Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing
on Games. Look, I get it. Between some downright painful dialogue and
often wearing its influences uncomfortably on its sleeve, the original Life is Strange
is a tough sell to many. There’s a reason it ended up as one of my
favourite games of 2015, however; that dialogue, for all its high school melodrama and… Spirits Within apologia, was less about what
was being said; focusing more on what it said about the characters. Shoving TWIN PEAKS in the player’s face
is arguably some of the most on-the-nose referencing you could see in a game but hey, this isn’t
the first piece of media to be set in a sleepy town with a seedy underbelly. No, it’s what the game does with this influence
that makes it its own thing; using its mechanics to create a unique sense of place, then using
this as a springboard to tell its heightened, surprisingly dark, borderline magical-realist
version of the coming-of-age story. Time travel feels crucial to the game not
as a means of giving the player more choice in how they might affect the story, but in
highlighting just how futile Max’s choices actually are. It’s not a game about time travel, it’s
not even really about high school drama; it presents Max with every teenager’s fantasy
of being able to undo the consequences of the dumb shit you will inevitably carry out
as you coast through your existence, then rewards that endeavour with death, destruction
and the dismantling of the very fabric of reality. It’s about highlighting Max’s fear of
the unknown, of consequence, her ignorance of life outside the bubble of high school. The conclusion it draws is grim, painting
the real world as a cold, uncaring, often unfair place, but there’s a strange sense
of hope running through it; both Max and Chloe truly mature as people in their realisation
of this (depending on if you picked what feels like the one canonical ending here). All in it was a neatly told story that used
its heightened sense of reality and the mechanics that resulted to explore two surprisingly
well-rounded characters. Now though, we have Before the Storm, a recently
concluded prequel series with a new team, doing away with the supernatural elements
of the series to tell a more grounded story as they see it. Aaaaand… Chloe is giving the middle finger to a fence. Aaaand she apparently just won a conversation
with a fully-grown adult by responding to “isn’t it past your bedtime” with “isn’t
it past yours.” Because apparently that’s the main mechanic
now. Oh boy, we’re in for a rough one here. In all seriousness, my time with Before the
Storm left me genuinely confused. Why does this exist? Why did it need to be episodic? Why is this character doing what they’re
doing? In what world do human beings act like this? Moreover, why am I the only one who seems
to think this way? For every thinkpiece praising the character
of Rachel and her believable relationship with Chloe, I’d see barely more than a plot
device. For every review praising Chloe’s acerbic
wit and acute perception of the world around her, I would see mechanics that seemed to
celebrate the worst aspects of her character. For every commentator commending the game’s
slower pace and eschewing a more typical plot to focus on Chloe’s day-to-day, I’d see
the complete polar opposite; a bafflingly rushed storyline reliant on contrivances,
conveniences and underwritten characters. In short, I may be in the minority here, and
I genuinely hate to rag on people’s work like this, but I just do not understand the
praise I keep seeing this game receive. While it’s clear that the new team behind
this game had a great deal of respect for the source material, that just didn’t seem
to translate into anywhere near as human a tale as they wanted to deliver. It feels like a slave to its influences; at
once trying to say “me too” and simultaneously completely missing the point of whatever it’s
referencing, throwing out what ounce of subtlety the original had. For one, while Life is Strange would often,
perhaps smugly, nod its head towards its inspirations, Before the Storm all but smacks its head into
a goddamn mirror; going full-blown Fire Walk With Me in its attempts to characterise the
Laura Palmer stand-in of Rachel Amber; the girl whose abduction acted as a vehicle for
the larger plot of Life is Strange. And while this isn’t something that seemed
necessary given how cohesive the original felt as a package, I had no issue with a different
team taking a stab at something ambitious like this. It’s just that the relationship between
Chloe and Rachel never feels as convincing as that of Chloe and Max and that’s partially
because of the inconsistent nature of Rachel’s characterisation. The game more than invites the Laura Palmer
comparison, but where the darker side of Lynch’s troubled heroine originated from the horrendous
abuse she suffered, Rachel Amber… just kinda happens to be a dick. She’s a dick long before she discovers her
father’s apparent infidelity towards the end of episode 1; the kind of entitled asshole
to get pissy at you because she lost something as insignificant as a quarter. The game hints at the idea that Rachel isn’t
someone to be admired, as well as the idea of performing one’s identity for the sake
of others, but never really follows through on it, because the next minute we’ll be
