After the cliffhanger that Dontnod left us on at the end of Episode 3 where a choice that Max makes has some dire outcomes, I was eager to see how I could possibly fix what happened. I wasn’t disappointed at all, and it’s going to be a tough wait for the finale, Episode 5.
Dontnod has played with the idea throughout the entire series of “Even if you can change the past, should you?” Up until this point, it’s been pretty easy for us to just use Max’s rewind powers and think nothing of it. If we didn’t like an outcome, we could change that. Hell, Dontnod even encourages it at times to open up new dialogue options or to progress further in the game. But the beginning of Episode 4 really hits home and tries to make us realize that rewinding time may not always be the answer to our problems.
Episode 4 picks up right where 3 left off, and Max has to deal with the consequences of her actions. Without going into too much detail as to avoid spoilers, Max goes back in time to try and change the future so she could make Chloe’s life better – and hopefully solve the problems that they’ve been dealing with throughout the entire series – but instead of fixing everything, she only caused new, and potentially worse problems. As we play through the new timeline that Max has inadvertently created, we can see that she’s very distraught over what she’s done. In all of her good intentions, she’s made other peoples’ lives worse. As soon as Max realizes that she can fix this and go back to the original timeline, she does just that.
Back in the normal timeline, Max starts to work together with Chloe again to try and uncover the mysteries behind the Dark Room and Rachel Amber’s disappearance, all while the threat of a looming tornado threatens the town. No big deal. They already have a few suspects on their list, and with them in mind, Max and Chloe decide to search the dorm room of Nathan Prescott. At first glance, he just seems to just be a cliché rich kid who acts like a jerk, but Max realizes that there is a lot more going on than that. Life is Strange doesn’t use any quick time events, so most of the action that you get is being able to really investigate the environment. Doing this can serve to provide clues or just provide more information about characters and the location. A lot of games will just have useless items that you can look at for the purpose of making a room seem less empty, but Dontnod utilizes such items to tell more of the story. None of the items seem meaningless in the game.
Once Max gets into Nathan’s dorm room, we can begin to look around for any clues. Some of the items we can look at, such as posters or books, don’t help us in our search, but they do serve to characterize Nathan more and show what kind of person he is. This is Dontnods’ approach to “show, don’t tell”. Max ends up finding some very incriminating evidence which she believes may connect him to the Dark Room and Rachel Amber’s disappearance.
This leads us straight into another scene, where Max and Chloe visit Frank, the local drug dealer, in hopes of getting his client list which may provide further information about Nathan. This scene is one of the highlights of the episode, as there are several different outcomes to it depending on your dialogue choices and certain choices that you made in previous episodes. Most games like this give the illusion of choice, where no matter what smaller options you choose, you’ll always end up with the same outcome, but that wasn’t the case during this scene. Life is Strange always likes to remind us about the Butterfly Effect, and that our actions have consequences. Normally we see those consequences immediately, but this scene took into account much older decisions. Everything in it seemed natural and not forced. It’ll be interesting to see how the outcome of this scene may come into effect during Episode 5. At the end of the scene, we end up getting the information that we came for.
Max and Chloe piece together all of the clues that they’ve uncovered which leads them to the Dark Room. I won’t say any major spoilers, but the scene in the Dark Room and the subsequent scene following it were done beautifully. Ashly Burch’s performance as Chloe during those scenes was fantastic, and the player could definitely fell the emotions in them. We also discovered that the story just got much more complicated, and whatever we thought the problem was at first is much bigger now. I liked that Dontnod added another layer to the story instead of just answering an old question. Now it gives us even more incentive to figure out what’s really going on in Arcadia Bay.
The end of the episode offers some major choices that will likely come into play during the finale, as well as finally answering the question on who exactly was behind the Dark Room and Rachel’s disappearance. I won’t say who it is, but I will say that the scene where you find out this person’s identity just shows how good Dontnod is at storytelling. They managed to make it a complete surprise, but once I figured out who it was, I realized that there are so many little clues in each of the episodes that point to this character. There are times when the reveal of the main “bad guy” in something is either too obvious or too unbelievable, but Dontnod managed to find the perfect middle ground. It was shocking, but also understandable when you start to think about the characters previous actions and thoughts more and more. This scene also ends on a cliffhanger that really makes the player feel some dread before the next episode, and left us more questions than answers.
It’s not a perfect episode. It still suffers from bad lip-sync even though it has improved compared to earlier episodes, and it almost seems like it didn’t answer enough questions. Each episode is typically 2-4 hours long depending on how you play it, and it makes me wonder if they saved too much for the last episode. I’m not sure how they’ll end up fitting in a resolution to all of the conflicts going on, as well as answer the question as to what the hell is going on with the storm threatening the town, in such a short amount of time.
Overall, it was a fantastic episode that sets the stage for a potentially equally amazing Episode 5. It forced the player to make some hard decisions and made us really think about the consequences of our actions. Each scene transitioned into the next really well, and I was very satisfied with everything that I got to do in the episode. It did have its stumbles, but its strengths greatly outweigh those.
Jennifer is a games journalist, former games journalist and PR Manager at Gearbox. They contributed 234 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: went on to write for Windows Central and later managed PR for Gearbox Software.