This review is 100% spoiler filled. You have been warned!
My aim here is to talk more about the overall theme and message I interpreted from the game which is true for either ending you decide on. Through this providing the artistic merit this game has to offer if once is willing to think. This game is more than a surface level route experience. The very mechanics are premise of the game can be taken as commentary on games and on the thematic nature of the game itself. Without further delay, this game, to me, is about loss. Wether or not you choose to accept that loss is up to the player. And you are rendered with an outcome that matches your choice.
The time rewinding mechanic is a great use of subverting decision tree choice games. Where you are forced to make decisions and live with the consequences. In LIS, it appears you don't have to live with the outcome of a choice if you don't like. Even further, you can try all the choices, and if you learn something from those outcomes, you can create new choices and follow them to see how they play out. Mechanic wise, this is a pretty rad commentary on the nature of coined TellTale experience which hit popularity with The Walking Dead. While the main mechanic of the game is a constant thread throughout the episodes, when DONTNOD changes the rules, or entirely takes away such a mechanic for the small occurrences when they do, it is a powerful use of the system they have created.
There is a beautiful mechanic with the time travel in life as strange that is never overtly discussed by Max. In that when Max goes back through a picture, it doesn't stop time in the present day reality when she is tampering with the past of said picture. While she has the ability to rewind, she actually can't stop the march of time. The inevitability that none of us can escape.
Throughout the course of a hell bent pinball machine of a week, you reconnect with an old childhood friend, your best childhood friend. You begin to rekindle this relationship, realize what you loss by not being around, start to feel as you where when you were 13, indestructible, and have some ordinary ugly human nature screw up the happiness that is starting to blossom. The voice work by both Max Caufield and Chloe Price, Hannah Telle and Ashly Burch respectively, breathes life into 2 human late aged teenage girls who have had life throw good times, horrible times, and a chance to live again. As the game starts with you knowing nothing of this journey you are about to embark on, a girl is murdered in a bathroom. You have no idea how important this character is to you, to Max, she just wants to not witness someone die.
Before you even know you have these powers though, you dream of a great tornado destroying Arcadia Bay. The foreboding that a horrible tragedy is nearing. And now, you have magic, you could stop it. The game tackles a couple topics throughout the course of the episodes. Suicide, bullying, parenting relationships, and parenting abuse to name a few. But now I'd like to get the meat of my synopsis.
The main drive for any of the actions that Chloe takes, and in step Max, is to find out what happened and where is Rachel Amber. Chloe has lost her best, if not second, friend and will do any actions necessary to find her. Chloe from the get-go will not let go of Rachel Amber and get on with her own life without finding her. This behavior is what seals Chloe's fate at the beginning of the game until Max intervenes with her time travel. Chloe cannot let go. Including Rachel we find out that Chloe's father died when she was young and that has also hung over her existence since it occurred. Losing a parent as such a young age is a devastating event that is a jagged snow capped mountain to overcome and continue on changed. As any event like that, does not leave one unscathed. 5 years have passed and still this is burning at the forefront of Chloe's mind, and is brought up again and again. Chloe cannot let go.
Soon we have Kate, whom being the victim of *spoiler*, cannot deal with the stress of the shame that has occurred to her. She cannot let go of all the bullshit people are throwing at her, and at this terrible event she has had to live through. She attempts suicide and this via Max, has a specific outcome.
Eventually Max is able to travel far into the past and change the major life event that has painted across Chloe for the last 5 years. Time has a tricky way of self correcting though. Now we find Chloe's real dad and mother working themselves dead to care for their sickly daughter. From the discussions Max has with William, it is obvious he has not accepted the inevitable fate of her daughter. He cannot let go. Quickly we are poised with a decision. To abide by our friend's dying wish or to deny her. By denying her, we are agreeing that against Chloe's wishes we want her to continue to suffer and her parents to continue to suffer in this alternate reality. Until we undone the change to the past that we did. Max cannot live with either of these realities, she cannot let go of Chloe ... just yet.
