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.