’s life even after she has been shot. The two then begin to reconnect and work to solve the mystery of Chloe’s missing friend Rachel Amber, who had disappeared while Max was gone from the town.
Using Max’s powers, they discover that it was their teacher Mark Jefferson (Derek Phillips) who was working with Nathan to abduct and photograph girls from the school in an underground darkroom. This twist is hinted at early on when Jefferson takes a strange phone call outside his room, and if you walk close enough, you can pick up bits of conversation that reveal he had something to hide. Oh, and he is just an all around creepy guy the more he talks.
Meanwhile, Rachel Amber has been missing and no one seems to know where she has gone. "Missing Person" posters adorn landmarks all over town and there is a feeling that the community is holding its collective breath ever since her disappearance. Some people attempt to downplay her disappearance and offer hope that she may have left town to go to better places. The explanation never feels true as there are too many signs that something went wrong. That ominous air becomes suffocating as the game goes down a darker and darker path.
That path leads to a horrifying revelation. When looking through the darkroom, Max and Chloe eventually discover photos that reveal Rachel had been kidnapped. After piecing together the photos, they discover the location of her body. She was buried in a junkyard, where she had been the whole time. She never left for a better life and her entire future ended right there. The town had swallowed her up, making all their efforts to find her tragically futile. It marks a turning point in the narrative that shows how it might be impossible to save everyone.
These revelations are only a small part of the finale, though they set up a more deeply and authentically constructed emotional impact by having the author make an impossible choice. What ends up being the focus of the story’s climax is a choice Max must make. Even when she and Chloe were able to bring Mr. Jefferson to justice, their troubles were not over. As it turns out, Max playing with time over the course of the game had profound consequences for the world. The tornado she has been having visions of was actually brought about by Max first using her time powers to save Chloe.
This means she will now have to either choose to save Chloe, letting her town be destroyed in the process, or undo everything she has done by letting her best friend die.
Remember the butterfly? This repeated motif establishes that this world is governed by what is known as the Butterfly Effect. No, not the 2004 Ashton Kutcher movie though, yes, the principal is the same. The story follows the rules of chaos theory (which is also the name of one of the episodes) that says one small action can have larger repercussions and set other things in motion.
In this case, Max saving Chloe was a small action though it forever altered the timeline of events in the world. Characters warn you of strange weather events, animals dying, and just general chaos that begins to spiral out of control until now everyone living in the town is at risk.
It then falls to Max, and by proxy the player, to make an impossible choice. You must choose between saving your friend or saving the people of Arcadia Bay. It is a choice with real weight, both thematically and philosophically, that serves up what could only be the inevitable culmination of all your actions up until that point.
If you choose to save Chloe, you then drive off together into the unknown and leave behind the wreckage of the town you knew in your rearview mirror. If you let Chloe die, you must sit by and return to the moment of her demise to listen to her final moments without being able to stop the inevitable. You then will see a funeral for Chloe and a butterfly that is seen one last time as it lands on her coffin. No matter the choice, both endings serve as effective and impactful conclusions.
It is these conclusions that I revisit and reflect on more than any other game. Even with all the cheesiness of the dialogue in the game and some genuinely cringey moments, Life Is Strange has forever etched itself in my memory. I have revisited it multiple times and each time I marvel at how it all came together. The mystery of the town and the impending doom being revealed as a product of your own choices is a masterstroke of narrative subversion.
The reason it is so perfect is, even after playing it multiple times and knowing where it all goes, the story is not cheapened by the conclusion. In fact, it is only given more life with each subsequent revisiting. The inevitability of the chaos from all your choices and altering of time, actions you thought would help fix the problems of the world, only brought a different kind of doom. The destruction you must inevitably face was unforeseen, yes, though no less predetermined. However much you try, there is no escaping the end we must all face.
That makes every new playthrough of the game an exercise in extreme dramatic irony, where you can see the impending train that is barrelling down the tracks and will soon destroy everything in its path. It cannot be avoided and the characters remain tragically unaware of what is coming. They don’t know how it is that their very actions will bring about their own demise and that there is no saving everyone.
Yet it is that precise tragedy, that the characters are wholly unprepared for what is coming, which makes it so consistently compelling and persistently relevant. Humanity is full of people who will think they are doing the right thing and that they are prepared for what is next, only to be sideswiped by the danger they could have never prevented. There is no other way to see the conclusion, where you must either sacrifice your best friend or an entire town, as a consequence of a collective inability to see our own impending destruction.
That is why the conclusion of Life is Strange continues to stick with me, unshakeable and forever gut-wrenching. Be it the loss of so many in the town or the connection you have had with your childhood best friend, there is no true good ending. No matter your decision, the ending is devastating and full of profound loss. That not only takes guts to leave the player with no good choice, it makes the best use of the form. It leaves the audience with a choice that, while still having actual stakes, cannot avoid the tragedy of the world. To pull that off remains a triumph of storytelling.
Unfortunately, none of the subsequent games have quite been able to capture the same feeling and emotion of that first ending. However, the soon to be released Life Is Strange: True Colors certainly seems like it has the chance to do so though it will have some rather big narrative shoes to fill. No matter what, it will always be nice to return to where the series all started, with the understated magic of the first story casting a long shadow on all the games that came after it.