expected to take whatever heartfelt realisation about her feelings for Chloe that follows
at face value. Nothing is ever “realised” about Rachel
across the three episodes; hell, they even hint at some kind of supernatural shenanigans
at play as she controls the wind with her screams… and then just drops it. She just is what she is; all things to all
people. The universally popular timid rational straight-A
student who is talented at everything and stays on the straight and narrow but is also
a maverick with a hair trigger who loves punk rock and isn’t afraid to fight and ditch
school, turning on people in a moment’s notice when the plot decides it needs something
else to happen. Far from being a likeable character, she’s
an asshole at best and her lack of consistency makes her as much of a plot device as she
was in the first game. She sends you on missions, telling you to
gather this or that for her, clumsily reminding you that this is an adventure game after all. And honestly, that was probably the point;
it’s clear the focus is Chloe here. Exploring her character dealing with loss
at its purest; not only having lost her dad but having been abandoned by her friends too. We, very occasionally, get to see her in moments
of real vulnerability, peering into her mind to witness her nightmares; those rare surreal
scenarios where she just shuts up because she’s scared and doesn’t understand the
situation. She can’t sleep without recounting graphic
images of her father’s horrific death. In these sequences, the game says more with
less, making for some of the best moments across the entirety of Life is Strange; telling
us more about Chloe’s character than her pages of edgy teen comebacks ever could, even
if these moments are unfortunately short lived See, it’s just a shame that mechanically,
the game seems hellbent on saying less with more; taking those edgy teen comebacks, no
one’s favourite part about the original, and turning them into the game’s defining
mechanic. I think it’s maybe the worst move the series
could have made. At a few seemingly random points in the story,
you’ll get the opportunity to enter into a kind of insult-‘em-up where, by picking
vague lines based on your opponent’s last verbal attack, you respond with such scathing
takedowns as “you’re stupid” and “you’re an asshole” or “doing homework is dumb.” There was potential for this to have a similar
effect to that of Max’s time travel; forcing Chloe to confront the futility of her petulance. Episode 2, for example, sees you ostensibly
“win” the game of conversation, successfully defending Rachel and, as a result, you get
expelled. It could have acted as a clever bait-and-switch;
your idea of succeeding at a game gradually being replaced with the notion that you’re
doing more harm than good; a mechanic conveying Chloe’s narrative arc in the same way it
did Max’s. Unfortunately, the backtalk mechanic is used
so haphazardly (from playing a game of D&D to stealing a bottle of wine from the world’s
daftest couple), that it’s difficult for the system to tell a coherent story. It more often than not puts Chloe on some
kind of pedestal, celebrating what the writers clearly see as her razor-sharp wit as she
takes down bullies and get what she wants. It’s just that when you place that outcome
against what she’s actually saying to these people, the writer’s image of Chloe as some
badass wordsmith and what we’re presented with feel like two very different things. It’s the worst of all worlds; a throwaway
mechanic that says almost nothing about our main character, while simultaneously painting
her in the worst possible light. That’s not even to mention the game’s
main collectable, the graffiti. Where Max would take photos, Chloe goes full
punk rawk, scrawling horrendously unfunny weed jokes on her wall at the best of times,
and at worst being outrageously, uncannily stupid; like when she infiltrates a certain,
highly important person’s office in which it would do her well to keep a low profile,
but she just can’t help but write “SECRET BOOZE STASH” on someone’s furniture when
she spots a wine bottle for some reason. It’s not a “this action will have consequences
because it’s perhaps the most confusingly daft thing you could possibly do here” moment;
it’s just another collectable, a trophy, a reward, one example of many of your interactions
failing to line up with the kind of humanity the writers were apparently striving for;
and when you try to tell a human story and fail, it’s often the little details that
stick out the most. In Life is Strange, the writers clearly viewed
it as weird that Max would just go around looking at other people’s stuff in video
game fashion, and so they’d have characters call her out for being nosy; it was written
in as a character trait. A small detail, sure, but one that makes the
story better for having not been overlooked. As groan-worthy and out of leftfield as it
may initially seem, Max suddenly cutting to how she thinks Final Fantasy: Spirits Within
is an underrated movie when she’s trying to find secrets in Victoria’s room at least
makes sense as a stream of consciousness because, crucially, she’s thinking it; she isn’t
saying it. As Virginia Woolf would tell you, thoughts
are weird and tangential; our minds go to unexpected places in tense situations. It’s when those internal ponderings turn
