Note: This blog series is written in a way that those who haven’t played the game can still follow along, but I’d strongly recommend you experience it for yourself before reading. This entry also talks about themes of sexual assault.

Previous Parts: Episode One | Episode Two | Episode Three | Episode Four

It’s ironically appropriate that this final episode of the series is entitled “Polarized” and it’s easy to see why it’s been so divisive for the community surrounding Life is Strange. This wrap-up for the season has many pockets of thoughtful and touching story work, but also no shortage of self-sabotage, leaving even the events of previous episodes as collateral damage in its quest to try and tie together the ends of a potentially very complex narrative. On the plus side, you can’t accuse Dontnod of not setting themselves a challenge. Endings are hard enough to write as it is, but endings are even harder in time travel stories, and harder still in episodic choice-based games. Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why some of the content in Episode Five feels so awkwardly conceived.

When we rejoin Max she’s drugged and restrained, posing as an unwilling model for Jefferson who intends to murder her after the shoot. Here the game aims to impart a sense of being trapped by giving us all the regular camera controls and ability to “Look at” items in the environment that we’re used to, but disabling movement control. It’s not as effective as it might be in a game where movement is a bigger moment-to-moment part of play, but it still does its job. I found myself mimicking the natural behaviour of someone tied down like that, trying to press “W” or click at Max’s limbs to break free even when I knew it wouldn’t work. The dark room’s atmosphere is also vital to the scenes here; it’s tragic and creepy instead of homey and comforting like the places that you become used to throughout Episodes One-Four. In fact, that becomes a trend in Episode Five. You might compare this instalment’s darker environments to the more unsettling spaces of Episode Three, but they were mostly just spooky or carried the threat of getting into serious trouble with the school. They were there to elicit the feeling of being a teenager sneaking out of your room at night. Episode Five on the other hand uses the surreal, the apocalyptic, or in the case of the dark room, the sterile, to create a sense of mortal or existential threat. There’s also more than ever a focus on symbolism in the environments. In the dark room this is largely imparted by the black and white palette.

The black vs. white theme, as well as the use of strong light and shadow can at their most obvious level be seen as reflective of the conflict between good and bad that occurs in the room, but there are other slightly more subtle interpretations. It may be relevant that it’s in a room where everything is literally black and white that the mysteries of the games are supplanted with the truth: we learn who our villains are and what happened to those girls who disappeared from Blackwell. For me though, the palette feels more linked to Jefferson than anything else. It shows that while Max’s world is vivid and full of colour, his is in greyscale. It’s a style deeply ingrained in Jefferson’s photography, which we can most obviously see in the exhibition around the front of the Blackwell campus. Among the images in this collection of Jefferson’s work are a girl with a hand placed firmly on her shoulder, what looks like a young man being confronted by a police officer, and shots of women in somewhat revealing clothing. Then there’s the unsettling photograph of a man digging a grave we can find in Jefferson’s classroom in Episode Three. Every one of these photos is greyscaled.

The images are all connected to Jefferson’s violations and through the muting of the colours we can see that his empathy towards the people in these photos is in itself muted. There’s a similar sterility in the way he wears surgical gloves in the dark room and frequently wields hypodermic needles. Jefferson also reveals another meaning in his colour scheme to us, even if he doesn’t make it clear he’s talking about his art at the time. He declares that he wants to see a loss of innocence in his victims: in his words to see them go “from black to white to grey”, just like his pictures. The photographs in the game are also very illuminating of the relationship between Jefferson and Nathan, even before it’s openly mentioned how the two characters are linked.

We learn early on in Polarized that Jefferson was acting as a surrogate father figure for Nathan. This makes sense considering that we know Nathan’s own father is judgemental and distant, and that Nathan doesn’t appear to have any other friends. While at first seeming to have far less to do with art than the other shutterbugs of Jefferson’s class, in Episode Four we can see Nathan keeps clearly displayed images in and around his room. Outside we see a poster for something entitled “Dead Drop”, bearing the quote “I hate my life”. Next to it another poster reads “NSFW” and is adorned with a half-naked woman. Inside his room the pictures on his walls depict tortured subjects or are unapologetic fetish images. The one that dominates the room is a greyscale picture of a woman in bondage and it’s eerily close to Jefferson’s style. In fact it could literally be one of Jefferson’s. At the time it was easy to think these images were reflective of Nathan as a person, but even back then his room told a different story once you started to peek below the surface.

