There are a few convenient parallels between Dark Room and Inside Out, my two cultural outlays from this past week. Both address the inner monologues and daily travails of young women with almost remarkable success. Both are sharply written, addressing weighty concepts with a funny, humane edge. And both are completely emotionally devastating. I have been running from writing this review.
Episode Four kicks off shortly after last time’s dramatic denouement, as we’re spared the details of the characters’ awkward reunion and are subjected to a brief slice of this alternate reality. Following an emotional climax, the action quickly zips back to the more familiar timeline, as the broad strokes of the plot and its underlying mysteries are painstakingly set up and revealed.
The opening exchanges are nothing short of masterful. The subject matter, a distinct worry when it was revealed as the twist in Chaos Theory, is deftly and sensitively handled. Both voice actors shine, but Ashly Burch’s Chloe is a particularly delicate iteration on a character who has frequently – though never catastrophically – lapsed into cliché. Improvements to the script have clearly helped: barring one lazy call back to Chloe’s signature catchphrase, the patter here is believable. That is no small compliment for any game, and it bears repeating that for all the criticism of voice acting and familiar suppositions on how teens are supposed to talk, the timing and flow of conversation in Life is Strange has always felt natural.
If this feels like a finely crafted vignette, a literal snapshot in time, what follows is less defined. The opening section is neatly concluded but quickly discarded in favour of a breathless couple of hours, propelling the plot towards next episode’s finale. Any work that deals with time travel will have its restrictions, but there’s a certain irony in how strictly they are imposed here. The disturbing footnotes in Max’s journeys through time are as compelling as the Twin Peaks inspired mystery, but the characters, increasingly well-developed to this point, begin to get slightly lost in their story.
Max manages to write diary entries between all the action, but has no real chance to consider the consequences of her powers, and her conversations with Chloe are largely limited to their single-minded detective work. She opts not to share the alternate timeline with the ‘true’ Chloe in one line of internal dialogue, and makes a similar judgement to rewind when a meeting with Frank goes awry. Bioshock Infinite stands as a lesson on the difficulties of wringing a coherent narrative from multiverse theory, but there was fertile ground to explore here, and scant sign that it will be revisited. The optional ‘sit down’ sections where she reflects on recent developments go some way to addressing this, and remain a clever solution, but the idea that universes might now exist without Max should not be so easily discarded in a drama predicated on time travel.
In hindsight, the problem is recurrent. In my review of Episode Three: Chaos Theory I didn’t mention the titular concept at all, because the game gave me no reason to. An idea which should thematically slot right into the story and inform its twists and turns is glibly introduced over the course of one undercooked car ride. Compare it to something like Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, and Life is Strange is a world apart: a work of similar length which is driven by the science and emotion behind the idea, where the characters’ ruminations educate the audience and feed into the arc of their own drama.
The game clearly owes a debt to TV ‘dramadies’ and 80s coming of age films, and this doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it’s the very ambition to recreate that kind of story in an interactive, contemporary setting which makes the game so admirable. But it’s a mistake to assume that their structure is immediately transferable. I compared Life is Strange to television in my earlier reviews, but games have always been more like theatre than TV or films: a physical experience, with no director telling you where to look, and where each performance and viewer’s experience differs. Mistakes are to be expected in a game as genuinely pioneering as this one, but the approach to story and character feels muddled here. There is still time to rectify that.
More debatable are the slips in gameplay. Having made the illogical detour to the pool in Chaos Theory, you are again hamstrung by another bit of amateur detective work: a suspect catches you leaving their property, a confrontation ensues, and you have no opportunity to rewind through it. Suddenly the mechanics are unhelpful to the story they wish to tell and the characters they want you to see, and so they are removed. Equally frustrating is a subsequent puzzle section, which has you tediously sifting through the evidence you’ve gathered and aligning bits of paper with similar dates and nicknames. There is one decent brainteaser here, a bit of abstraction with phone pin codes, but it’s undermined by the number of other false numbers that you have to manually key in. Another puzzle involving a door key pad stumped me, but gets some points for creativity, and precedes the best and boldest section in the game. Episode Four does not lack for ambition, and each laboured plot device tends to have a memorable and hard-hitting pay-off.
What it gains in plot, it loses in choice. Despite clocking in at well over three hours, Dark Room offers the fewest major decisions yet. When the character beats land, however, the results are suitably galling. The first choice is among the hardest I’ve ever made in a game, and as the clues build up in the search for Rachel Amber, the game hurtles along with an emotionally fuelled abandon that seems destined for a car crash finish. As if acknowledging the lack of meditation on its prior tragedies, the game makes a point of highlighting the growing anguish on Max’s face, and Chloe’s frustrations as we try to play things straight with the Blackwell students. What ultimately transpires feels preventable to say the least, and to say nothing of the conclusion, it raises serious questions over the game’s previously infallible web of choices. I hope I’m wrong, but the consequences of many key decisions now look to have been unfairly weighted towards red herrings, with no logical reason to have picked the choices that might now help.
For all that, Dark Room raked at my heartstrings more mercilessly than any game I can remember, and has spent a week implanted in my mind. It's a dizzying barrage of big moments, and whatever you think of the ending, it is likely to shock and sicken you as much as the prospect of what’s to come. If I’ve been critical of the structure and focus here it’s only because the series offers and has promised more than any adventure game I’ve ever played. I make no small secret of my admiration for it; nor for the sheer balls it takes for a near-bankrupt developer to stake themselves on its success.
Most developers take a mechanic, an idea of how a game will play – it’s about time travel, you can rewind and do things with foresight, weighing the impact of your decisions – and tack a story onto it. For better or worse, DONTNOD have evidently written a story and made it into a game. It remains to be seen whether it survives as a wonderful curio or a genuine classic.
Missed the first three reviews? You can find them on our Life is Strange page!
“Nailbiter”