external, as they so often do in Before the Storm, that it becomes a problem. Like when Chloe snarkily shouts at some animals
as opposed to just shooing them away, or when her backtalk mechanic has her referring to
her “well of witticisms” that some people might think about in an argument but no one
would actually say, or when she writes SECRET BOOZE STASH in a situation where it would
only put her in danger, or when she climbs a fence and gives it the middle finger. Like, who’s going to see that? Who is that for? Yes, it tells us that Chloe is an abrasive,
edgy teen, but we knew that already. We already had a whole game tell us that. BtS was in a unique position to more fully
explore Chloe’s psyche as she deals with loss and letting her guard down for someone
who seems like she doesn’t care, but little moments like this only serve to detract from
the game’s attempts at sincerity; making its characters feel lifeless, artificial,
underwritten. But it’s not just a problem suffered by
the game’s characters; the larger plot’s attempts to pull at the heartstrings fall
flat because of what I see to be glaring inconsistencies. My friend Cagey Videos wrote what is still
a great piece about how this game, for him, nailed the feeling of abandonment that so
often comes with loss, because in his eyes, the game doesn’t really have much of a plot;
instead choosing to focus on Chloe just existing, being left to her own devices as she is forced
to deal with her pain alone. And while I appreciate that sentiment, I would
argue that the game actually does the opposite; occasionally encouraging you to soak in the
atmosphere, before remembering that it has to get these characters to certain points
in the story within a fairly short space of time, resulting in, without hyperbole, one
of the most rushed stories I’ve come across in quite some time. It’s really odd; feeling like very little
actually happens because it’s on such a relatively small scale, but that “very little”
also seems to happen at a whiplash-inducing pace. For example, and here’s where we’ll get
into spoilers, take something as seemingly innocuous as the school play in episode 2. Victoria will try to drug Rachel beforehand
out of jealousy but Chloe finds out, and instead of, ya know, informing someone, the pair think
it’ll be fun to force Victoria to drug herself so that she collapses in front of the play’s
director and instead of, ya know, postponing the play and informing someone, Rachel comes
up with the genius solution of having Chloe take over Victoria’s role even though she’s
expelled and hasn’t so much as glanced at the script because “heehee let’s put the
punk kid in a funny costume,” all while Victoria is passed out on the ground in front
of them. Leading you to take to the stage and charmingly
blag your way through the lines to rapturous applause. Even in normal circumstances this plot thread
would be considered dramatically convenient at best while perhaps painting every character
as a fucking sociopath at worst, but then you also remember that this whole encounter
takes place over the course of a mere fifteen minutes. Questions of “why is this happening” were
being constantly interrupted by questions of “why is this happening.” I keep coming back to it but the writers said
they wanted to craft a more human story here and, well, human beings don’t act like this. If this was the one time this happened, though,
it’d maybe be understandable as a means of getting characters from situation A to
emotional realisation B. But it’s far from the only example, and what’s more, it’s
far from the worst. That would come later, in episode 3 (and buckle
up kids because this one gets wild). This is where Rachel tells you to infiltrate
her dad (the DA’s) office in the Amber household in order to get information, so you break
in and find a burner phone seemingly mid-text conversation with the friend of your drug
dealer who it turns out is working with Rachel’s dad to keep a certain someone quiet but he
might be going too far so you adopt the persona of Rachel’s dad to find out where this dude
is before uncovering the fact her dad is being blackmailed and so you end up playing a game
of “burn the correct, conveniently-placed evidence” and “pin the tail on the snitch”
oh but not before the aforementioned SECRET BOOZE STASH bit jesus christ and you find
out where he is but before you can go… Eliot shows up (a character so nothing-y and
unimportant I genuinely forgot he existed) after following you from the hospital and
just waltzing into the house of a person he doesn’t know before suddenly exploding into
a controlling asshole demanding “you need to pay attention to ME now” and locking
you in before you try to call the cops in maybe the game’s dumbest backtalk sequence
which is of no consequence because you escape anyway, all the while I’m thinking “who
the hell is this prick,” before you head back to where it all began, the old mill,
to conveniently find the drug dealer friend about to give Rachel’s mum an overdose of
heroin but you get beaten up but then Frank shows up and they start fighting but things
fade to black and then you wake up and find the mum sitting in a chair and she’s apparently
fine and solemnly tells you that… Frank killed that other guy I guess and that
