Life is Strange Episode 3: Chaos Theory

If you’re unaware by now, Life Is Strange is an adventure game which deals with time travel, and learning to live with the consequences of your actions.

The further this gets into the five episodes, the harder it becomes to talk about without spoiling it. Say you don’t mind spoilers — the spoilers I write may not even apply to your playthrough! So I apologise in advance for my vagueness in places.

Explosive action! Actually, no, this is the single instance...

Day three in the life of Max Caulfield, college/high school student at the prestigious Blackwell Academy, starts during the night of day two. What’s that? No, I still don’t know whether Blackwell is a high school or a college. The characters don’t even know, with one calling it a college and another later on calling it high school. Anyway, after the events of Episode 2: Out of Time, Max and her best friend Chloe decide to break into the principal’s office to find out whether he has a paper trail connecting events.

What happened to Kate at the Vortex Club party, what the deal with Nathan Prescott is, and the missing girl Rachel Amber, must all be connected as far as the friends can see. Using past movie-watching knowledge, we know of course they are related. But I’ve no idea how these two made that leap…

I had to wait 10 minutes to get a screegrab without all the underwear in.

The break-in leads to the swimming pool, which leads to them spending the night together and a kiss. I’m not even kidding. After some vague innuendo that hinted Chloe might swing both ways in the second episode, it was strange to have it almost shoved down our throats in this one. As if the writers are trying to be progressively more shocking in each episode.

Now kiss! Oh, they did.

Despite the opening taking place at Blackwell with big events, the majority of the episode is off-campus and deals with Chloe in more depth than before; her father’s death when she was a child really screwed her up.

Speaking of screwed up, let’s see if any of the problems from Episode 1: Chrysalis have not been addressed! Does Max still shake her photos? Yes. Are the lipflaps distractingly not synced? I recorded the horrid lipflaps. Is the writing pretty bad? Hella yeah!

"College, high school, I don't care they just pay me!"

These faults aside, I did enjoy Episode 3: Chaos Theory. The bond between Max and Chloe does feel stronger by the end of the episode as they continue to go through their trials and tribulations, which is pretty much the point of this one. There is very little interaction with other characters, after all, and most of them are actually in relation to Chloe.

I was a little upset to find the puzzles were pretty easy. It’s usually trial and error, but there was only really one I got almost stuck on for any length of time. There were more fetch quests in this episode, too. Get these things, go back. And as each area is pretty small, it doesn’t take much effort to finish them.

Still doesn't narrow it down to either high school or college...

As with the previous two episodes, this will last about two hours, which includes several long sequences of mellow music and watching characters laze around. There are a couple of exciting parts, but it’s a pretty easygoing playthrough.

I am really looking forward to how my choices will affect Episode 4, as it’s been fun hearing things referenced and remembering the choices I made in Episode 1, such as the petition signing. I initially feared that the dialogue for different choices might sound odd, but the audio mixing is very smooth and seamless. It must have been exhausting for the actors to record the same thing a dozen times just to reference different choices. Even though Hannah Telle, Max’s voice actor, can sound bland with her almost forcing out cuss words, the rest of the voice acting is very well done.

Finally, Max exhibits a new power in Chaos Theory. The controls for it are quite vague, and it’s only used once, but it’s certainly an interesting addition to her repertoire. I hate to give too much away, but I don’t feel right leaving it at that. She can time travel backwards more than just a few minutes, or somehow into a tornado-ridden future, if she is holding a photo. Max can travel back to the moment the image was taken and interact with the environment. It will be very interesting to see how it is used in the coming episodes, as well as exploring the mysteries of the snow, eclipse and dying animals.

DONTNOD: "How will they know it's the past? Oh! Wired controllers!"