Goddamn.

Let's just quickly review what happened this episode: Alt-Chloe pleaded for death, knowing that her paralyzed body was gradually crapping out on her, and Max either does or does not end her suffering before restoring the timeline and letting William die in his fated car accident. After this, Max and Chloe put their heads together trying to solve the issue of where Kate was taken by Nathan after being drugged at the Vortex Club party, helped by clues gathered by talking to Frank (which is an encounter that can go any number of ways), sneaking into Nathan's dorm room and rifling through David's surveillance files. Finding a creepy barn with an even creepier vault underneath, we discover that there's binders on a bunch of missing women (was Romney down here?) that have been photographed in various states of inebriation and undress. We also determine that there are plans to make Victoria Chase America's Next Topped-Off Model, and that Rachel is... well, dead. And buried in the junkyard; her and Chloe's secret base, in an added but probably inadvertent touch of grim irony. Storming the big End of the World party, Chloe in full warpath mode, we don't find Nathan but we are warned that all the evidence we have is going to disappear via an ominous text. Rushing back to the junkyard, Chloe is murdered and Max injected by GHB by none other than the squeaky clean hipster teacher Mark Jefferson, the person alluded to in the bunker's files about "using his expertise to help Nathan with his grand work" which Max incorrectly attributed to Nathan's father Sean Prescott. We have our true villain, finally, but it's a little too late for either of the Wonder Twins to do much about it. End episode.

I'm not ready to mourn for Chloe yet, though rewinding a few minutes isn't going to be feasible after Max passes out from the neckful of G (did I call that or what?). It seems more like Episode 5 is going to give me the huge choice of either letting Chloe be a tragic heroine or saving her life (and possibly Rachel's) and dooming more than one other person in the process. Maybe the entire town. More than once, Max has considered the prospect that her time-travel powers and the weird ecological disasters hitting Arcadia Bay might be related. It could well be that her powers are the proverbial chaos butterfly that is causing the tornado to appear, and her vision was simply the universe saying "hey, we're letting you do a thing, but maybe don't." After all, it wasn't until she did the huge alternate timeline jump that the beached whales started appearing, which is a far larger pile of corpses than the handful of dead birds around town. I could see the final episode setting up a massive rewind that would simultaneously save everyone who has passed so far, but would destroy the town and anyone who couldn't get out in time in the process. It might be why I've been given opportunities to warn people of a nebulous town-destroying threat, or set up trips like Warren and Brooke's drive-in date to keep them out of harm's way. We'll see if that theory pans out in a few hours - as I said at the lede, I'm jotting down my thoughts now so they aren't tainted by what I know, or will know, about the game's conclusion.

With that out of the way, let's recap those big decisions of Episode 4, shall we?

Only four significant decisions this time, but they are doozies. I feel like letting Alt-Chloe die was a bit of a cheat, since everyone playing probably knew that they had to go back and change the timeline anyway. At any rate, Chloe was doomed to an early death because of her condition whether we tweaked her morphine injector or not, and Max wouldn't have allowed that to happen if she could help it even if it did mean killing poor old Bill a second time. The Warren/Nathan fight break-up decision is a curious near-even split, because I have a semi-secret theory that people don't care much for Warren. Letting him continue the fight would put Nathan in a hospital and Warren out of Blackwell, which may well have been a win-win for the science geek's detractors. I pulled him off Nathan, because that's probably what Max would've done. Probably. Nathan could've used a trip to the ER; if nothing else, it'd ensure he was back on his meds. Talking to Frank was like any other tense conversation in this game: it essentially boiled down to saying the right things for a number of prompts. I didn't get up in his face, and neither did Chloe for once, and we managed to get through to him and keep things chill. Knowing about his dog being a rescue no doubt helped. Victoria needed a warning, and I'm surprised so many people chose to "let her" get drugged and murdered. Clearly she wasn't in as much danger as anyone may have thought, since Mark was more interested in following us, but it did mean that she and Max are as cool as they're ever going to be. Not the archetypal Queen Bee villain after all.

As for the minor stuff: I'm not sure I did the right thing with the bird. I obviously should've rewound after disturbing the next for a photo, but it was doomed anyway after I let the Bluejay outside and with no means to get back in. And even still that Bluejay might be a goner, given what's been happening to every other bird. Maybe it's more an issue affecting migratory birds, but I'm no ornithologist (though I have written two lists on this site about video game ornithology, plug, plug). I just figured I owed the little guy one after letting it inside the house in the first place. I sussed David's locker padlock number but not Nathan's phone PIN, so that's one for two in the Sherlock stakes. Kate knew Nathan's dorm room number, which I could've easily deduced myself given the slate outside his door said something like "Prescotts own this school!", but the thought was appreciated. I wasn't sure about asking the quiet sketch-artist Daniel to the party - the pieces were there for some unfortunate Carrie moment - but he seemed fine. Man, the MRA fedora T-shirt he's wearing in this chapter though... woof. Whether that was a shoutout to Reddit - their idiotic fedora avatars are all over YouTube - or some dig at the kind of audience who would not be into an Indie feminism-focused "walking simulation" like this, I couldn't really say. The Warren's slate thing is, as I brought up last time, probably one of those "Wait, I could do that?" non-decisions. Finally: Yep, I helped Alyssa again, this time from getting dunked in the pool during the party. I wonder if the fact that there's fewer decisions this time around isn't related to burning a few of my bridges earlier; specifically my poor deceased plant Lisa, who really set a precedent for the bloodbath to follow.

Wowzer. Hella wowzer, even. What was even going on in that episode? It was one third the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one third the ending of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion TV show run (though more "you suck" than "congratulations") and one third a Roland Emmerich movie about global warming. It lost quite a bit of focus, in so many words, though I don't think it was too detrimental to the overall story. Not enough to change my recommendation of it (see above).

