A couple of hours and several frustrating misdirects into Life is Strange’s finale - tellingly titled Polarised - and I’m a bit worried. A customary but ill-timed sag in the writing and a lack of agency have taken the sheen off episode four’s great reveal, and the plot has only plodded from here.
Despite everything patently not being solved, I’m stuck at a jolly champagne reception in the game equivalent of a frothy anime filler episode. A few scenes later, and I’m in a hallway where everyone’s walking backwards and giant squirrels are peering through the windows. Life is Strange concludes much as it began, then: a melange of bold ideas and rough edges that’s as inspired as it is inconsistent.
This is a review of the final episode, not the whole game; there will be spoilers. Click here to read all of our individual reviews!
This last and longest episode picks up where Dark Room left off, as Max is held captive by our recently revealed antagonist. The silent stills and slow pans across the cameras, syringes and restraints are arresting, yet what follows lacks both the courage of writer Christian Divine’s convictions and his fleeting capability for decent dialogue. The newly unmasked villain seems to have been imported straight from Scooby Doo, launching into a series of cackling, rambling monologues. For a game that’s this preoccupied with cramming in pop culture references, The Incredibles is a notable omission.
In the end the “how’s” are redundant, and the “why’s” are fleeting. If the polarised nature of this character is a deliberate nod, it’s also a tragic misstep: at no point did I find their motivations or duplicity believable. There are a few neat moments here, but shockingly little tension, such is your detachment from the action and the absence of any real threat. Sequences which should by nature be deeply disturbing and constantly perilous become trudging and linear, as you wait for breaks in the cutscenes to click on a lone object.
The presence of another victim initially promises a proper fight and problem solving, until the photo rewind mechanic, already convenient to the point of cheating, eschews it for a dramatic retcon. Having worked so well as the climax to episode three, this is liberally deployed throughout the finale with the intent of saving time. A better idea might have been to cut half an hour out of the script.
There’s a good thirty to forty minutes here that feels entirely extraneous, playing for time while it finds somewhere else to shepherd you. Having bungled your way through several time loops and threatened to go somewhere brave and interesting – plane? Storm? – the narrative seems to just glitch out.
I’m really hurting at this point. The game’s been a hard sell from the start, and I’ve resolutely stood by it, but I know the power of an underwhelming finale. You see it all too often in films, where an action packed final 15 minutes can save a poor whole; and in games, where a disastrous last segment killed the otherwise excellent Mass Effect 3. I didn’t want the ending to sully an otherwise worthwhile experience.
It’s as if the game senses it. Gradually, point by point and line by line, things start to fall into place. Chloe returns to the picture, and you get a first real choice to make. A scene out in the storm doesn’t hold anything back, fully illustrating the destruction even as a few dolts wander about in hoodies and t-shirts. You get some resolution from minor characters. Critically, you finally get to unload all the secrets you’ve been keeping to Chloe, if you choose to. Having queried Max’s chipper attitude in the face of multiple, grisly deaths last episode, this is both cathartic and superbly acted.
Things settle into a comfortable rhythm, but the narrative is never more than perfunctory. There are small moments of satisfaction in the intense personal dialogues, but the game struggles to tie up its larger plot threads, instead meandering around broad explanations. Chaos theory is invoked again with no effort to explain what it is or how it applies; there’s an expectation that one change a week ago will yield perfect results, and incredulity when – spoiler – it doesn’t. There are no more shocking twists, though Life is Strange has set the bar supremely high.
And it makes a degree of sense. The many great characters built up from episode one’s stereotypes are sidelined; this is very much Max’s adventure. So it falls to the game’s other key strength, its audacity, to save the story of Arcadia Bay. It does that by breaking time.
The resulting sequence is a joy. The apparent mixture of time and memory owes more than a little to DONTNOD’s previous game Remember Me, with Psychonauts’ zaniness and Spec Ops: The Line’s crushing self-doubt lurking in the background. As the game finally challenges Max’s attitude and decisions to date, we’re treated to a procession of visual art; an effortless jaunt from stealth sections and set pieces to heady introspection and smart meta-commentary. Each new scene had me gasping in wonder at the sheer balls of it.
As the game swaggers to its foregone conclusion, you’re reminded of all the other times Life is Strange has shocked and surprised you, and with the ending, how many times it’s had you welling up. And you realise how a game that fails to do so much can still contend for your game of the year.
“Satisfying”