I pegged the Mr Jefferson thing since the first scene I watched the original quick look before even playing the game. When he said some along the lines of "I can trap you in a corner and take a picture of you" in his lecture. I was "oh so you are saying you WILL trap me and a corner and take a picture of me". Good to know. Also when I played in the first episode when you leave the school a girl you talk to tells you Rachel posed for Mr. Jefferson and that they were sleeping together. So I was yup he did it. Then the game proceeded to play off that he was just a cool innocent art guy and that there was nothing to see here forget all that foreshadowing upfront. Then I was 1000% sure would have worked better if they just kept making him more and more suspicious that would have probably thrown me off.

As for the ending. Oh is this a time travel plot? The correct answer is going to be not using time travel at all and letting destiny happen. (99.9%) Oh the random person you saved with your first act of time travel was your lost best friend and you are immediately guilt tripped for leaving your friend as her life turned to immediate shit. (100%) Oh and we are going to re connected and be best time cop buds. (105%) Myriad Final Destination attempts on said friend life. (110%). Alternate timeline line where attempting to help your friend leads to her death(200%) In my game now a romantic subplot between the friend. Now they are lying it on way too thick here. They might not actually do it (99%)

As for the other ending I was fairly sure they would give us that choice as this is a game about choice and my thoughts on that ending from another thread are below.

I chose to save Chloe because what's one town for the OTP. Also the way the game has it set up it seems like it operates on parallel realities. What with the entirety of episode 3, two moons, and the talk with other Max. So even if you left that and many timelines are still screwed. Basically you are not correcting the timeline but instead choosing what timeline Max' or the Max you play lives in. For my Max she would rather be in a world with Chloe rather then the "correct" world with Arcadia Bay.

I guessed neither in that I didn't guess that it would be a choice. I assumed the game would force you to sacrifice Chloe and was pleasantly surprised when it gave me the option to be completely selfish.

As soon as Max took the photo in the bathroom I assumed it would be vital. Once it became clear that Chloe dying was a recurring theme in the episode I understood that the entire thing on Max having to let Chloe die. It's right there from the start. The writing is on the wall. 'Just gotta let go'. The fact that the choice is even there and that people are willing to pick it tells me, at least, that they did well with the Chloe/Max relationship side of the narrative. I knew what I 'had' to do. I didn't know if I 'wanted' to do it.

I didn't piece together the Jefferson thing right away but I knew Nathan wasn't responsible for all of it because the guy had money but was lacking in sense.

I didn't guess the killer and I thought the final choose would involve Max killing herself to save the rest of the world.

I didn't really have a firm guess on the killer (I just knew it was wasn't David and Nathan), and didn't have another guess for the final outcome, so "Nope" on both accounts.

I didn't guess the choice nor who the killer was, but did I guess what would most likely happen? Yes. I mean, I assumed from the get-go of the first episode when you see her use the time ability that it'd probably end up where it started (if you choose that). As for the killer, I don't see why anyone would guess who it was, or that there was even a killer until it reveals what happened to Rachel (from what I remember), unless you really disliked the teacher from the start and just felt he was off. I didn't think much of him, and thought he was somewhat if a non-important character, which is why I thought it was weird he was in choices in the chapter of saving Kate from jumping off the building. It did cover some of that though in the last chapter (where he mentions who you picked, as I chose Nathan). Perhaps I should have thought he had a more important role, but early on, it just came off as awkward that he was showed any time since all he was cracked up to be throughout was an art teacher, so why would I suspect him of anything? Maybe that's the point, though I can't say it's an impressive way to surprise someone. I didn't guess it was going to be going back in time and you had to choose to kill Chloe to make things right, I just suspected that everything you do, will most likely end up back to point A. Off topic, so, I'm no longer answering the question, but after the end, when you sacrifice Chloe, what happens throughout, which wouldn't have originally happened, was that you still save Kate, and you make sure Jefferson and Nathan are caught. That's about it.