Skipping an episode a 3/4's we arrive at the finale. There has been a lot of discussion of how people would have changed the 2 endings, and what other options there should have been. Perhaps when something ends in a way you don't agree with the knee jerk reaction is to try and provide ways it could of ended better. Could of ended in a way that would of pleased your personal narrative. Rejecting the journey and the conclusion that the authors have provided. Instead, of trying to dig and build on what the authors have chosen to do. Part of this being that, you can't make everyone happy, you can't save everyone; this being the statement to the characters in game and players at the controls. As someone who is critiquing a piece of art, to look at the surface and offer advice and corrections is an arrogant back heel to rest on. So we have our ending, what can we harvest from it.
I knee jerked the chose to save Chloe. And then I re winded and saved Arcadia Bay. Skin deep this is seemingly random and fake choices you are given. Kill thousands, save the one that matters most. Kill the one you care for so lovingly, save the town. What a copout. A standard time travel chaos theory wrap up. You can't actually change anything. The slightest blade of grass is snapped, and hellfire fills the skies, seas boils and wildlife dies.
Yet could I as Max, really burn the world down all around me to save my friend, against my friend's wish? A direct parallel to Chloe on her bed during the intro of episode 4. I chose not to abandon Chloe, then and let her drift to sleep. Partially because I was gripped with disbelief that the reality I was in was real and that I could change this back, I had to change this back.
How curious a butterfly chose to let me spend a week, but just a week, with my best friend, that I didn't even know at all, before I'm asked to let her go. As with every far-back rewind, time keeps marching and there is only so much time. Do I wish there was more to the ending of save Chloe, sure. She would have been devastated, Max wouldn't of been able to lie to Chloe and tell the Tornado would happen no matter what. Fate has chosen for you that you are going to lose her, or to lose yourself. We'll get to the latter idea.
My Max couldn't of lived with destroying Arcadia Bay and lying to herself that it was inevitable. My Max, like Chloe was confronted with the immense pain of loss, and was asked can I accept it, or not. Can Max let go?
I come away with, that even with magical time traveling nonsense, I just can't have everything turn out alright. And, I've been given this gift to reconnect, get up to mischief, get hurt, grow a friendship, grow a love, grow a lasting embrace that I'll never forget, which otherwise I would of had none of without the powers, and which I would of had to ruin, to be selfish and all the world itself to spiral out of control and rip apart. Life is messy, and there are going to be so many bad things that happen along the way. But we still have good memories to cherish. And we can let loss, destroy the world around us.
This, perhaps, to me is my big takeaway. We can allow the loss of Chloe to destroy us, destroy the world (Arcadia Bay Tornado-rama), and leave things so shattered. There is the television series The Missing that covers a very similar topic. It is geared as this crime detective drama of solving this unsolved disappearance of a child. but it is really a cruel reality of what happens when someone cannot let go of an even in their life and move on. Instead they let it define them, fester inside. and dictate their whole outlook and actions. That show hits you on the head with this theme pretty up front. While LIS, alludes to it, repeats the loss that Chloe cannot recover from over and over, and tells the player, now you must make a similar choice which will define your future. But what a unique take, instead of I know person X, they die, I grieve and move on, LIS offers us Chloe dies, and my life goes on, but then I rewind time and I get to know Chloe, to grow with her, to love her, and then asked will you make the same choice that Chloe has and define your fate through her loss? Cause you can choose to not lose her, and let your world crumble around you, very literally on screen. Or you can see that, a jane doe came by and said, "you are going to lose someone very important to you, and you don't even know it. Please have the next week to build memories with them before you are asked to say good bye". Chloe would have been just that, a jane doe without Max's gift. There is a direct alliteration to this via Max's doe/deer t-shirt. This to me is a unique take, on grieving, and to me this thread sang through all the sci-fi and other story bits flying around.
For those of you who've met someone whom has never recovered from a loss, this is the Max that chooses to save Chloe. My Max, would be so strong, it would hurt so damn much it would hurt more than any other decision in the game, ... she would lose her best friend ... and she would keep living. We can praise the luck we have for the time and the memories we got to experience with Chloe. We can have grief and sorrow, but the sun will still rise and we must keep living, loving, life. Life is Strange, and it is damn wonderful.