We know Nathan likes to put on a front and these edgy, racy images were what he wanted the world to think of him, but there are also personal photographs in his room that he doesn’t display to anyone else that take a different slant. They’re greyscale still, but one is of a child walking the street alone and another is of dead birds but depicted in a gentle light which Max calls beautiful. The black and white colours may be an attempt of Nathan to mimic Jefferson’s style, or perhaps it’s the other way around. Maybe Nathan colours his art the way he does because of his own emotional isolation and Jefferson’s similarly coloured images spoke to him. Either way, while there’s some replication of style, this is not a full replication of Jefferson’s themes. There are no attractive women in these photos and no hints at heinous misdeeds. There is one private image Nathan keeps of a real, tortured woman and it’s a photograph of a drugged Chloe, but this is perhaps the most telling of all. Contrary to Jefferson’s style the photo is full of bright, vivid colour and allows us to recognise the suffering of the person it captures. Compare this image where we can see Chloe’s clear body language paralytic face to the “hand on shoulder” image from Jefferson’s collection where the figure is unemotive and their eyeline is obscured. Nathan’s photographs indicate that he is not a monster. Sadder than that, he’s a person with genuine talent who aspires to be a monster. It’s amazing how much the game manages to express about these characters through these visual elements.

As for our real monster, he threatens to turn Life is Strange into a cruel parody of the “coming of age” story. Protagonists in coming of age high school dramas may experience significant emotional pain, but it’s usually in the interest of them learning about their ability to overcome it and having some constructive life experience. Under Jefferson’s lens however, girls don’t grow into women through manageable life lessons and a process of self-discovery, but by their mistreatment and abuse, something that’s destructive and leaves permanent damage. In this way Life is Strange also provides a metaphorical exploration of sexual assault, an event that has deeply shaped many young peoples’ lives, but one which traditionally high school dramas have turned a blind eye to. Of course, most real perpetrators of sexual assault aren’t as charismatic or as machiavellian as Jefferson, but the game still demonstrates some of the ways sexual assault of students can happen and go unpunished in the real world.

Crucial in enabling Jefferson’s abuse is his position of seniority and power. Because of his reputation, occupation, and his connections to other authority figures, he’s both facilitated in his crimes and protected from accusations. One of the first things the game teaches us is that the administration simply doesn’t do enough to listen to or help students who are in danger. It’s in that interaction we have with Principal Wells about Nathan and his pistol, and the pattern continues on with how the school as an entity treats the suicidal Kate. That inability of the school to properly deal with student endangerment not only becomes one of the primary drivers for the story, it’s also a means for the game to show us why even those at risk of assault in the real world might not say anything. Because they believe, too often correctly, that they simply won’t be listened to, or may even get into trouble themselves.

Max is able to escape being killed by Jefferson, as she eventually gets a hold of her diary and uses a photo in it to travel right back to the start of the game and report him, but this only works because she has a whole bunker of evidence to show the authorities. Most assault victims in the real world don’t have this kind of evidence because unlike Max they don’t have superpowers, and most abusers don’t leave this kind of physical trail. Perhaps most important here is Jefferson’s reason for perpetrating his abuse. Many people think that people sexually abuse because they cannot find sexual fulfillment elsewhere, but from the moment the game starts we see students falling at Jefferson’s feet and we know of his established popularity. There’s even a scene in which Victoria comes onto Jefferson and he rejects her advances. There would be women willing to model for Jefferson in the way he forces people like Max, Victoria, and Rachel to, but that’s not what Jefferson wants. Jefferson’s assault is born out of his need to feel powerful and his lack of consideration for other human beings, and this is strikingly real.