I didn't correctly guess who the killer was, I knew Nathan was too batshit to be working alone but I didn't pay much attention to who he may be working with, but I figured out the ending choice at the beginning of Ep. 3. The first time Max goes into a photograph (The one with William I think) I thought over all of the photographs she had ever taken knowing one would be vital to the ending. I remembered the one she took in the bathroom of the butterfly before Chloe died and knew immediately that I would have to go into the photo and be made to sit there and wait while Nathan killed her. I have some thoughts on the end, and will explain why I chose to let Chloe die.

1. I don't think this apocalypse will end after eating up Arcadia bay. Max fucked the space-time continuum and must pay the price, it wasn't supposed to go down like this. The Universe wants Chloe's blood to flow, and you must not deny the Universe its satisfaction. Creating a tear in the fabric of space-time wouldn't just cause an isolated Ragnarok, it would be the end of the world.

2. If I'm wrong about my first point, and this is in fact a single-serving of death and tornadoing to Arcadia Bay, I can't hold Chloe's life above all the others in Arcadia Bay.

2.5 Fuck Chloe she sucks.

I guessed both. If you've watched a few time-traveling movies and other stuff like Butterfly Effect, that is similar to the games main gimmick, it all gets pretty obvious. From making someone crippled when trying to change the past and having to change the past again because the new present is worse, to have the most evil person on the story be the obvious bad guy until all of a sudden they needed a twist and it isn't him and it turns out to be the nice person no one was expecting and so on (which was pretty obvious at the start when their foreshadowing felt more like "hey guys here's the plot!" and when Mr Jefferson was one of the suspects almost out of nowhere). From the random person at the beginning turning out to be important, to the point where you have to go all back again to fix it and feel bad because you had to decide between saving a friend or let the friend die for the greater cause. It was all predictable, seriously, even the part where they would give you an option for the girls to kiss was predictable as soon as the pool sequence started. When the going back through time using photos (hello Butterfly Effect) thing happened it was obvious you would be able to do it at the end of the game using the photo taken on the first episode. While I played it I was always doing it thinking "You're developing all of this relationship between me and other character just to give some impact to the end. All of this is meaningless". I never felt there was an unexpected twist, everything about the plot was like if they had a list of every time-traveling thriller movie cliché and checked them while they were writing the story.

Also, how come no one noticed that she was teleporting for most of the game?! The game explicitly states that you are teleporting (the tree falling tutorial) but no one notices her jumping from one place to another! (for example you go from place A to place B, stand in that place B and return back in time while standing in that place B - for someone who can't travel through time you just teleported from place A to place B in their eyes!)

A got a really weird Adachi deja-vu when I found out it was Jefferson. The whole time I was locked down in that basement I kept imagining Jeff doing his "I'm a creepy raper guy!" impression.

But yeah as soon as I realised that "going back through the photos" was going to be a thing I thought back to the first episode and knew you'd be able to let Nathan kill Chloe to achieve something, though I didn't know it would be the whole town. I mean it's a photo of a butterfly for fucks sake, it's not like they were even being subtle.

Didn't guess who the killer was (never gave it much thought to be honest), but kinda sorta guessed the last choice. I mean, i knew for certain it was going to be something along the lines of "save or sacrifice Chloe," but I didn't think the entirety of Arcadia Bay was going to be on the line.

After the first episode,I obviously had no freakin idea what was going on, but when Chloe got her leg stuck in the track, that's when I started to have my suspicions that the universe was trying to correct itself and Chloe was supposed to be dead. My suspicions were all but confirmed when you're asked to kill Chloe after you alter time. To me, that was just too many instances where she dies for it to just be a coincidence..

I think for me that was easily the most impressive aspect of the story. Even though you are expecting it, you still have trouble doing it. The story isn't original, and the foreshadowing is way too obvious, but the characters are so well written that you just don't want to let anyone die.

wrt the ending: I was really hoping it wouldn't go there, because I'm kinda sick of that trope. All up I think the rest of the episode does more than enough to make up for it (that nightmare! :D ), but both of the endings are a bit of a letdown, tbh. It kinda surprised me that the storm turned out to be a real thing at all, and I don't accept that fucking with time again to let Chloe die suffices as some sort of "make-good" with the cosmos which prevents the storm from happening. I'm more okay with the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending in principle, but it doesn't seem well-executed, so I kinda feel like I've been left hanging.

