REVIEW

Life is Strange Episode 5: Polarized Review

by Ian Stokes, November 1st, 2015

Endings are tricky business in games, especially when you’ve given the player the power of choice throughout the course of the story. Mass Effect 3 showed us what happens when you balls it up big time, garnering a significant backlash from the fans who felt cheated that all of their choices meant bugger all at the game’s finale. Life is Strange has sidestepped pissing off its fanbase, managing only to bore them with the ending instead.

ENORMOUS SPOILER WARNING: There will be spoilers for both this, and previous episodes. You have been warned.

At around the end of Episode 2 you will have had a pretty good idea of where the story was going or at least I know I did. I had been merrily bouncing along under the impression that it was just a red herring though, and DONTNOD would pull something special out of their arses but alas. It barely even deserves spoiler warnings because it’s so blindingly obvious, but if you don’t want to know the scores, look away now.

Max saving Chloe has pissed off the universe, and Max has to sacrifice Chloe to fix everything. I told you it was predictable. Slightly less predictable is the alternate ending that you can choose, where Max chooses to save Chloe at the cost of killing everyone else in Arcadia Bay. Not predictable, but entirely stupid. As an aside, I choose the stupid ending just to rebel against the predictable ending and it seems I wasn’t alone as the split between endings was around 50/50 in the final stats, though I’m not sure how many people had my reasoning and how many others just couldn’t stand to let their shipping fan fiction go to waste.

However I didn’t let the ending to Mass Effect 3 ruin it for me, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting this ruin what has been a poster child for doing Telltale Game’s thing better than them, so let’s ignore that and talk more about the rest of the episode.

Polarized is more linear than the previous episodes, which is to be expected given that we’re looking to wrap up loose story threads, not split open a hundred more. The action kicks off in the dark room, with Max awakening to find herself in a creepy photoshoot for the fantastically nutty Mr Jefferson. The scene is particularly well acted, with Max suitably terrified and Jefferson rocking the ‘you just don’t see the brilliance of my work’ vibe that all the serial killers are going for this season. Max escapes into the past using her photo diary and attempts to alter the course of history to save herself, Chloe and the whole town as the storm from her visions finally becomes a reality.

All this back and forth between the past and present leads to some interesting and varied environments to explore, as Max attempts to fix the mess her powers have created. The storm ravaged Arcadia Bay is counter balanced by a beautiful art gallery in San Francisco and there is even a lengthy dream sequence which takes Max into some very surreal environments.

The gameplay is pretty standard fare, DONTNOD can hardly be expected to be adding game changing mechanics at this late stage in the story but the usual mix of conversation trees and time travel puzzles do the job. There is an out of the blue stealth section during the dream sequence, but it manages to be as unobnoxious as possible, all you can ask of an out of nowhere stealth section really.

The story wraps itself up, dealing with Jefferson’s subplot before moving onto the meatier problem of time travel breaking the universe. Naturally the plot has more holes in it than a cheese grater, but there hasn’t been a time travel story told that holds up upon close inspection, so I’m willing to let it slide. The major problem with Polarized is the ending. Not the fact that it’s boring and predictable mind you, but more than it doesn’t really explain anything.

Me: Why did Max get time travel powers?

Life is Strange: *shrugs* “the universe gave her them”.

Me: Why did it do that?

Life is Strange: “So that she can learn that she can’t use them.

Me: Wait what, that’s stupid.

Life is Strange: You just don’t get it man.

A lot of the potential consequences of your previous actions swing back around to either cushion or kick your arse in the finale too, but whether a decision helped or hurt you is entirely random. Did you warn the old lady about the storm? If so then she leaves town and lives. Did you warn Victoria about Nathan? If so then fuck you Jefferson kills her.

Polarized isn’t a bad episode by any means and if you’ve been playing through the series than you’ll find a fairly satisfying finale here, even if the ending was chosen from the Dulux ‘best of beige’ range. Life is Strange was about the journey, not the destination and it has been a thoroughly enjoyable journey, even if the destination turned out to be Thorpe Park instead of Alton Towers.