Let's just try to piece together what happened, for my own sake. We woke up in Jefferson's Dark Room next to a drugged Victoria, and took a few desperate trips back in time to incriminate him before he could kill Chloe (and, we later discover, Nathan). It even allowed us to enjoy the fruits of Max's labor, with her winning selfie - though what it has to do with everyday heroes is anyone's guess, unless the game was being cute about all the people Max saved since taking it - sending her all the way to San Francisco with the Principal as her chaperone, rather than the now imprisoned Mark Jefferson. Alas, this perfect new reality came with a caveat: the tornado still happens, wiping out Chloe and all of Arcadia Bay along with it. We find a way to get back, but it also puts us back in Jefferson's clutches and now Victoria's the latest casualty of his insanity. David saves the day, but Arcadia Bay is still doomed unless the tornado is stopped. Max runs around town saving people (including Alyssa again, naturally) and then meets Warren to return to the party from the previous night with Warren's drunken photo, so Max can save Chloe by stopping her from walking into the trap Jefferson set. At this point, Max passes out with Chloe in front of the tornado and the game goes really off the rails.

We'll need to start a new paragraph for this. Essentially, the game has some non-Euclidean fun with Max's fevered nightmares, which were heavy with self-loathing, self-pity and self-doubt. Max is frequently blamed by herself via her manifestations of the game's NPCs for the destruction of the entire town, and it's her subconscious telling her over and over what Warren already confirmed moments before: she was likely the one who caused the tornado with her cause-and-effect chaos butterfly time-tampering, and she hates herself for it. After finally recovering, Max realizes she has to make a choice... but let's discuss all that in a moment. Those dream sequences were some messed up shit, and not just because of the imagery, the symbolism and the agonizing pathos. Little stealth sequences avoiding flashlights, running through Blackwell's halls as everything moved backwards, Max mentally torturing herself again and again with some exceptionally cruel language. They even brought the bottle hunt back, though it was entirely optional this time. I'm not sure any of it was truly necessary, beyond perhaps a few of the self-loathing cruelty cutscenes to establish where Max's mind was at, but I suppose DONTNOD painted themselves into a corner with how short this episode would've otherwise been with just the sequences where Max was conscious. It reminded me of the hallucination sequences in Max Payne, where you're following precariously thin blood trails to your crying infant and wife moments before they die, and the whole thing is a nightmare in both how it's presented and how grueling it is to actually progress through as a player. Whether the intent was to make the player suffer along with the protagonist is probably too passive-aggressive an observation to really consider, but it does make me wonder about dream sequences in games and how designers choose to implement them specifically for the video game medium to make them sufficiently harrowing for the purposes of the story they're telling. It's on the darker and more anti-user experience side of attempting immersion, for sure, but a potent tool for audience involvement when used adroitly.

I suppose there's only one thing left to discuss here.

I killed Chloe.

Well, it's more like I let her die for the sake of the rest of the town. No point quibbling over details, I suppose. By using the butterfly photo we took in the bathroom prior to Max acquiring her new powers, she was able to jump back and... do nothing, as Nathan flips out and shoots Chloe in the gut like he was always meant to. With this, Max doesn't use her time powers once, and the tornado never arrives. Nathan is arrested and Jefferson soon follows him - if Max didn't send an anonymous text to David, we can assume a defeated Nathan blabbed under questioning - and the town mourns the tragic loss of a random nineteen year old girl with blue hair. Bittersweet, but this was one occasion where we know Chloe would've been happy with our choice. Was Max though? I can't help but look at just how close those two percentages are and think to myself that this is what DONTNOD was hoping for all along: to create such a powerful central relationship that almost half their audience wanted to see it continue, even if it meant the deaths of thousands and practically all the other NPCs in the game. Victoria, Nathan and Officer Berry (not Officer Berry!) at the very least are confirmed cadavers, and it's unlikely Warren, Joyce or Frank would've survived the storm in the Two Whales considering that it blew up before Max intervened. Chloe would've never forgiven Max if she let her mom die, and yet...

And yet I can appreciate why 46% of people made that decision. Chloe and Max could weather anything together, including the weather. Or maybe those players were just tired of Arcadia Bay: its bottles, its dead birds and that g-damn Hotdog Man everywhere. (What was the deal with that guy? I have a pet theory that he was the game's equivalent of the cheese man in that one messed up episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where everyone was getting murdered in their dreams. The more Max messed things up, the more often he would appear.)

A whole lot of a-doy with this bunch, and yet nothing here - or really with any of the prior "minor" decisions - mattered in the end. I mean, if I want to get that reductive, none of the game's events really mattered since we reversed almost all of them. I can't see the significance of David's scar - I guess I was supposed to warn him at the right moment before Jefferson hit him? David didn't kill Jefferson, but I thought he might after I told him Chloe was dead. So I didn't. It's not like I wasn't planning to reverse it anyway, right? I saved everyone I could during the storm sequence, and didn't get some big payoff with a five-time save record for Alyssa, though I guess randomly saving her from her terrible luck made for a fun running goof. I'm going to miss her weird mouth-fulla-marbles voice. Warren gets a hug because screw Warren, but also yay Warren. Go ape for ambivalence! Talking to Frank and Joyce, well, didn't seem to do much. Max was all poised to hop back in time again, so it felt even less necessary to square things than usual. A whole lot of not much here in the minor leagues, though I appeased Max's conscience, at least.

That's Life is Strange. A lot of crazy shit happens, and then doesn't happen. It was a fun ride, even if that last act felt a little too disjointed and weird for weirdness's sake. Hey, if you can't go all out on the psychological horror in a dream sequence, when can you?