I think it would've been awesome if the nightmare wasn't a nightmare. Let that be what actually became of the world due to Max fucking with time, maybe with an intervention from Time Lord Samuel to untangle things. I know the "ruining everything with time travel" trope is also not new, but it seems less tired and cliche'd than what they went with, and the nightmare was so much better than the ending. Or, they could've had Max wake up in Jefferson's class, with only the memory of her "vision" from the start of episode 1, and just have the events of the entire game play over -- so that Max is unknowingly stuck in a time loop, doomed to unknowingly live out the same 5 days for all of eternity. Again, not new or ground-breaking, but far less tired. They even could've had Max wake fro the nightmare to find she's still being kept captive in the Dark Room by Jefferson, which would make much of the manipulation of Max's psyche in the nightmare seem fitting.

I feel like any of the above possibilities has more potential to employ loose ends, and explain why all of this supernatural stuff came to pass, than the ending we got. The Mystery of Chloe Needing Saving Several Times isn't compelling or mysterious enough of a phenomenon (at least to me) to prioritize resolution of it over picking up on many other, far more compelling and eyebrow-raising phenomena that they just seem to have neglected. Honestly, every instance of Chloe needing saving by Max's time powers could've been a plain old coincidence and I wouldn't've batted an eyelid. (That is, even if I'm suppressing some minor, unrelated concerns about the damsellizing that's going on in this game.)

wrt Jefferson: I figured he had to be involved somehow, and I expected his slut-shaming in episode 2 to amount to something, because I suspected Dontnod would like to capitalize on turning the sort of subtle media misogyny that feminist critics tend to deconstruct after the fact into some sort of "aha!" moment that makes the devs look in-tune with feminism. I thought anyone who was wondering "wtf? Why's Jefferson a suspect?" was misinterpreting that decision as a chance to predict the Big Bad, when if you'd been paying attention you'd've seen Jefferson blow his duty of care in a mostly straightforward way, whereas the other two were maybe morally more culpable (that is, based on the evidence at the time) but either formally irrelevant or only able to be implicated by hearsay. But I also thought Jefferson's phone call was with Rachel Amber, which is the main reason I didn't peg Jefferson as the killer. I'd say that when I saw that Rachel had been buried in a shallow grave in the junkyard (an impressive subversion of the Missing Person Turns Out To Be Alive After All! trope, btw), that's when I switched over to "Jefferson probably did it" mode.

I got the ending right away. The butterfly effect symbolism was so on the nose, it was obvious that saving Chloe with the time rewind potion was the cause of the hurricane. Then when you go back to save William (Chloe's dad) my first thought was "Chloe has the butterfly picture... time to redo the original redo." What I didn't expect, however, was being able to choose between Chloe or Arcadia Bay, my assumption was always a choice between Chloe or Max getting shot. I would have chosen the self sacrifice option because I'm so noble when there's no real life consequences.

At the beginning I assumed the big bad was either Jefferson or Samuel because they're never painted as the obvious target, and I knew from the moment I saw David's surveillance stuff that he was trying to stop what was happening at Blackwell, not the cause of it. I discarded Samuel quite early on too, as he was just too innocent, even the girl items in his room weren't enough to sway it. It just didn't seem like he was a secret Prescott family member doing his sick deeds in a dark corner with his low-profile job as cover (a la True Detective). So I was left with Jefferson, and in episode 2 when he said about Kate's video "perhaps she doth protest too much" just made him seem pretty terrible, there's no way a teacher should take that opinion of a student, well at the very least not express that opinion. I got him suspended from the competition because of my suspicions. Not believing that David was a bad guy, and not wanting to stir up more Prescott trouble (that wont amount to anything) also aided in the choice.