It’s a shame that for all the game says in these opening scenes that there are creative decisions and poor performances that help undermine it. For one thing, while these scenarios are meant to feel tense and threatening, your time travel powers give you the safety net of being able to rewind away from any danger of death and that makes it hard to feel like you’re in legitimate peril. Then there’s a puzzle where breaking out of the electrical tape that binds you is the solution even though the game established earlier that struggling against the tape doesn’t lead anywhere. At other times the script and voice work is of a questionable quality. Sometimes Derek Phillips (our voice actor for Jefferson) will take an okay line and make it far too cheesy, sometimes he’s given a line just too cartoonishly villainous to work with, and sometimes bad delivery and bad script line up together and leave the mood stone cold dead. It’s somewhat unexpected because for the other four episodes Phillips gives a far better performance. All these things mean that when we take the aforementioned trip back to the start of the game it’s not just a relief from the tension of these scenes, but also some of their cringeworthiness.

The arrest of Jefferson and the events following it are some of the moments in which this episode heavily benefits from the game’s established visual shorthand for the timeline being altered. Major events being changed or erased from history is represented through photographs of those events burning up or changing in what they depict. It allows the game to conduct exposition in a way that doesn’t waste time, which is vital for Episode Five’s winding and expansive cap-off to the season’s plot. After Jefferson is carted off by the police Max goes on to win the Everyday Heroes photo contest, earning herself a trip to a photography exhibition in San Francisco.

The sequence in the photography exhibit is wonderful; it could be an experimental game on its own. In most games the places we inhabit are not there to be simulations of the real thing, they’re there to be staging grounds for narrative or gameplay. For example, if you go into a restaurant in a game, you wouldn’t expect the systems to be in place for you to use it the same way you would a real restaurant. The process of finding a table, ordering a meal, and eating your food aren’t going to be part of the game mechanically. Instead, you’d expect the restaurant or whatever other place to be a staging ground for dialogue and exposition, or to be the set for an action scene, or whatever else is relevant to what the game wants to be at the time. In this episode of Life is Strange, the art gallery really does function as an art gallery. You can have a visually engaging experience in it and the game encourages you to roleplay the behaviour of someone in a photography exhibit. Using a minimalist museum is also a smart way for a game with limited resources to create a good-looking, realistic environment that you can spend a lot of time in. The gallery does suffer from that same Jefferson scripting and voicing problem though. Some of the people in this exhibition sound like the version of an art critic you might find in an unimaginative satirical cartoon.

Some time into her gallery visit, Max receives a phone call from Chloe who is under threat of the storm bearing down on Arcadia Bay. To prevent the creation of this reality where Max ends up in California while Chloe dies in Oregon, Max goes back in time to destroy the photo she entered into the Everyday Heroes contest. After doing so she ends up back in the dark room again. The logic here is that in the new timeline she created Jefferson burned her diary so she could never get the photo from it to go back in time and stop him in the first place. Why did he burn her diary in this reality and not the initial one? It’s never really explained. You could infer from his dialogue that he did it out of rage because Max showed him the photo she was going to enter into the contest before destroying it, but then that raises the question of why Jefferson saw that photo in this reality if he didn’t see it in the original one. It feels like a slightly contrived way to get the diary out of the picture, something that the game has to do because with all the photos from previous episodes Max could far too easily rewrite history and find a relatively effortless out to the trials of Polarized.

With the diary gone it’s clear there’s only going to be one means of exit to the room, but it would be unrealistic and diminish Jefferson as a villain if Max, an unarmed teenager, escaped the room on her own. However, leaving you entirely as a damsel to be saved would deny both Max’s abilities and your agency as the player, and so the game has those two ideas meet in the middle. David Madsen finds the dark room, but Jefferson attempts to get the drop on him. With the instructions of the time-travelling Max, David manages to get the upper hand and knock Jefferson unconscious. In the following moments David expresses, among other things, regret over the way he treated his family, and he shares the difficulties he’s had working alongside other people both professionally and in his personal life. You later have the option to try and convince Joyce to take David back or leave their relationship as it is, but I felt like the only wise choice was the latter. David saving Max is proof of his will to do the right thing, but he virtually admits he’s unable to co-operate with others in a way that would be required for a functioning family relationship. David’s arc is an interesting bit of character exploration where it’s recognised that sometimes the difficulty in life isn’t so much to do with whether someone’s a good or bad person as it is to do with the kind of roles they can and cannot fill, and for David father may not be one of the roles he cannot reliably operate in.

