Below this paragraph is where I’m going to unpack my own personal feelings about the ending. There’s no way I can force a reader to willingly keep themselves innocent of spoilers, and there are some who often enjoy knowing the plot to a game before playing. If you’ve been reading this unaware of Life is Strange, content to simply read reviews and judge merit based on score, I’d ask you stop at this point. That critique holds up, right to the very end, in a final moment that will override everything that has happened to this point. In my first entry of write-ups for this game, I noted that I loved the fact that choices felt concrete and real, and that there was rarely a black-white-decision. There is no true perfect ending in Life is Strange, as I should’ve known going into this, and in some place in my gut I did. “Polarized” serves its name well - it is a polarizing finale, sure to strike a controversial chord and perhaps leave a note on tongue that will range from sour to bittersweet at best. The talent for Max and Chloe especially hit their peaks in this episode, but the animation kills the emotional accomplishment they achieved. Lip synching has never managed to work quite right in Life is Strange, and the robotic, blank slates of faces fail to carry the enormous weight hefted by the voice acting talent. It feels like all of Life is Strange came down to a single choice in the end – but we’ll return to that in a moment.įor all the emotion that the game brings in those moments and later, problems persisted with the animations as well. From the beginning, Max is held up to a lofty goal and idolized, tossed around and leered at by the lens, and so the player often feels the same, regardless of choices made. This is a largely introspective episode, meant to turn the lens on the player. The human moments of previous episodes are few and far between, savor one climactic conversation with Chloe at the midway point. Yet when those sequences falter, the story sequences manage to find moments of nigh-pure perfection. Where episode four nailed puzzles with the mix of linking clues and interrogating for answers, episode five returns to previous notions of gameplay - tedious moments of trial and error, forcing you to time out perfect stealth movements in order to progress. The repetition rears its head ugliest in the gameplay segments, where even cheeky nods to bottles don’t substitute for rehashing the lesser parts of previous episodes. Scenes repeat themselves ad nauseum in front of Max, haunting her, never letting her leave the prison she’s created with her abuse of time and space. Max constantly returns to the beginning, a da capo played over and over. If you’re familiar with really any time-travel tragedy, you’ll see some mirror of that here. Events are logical enough, without being too cut-and-dry or simple, and a lot is explained away as “time travel.” The key component of this episode is repetition, using alternating lengths of staccato hits with legato moments, rarely setting a pace or letting you catch your breath for long. In many ways, “Polarized” stretches to do just that, without going far enough to completely break anything. The storm has finally arrived in Arcadia Bay. The task of episode five was to make them fit, neatly and orderly, and to finally solve the last remaining disaster - the storm slowly approaching Arcadia Bay. We knew who the killer of Arcadia Bay was, we knew what happened to Rachel Amber, and we knew where (most) of the pieces fit into the puzzle. There’s a lot to unpack here, but I found that episode five, “Polarized,” managed to encapsulate every high and low of the series in a single stanza.Īfter the events of episode four, we had a lot of answers finally laid out. That choice rippled out into me playing one of the most moving experiences I’ve experienced in gaming to date. I remember eyeing it on the PSN Store the day it came out, and with nothing else to review, I downloaded it right there and sent a note to my editor-in-chief that I was going to do a “review on a random PS4 indie game.” We’ve finally come to the last installment of Life is Strange, a short episodic game that took the year by storm. If you’d like to read the rest of our articles, you can check out our most recent impressions here. This is part five of our coverage of Life is Strange, and the review score reflects the series as a whole.
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