I didn't guess Nathan was the actual killer though, as I had assumed the big bad and killer were one and the same, nor did I expect that he was Jefferson's apprentice. I did feel a little sorry for Nathan. Just not too much, as he was still the protégé-psychopath after all. I do wonder if Chloe was Jefferson’s first murder victim since he did it so callously, but it seems like Jefferson may have let his captives go as we saw from Kate. And seeing as it was Nathan "playing" at psychopath that accidentally killed Rachel Amber (via an overdose), and she was the first missing person in Arcadia Bay for decades, it doesn't seem like Jefferson killed his victims. That's not to say Jefferson couldn't have had his own "accident" at a previous place. As far as I know, we just don't know.

I'm a bit confused by why Nathan drugged Chloe and took her photos in his dorm room and not the Dark Room, was it practice before Rachel Amber, or was he barred after the Rachel incident and wanted his fix... or was he just sloppy? But that did throw me off of Jefferson a little and made Nathan my number one for a little while, just because of how messed up seeing that was. It wasn't until the Vortex Club party that I had totally realigned myself to the Jefferson-is-the-big-bad trail when I (Max, whatever) successfully warned Victoria about Nathan and then Jefferson appeared; I was thinking "Shit, it is Jefferson! And I just set Victoria up to be captured by him! Shit..."

I was even more impressed that they didn't really make it feel like a "bad" choice.

@demoskinos: Yeah I was waiting for the Chloe gets pissed like why did you save me all those people lalala but no she's just like wow thanks let's go live sadly ever after.

Its weird because I think most players after chapter 2 were thinking "This guy at the school is a bit controlling and creepy", but then tons of red herrings are thrown at you. I always guessed that killing Chloe was going to be a choice, but I figured the choice woudl between who to save Chloe, Rachel, Max, or even someone like Victoria or even David Madson. So, I was sort of suspecting the choice taht woudl be asked and the killer more than knowing.

The weird thing I always knew (and never was shaken from) that David Madson was going to end up being Max's savior. They painted him so badly early on and what he was going was so "justice" oriented that I just knew he was going to be a redeemed character.

Yes I completely guessed the end…I slowly began to realise Max would have to go back to the beginning to prevent everything from happening. I did have a few running theories about how far “back” was and started to think about The Butterfly Effect ending but then I did come to the realization that the choice was coming I even wondered if it may come before Episode 5 and make you live with the consequences a bit more than just a cut scene. However I have a theory on a way Max could have saved Chloe and Arcadia Bay….

So Max caused the storm by manipulating the time stream so she went back and did not rewind time to prevent Chloe’s death. However what was to stop her busting straight out of that washroom and stopping Chloe from going in to there. Now I hear what your saying that would be changing events…however not as a result directly of altering time. She is already living in an altered timeline whereby her own unique form of grief around this situation means her life will take a completely different course of events. It’s also essentially a timeline that never existed anyway and a lot of things that occurred whether Chloe lived or not will never happen.

This is of course only possible if Chloe’s death was intrinsically linked to the storm rather than Max’s time meddling. Which is not what I was lead to believe….for me it was always about returning to the nexus point of her starting time travelling and insuring she never does it to avoid the storm outright.

No, I was foolish and guessed that the ending would be surprising and satisfactory. I was wrong. They telegraphed Jefferson's questionable actions way too much in Episode 4, but I guess all amateur writers do that.

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that the game will make you choose between saving Chloe and saving the town. I never really believed the possibility of Max dying since I feel that it wouldn't have made much sense with the story they were trying to tell.

As for the killer, while searching through Nathan's room, I did think that Jefferson could have something to do with it (I was expecting it to be more like Jefferson, the master, trying to form his protégé (Nathan)) and the game hints at it with some of Mark's dialogue (the lecture at the start of the game and his conversation with Kate being big ones). Also, in episode 3, while breaking into Jefferson's class, you can find the folder for the Everyday Heroes contest and look at Victoria's picture, but next to that are a few of Nathan's pictures and I want to say one of them is of Nathan digging (I thought it was someone else digging in the picture, but I think the guy in the picture is wearing a letterman jacket), implying another party took the actual photo, and, in episode 4, you can look at a tripod in the dark room and Max reflects on it saying something to the effect of "who's using the tripod in some of those pictures?"