After escaping the bunker, Max travels through an Arcadia ravaged by the storm towards the Two Whales Diner. Along the way we’re invited to rescue citizens from various instances of impending doom they find themselves in. The segment is there to make you engage with the death and destruction in Arcadia, as opposed to the storm being something the characters simply talk about but that you never get hands-on experience with. Unfortunately, while Dontnod nail the chaotic, oppressive atmosphere this section needs, they forget some of the most important techniques in their writing here. Much is done throughout these five episodes to connect you to Arcadia Bay itself and that’s achieved not just through environments or meeting random strangers, but also through a very human central and supporting cast. Only through believable and rich characters do you get a believable and rich community, but these are not rich characters we see here, they’re almost all strangers who you’ve never seen before and never see again whose only purpose is to be rescued. The others are bit players like Alyssia or the fisherman, and the interactions with them have no real relevance or impact.

The ultimate resolution for the fisherman has nothing to do with his character up to this point. He was worried about the power the Prescotts were gaining in the town, the toxic conditions for Arcadia’s wildlife, and the hurdles he was facing in his career, but his ending literally just has him running away from a fire. Alyssia is someone who you save from countless slip ups before like being hit with a football or being pushed into the pool, and as I approached her I thought “This is it, the chance for Alyssia to save herself, or maybe Max saves her again and they have a real exchange of emotions, or maybe she finally twigs Max has powers now”. Instead it’s just another simple “Move her out of danger, get told thanks” puzzle. It's almost like the devs wanted these character subplots to building to something they ultimately couldn't deliver.

When Max finally reaches the diner she finds Joyce, Frank, and Warren sheltering from the storm. The three are vulnerable and more open emotionally than they’ve been at perhaps any other time. Nothing brings people together quite like a crisis. One of the stand-out moments in the diner is Warren having one last heart-to-heart with Max and the game then giving us the chance to hug or kiss him. Perhaps even more interesting than the actual scene is the metadata about how players performed. As a dorky character who persistently texts Max, even when receiving no response, Warren has annoyed a lot of players. Personally, I’ve never been that ticked off by him. I felt it became obvious that everyone in Life is Strange’s world has serious flaws, and Warren’s flaws are more upfront but no worse than most other characters’. You know what you’re getting with Warren: he’s a bit of a bother to deal with sometimes but he earnestly and consistently acts with positive intentions towards Max, and I don’t think that’s just because he wants to date her. With that in mind and seeing that it was the end of the world and all, I had Max kiss Warren and I thought I’d be in the tiny minority.

At the end of my playthrough I was surprised to find 93% of people hugged or kissed Warren. Perhaps there’s a message in that about how people really receive characters vs. what we see on the message boards, or perhaps this scene won people over on him. Either way, I think there’s something positive to be found there. However Max reacts to Warren, he gives her an essential part of the puzzle: The photo he took with Max outside the Vortex Club party. The photo allows us to go back and warn Chloe about Jefferson shooting her and kidnapping Max so that she can prevent it from ever happening.

This alters the timeline such that Max and Chloe now stand at the foot of the hill from Max’s vision of the storm: a vision first received at the opening of the first episode. Note that Chloe’s shirt here bears the ouroboros: the snake eating its own tail, a traditional symbol of events working in a cycle. As a twister looms over Arcadia Bay, Chloe bonds with Max over her determination to save her life. Then Max faints and we enter a succession of surrealist dream sequences. These sequences include a version of the opening of the game where time runs backwards, a nightmare where Max is in love with Jefferson, and a looping hallway sequence based in the Blackwell girls’ dorm.

This spontaneous dream odyssey might feel like a bizarre thing to be jammed into the second act of this episode, and it is, but there’s reason for it to be in here. By mashing together dioramas of previous events and characters, the game creates both a refresher and retrospective on everything it has been before going into its finale. To my knowledge there’s not been another episodically released game that’s done such a thing, but you can see why Dontnod would be motivated towards it. A film is experienced on average over 90-150 minutes, a single series of a TV show is experienced at most over a few months, and the same goes for most narratively-driven games. Episodically released games are generally experienced over a much longer timescale however.