“Rachel can’t know the truth” even though the whole reason any of this happened was
because the mum came back looking for her and the dad was a sack of shit about the whole
thing and for a minute you think “oh maybe they’re going for a Black Lodge surrealist-type
deal (just, ya know, without the dazzling visual metaphors) where things aren’t quite
what they seem because none of this makes any fucking sense” but then no because the
ending shows that Frank did kill his pal and the game just… didn’t animate it or something? All of this feels like it should occur over
the course of an entire episode, hell maybe two given the various threads and conspiracies
being uncovered and characters at play here. But no, this all happens in the last 40 minutes
of the game. My mouth was genuinely agape at what I was
witnessing. Combined with the almost universally awful
voice acting (besides the new actor for Chloe who does a genuinely fantastic job), these
events brought to mind films like The Room they were so farfetched. Sure, the original Life is Strange rather
quickly introduced Max’s time travel powers, but was surprisingly measured in establishing
what they said about her character in episode one, before exploring the larger context of
the town in episode 2, then focusing on the murder mystery in 3 and 4, then dealing with
the repercussions of the twist in 5; it justified its delivery as an episodic story because
every episode had a distinct purpose. Before the Storm, on the other hand, feels
like it adopted that structure because that’s what the original did, then somewhere down
the line forgot that it only had a certain number of episodes with which to tell its
story so had to cram everything in at the last second. And the thing is, I can imagine what they
were likely going for. The whole scenario with the play gets Chloe
and Rachel to the point at which they truly figure out the nature of their relationship. The events of episode 3 get us to the final
dilemma: how does Chloe, a person who knows more about loss than anyone, navigate killing
the image of someone close to Rachel? These should be relatable, human moments and
I truly believe the writers’ intentions were genuine, but because these brief occurrences
arise from such wildly expedited and convenient events, it all kept me coming back to the
question: “in what world do human beings act like this?” The original Life is Strange had its fair
share of convenient moments too, for sure; where Max’s powers would just so happen
to give way at a point where it would provide the most tension. The difference is that Life is Strange was
a game steeped in the supernatural; things could be a little absurd at times because
at almost every point, the state of the universe as we knew it was being brought into question. Perhaps ironically, the heightened reality
of Life is Strange, establishing the baseline of “things will be weird,” is precisely
what allowed it to cut more directly to the core of the characters; examining more closely
how they deal with these occurrences. The writers of Before the Storm, however,
place their story firmly in the realms of reality. And when you make that claim, the standards
to which the resulting story will be held should be higher as a result. I genuinely don’t like making videos like
this; it was the same with the MGS video. Even what you might think of as bad games
often take a lot of work and it doesn’t feel good shitting on that. I also understand that I’m in the minority
here; it’s the kind of story that rarely gets told in games and perhaps people want
to celebrate that fact alone, but I don’t think that means we should settle for that
kind of story being told badly. And sure, there are a few moments here that
rank up there as the best things Life is Strange has ever done; it just so happens that they
always get drowned out by what immediately follows. A useless verbal tug-of-war here, a casual
drugging there; all events carrying about as much humanity and emotional weight as giving
the middle finger to a goddamn fence. So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Before the
Storm. Like I say, I might be in the minority here,
but hey, ya gotta be honest about how ya feel. If you’re into what I’m doing here, why
not hit subscribe, click the little bell thingy and check out the podcast in the description. If you feel like going the extra mile, however,
you can always support the show directly via Patreon like these wonderful folks currently
on the screen. I have a lot of plans for how I can bring
more content to the channel in 2018 and that simply would not be possible without your
generous pledges. In particular I’d like to thank Mark B.
Writing, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk, Spike Jones, Vasili Hrebinka, Chris Wright, Dr.
Motorcycle, Harry Fuertes, Ham Migas, Travis Bennett, Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom
Nash, Shardfire, Filip Lange, Rob, Rusty Shackleford, Ana Pimentel, Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson,
Iago Foxo Bouza, Justins Holderness, Biggy Smith, Peter, Christian Konemann, Nico Bleackley,
Cameltraffic, Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang. And with that I’m Hamish Black and this
has been Writing on Games. Thank you very much for watching and I’ll
see you next time.