If you followed Life is Strange’s episodes as they were released it took you nine months to get from the beginning to the end of the game with at least a two month gap in between every episode. A lot can slip out of your memory when you’re consuming a piece of media that way and so you can see why the developers might want to thoroughly reaffirm your familiarity with the events of the game. Still, putting so much time and resources into pointing to touching moments and loveable characters from previous episodes when they could be creating new ones makes these sections feel insubstantial. They also come with the complication that how you receive them is likely to be dependent on how you specifically played the game. If you bought the game in its final completed form and ran through from it beginning to end with no huge pauses, you’re far less likely to need a reminder of the events of the game than if your play was stretched out over the better part of a year.

While in some ways the dream sequences feel like the video game equivalent of a remix, parts of them feel a bit like a clip show or perhaps like the earlier section of this episode you could interpret them as a museum. It has that “Look, don’t touch” feel to a lot of its exhibits. There are characters you know, but you’re frequently not allowed to interact with them in any way that deals with their real thoughts, feelings, and personality. It’s all being caught by them as part of a stealth puzzle or the conversation being deliberately warped in some way to create a tone of uneasiness. There are snippets of previous episodes in here but all you can do with some of them is watch their elements float by, powerless to properly relive them in any way, and maybe if you did actually do more than linger on them they would outstay their welcome. Similar to the sequence in the burning, broken Arcadia, connections with characters here feel fleeting, which is a problem because this is a game where deep character engagement is at least half the hook. The themes and intended emotions of the dream sequence don’t necessarily hold together either.

As with the plot-reforming events at the end of Episode Three, one of the strongest and most immediate feelings this section brings out in you is confusion, but the end of Episode Three still operated on firmly real-world logic within itself. Here the game turns up the confusion dial until it breaks right off in its hand. The sucker punch surrealist reframings of things you thought you knew create an extreme sense of chaos and disorder in the section which helps align your emotions with a Max whose world is quite literally falling apart. However, while that generally works effectively, some of the more targeted emotional moments falter considerably. The sequence repeatedly brings to the surface Max’s anxiety, not just about the world around her, but also about herself and how others perceive her.

Again, there are narrative snippets that function as intended. In my playthrough Kate blamed Max for her death before symbolically reenacting it and at another point Max stepped through a doorway to find herself once again in Rachel Amber’s clothing. The sequence in which Jefferson hunts Max with a flashlight is right at home here as well. It would be easy for the game to just never have brought up Max’s treatment at the hands of Jefferson again, especially as he’s now a vanquished foe, but the episode goes out of its way to show that even if Jefferson may have disappeared he still haunts her. His torch cutting through the dark paints him as an invasive figure in Max’s psyche at the same time as visually alluding back to the bright lights and black/white tones of the dark room. It goes back to our antagonist as a means for the game to explore the effects of abuse. But then you pass through the initial maze and you discover every other person in Arcadia has a torch and a will to catch you too.

All of a sudden even entirely harmless characters like Samuel and Warren are being presented as being as dangerous and predatory as Jefferson, or at the very least in the language of the dream they create as much anxiety in Max, and it makes no sense. It’s also immersion-breaking and damages Jefferson’s credibility as a villain. A similar scene comes later on as Max enters a time-frozen version of the Two Whales Diner where the citizens of Arcadia judge and berate her, and yet one or two of them seem to praise her with no discernible logic behind it. What's more, the versions of Chloe and Max in the diner are vicious and interrogative towards Max when the idea of Max being emotionally or morally detached from people feels completely unrealistic.

Some of this might have worked back in Episode Two when there were more fuzzy lines around whether we were on good terms with people like Joyce or Chloe, but it’s bewildering to see this kind of content here after the game has put so much time into affirming the positive links between Max and the people around her. By this point in the episode the story has made major investments in showing that even many of the people we once considered enemies like Frank and David are human beings who we can have an empathetic connection with, and the dream sequence happens directly on the back of Max and Chloe pledging their trust and loyalty to each other. The game wastes so much time making the least convincing argument it possibly could.

Of course, not everything in the dream sequences feel like they’re meant to mean something, some of it is just there to be weird for the sake of it, and I’m all for weird for the sake of weird, but there’s a time and a place. The dream is part of an unfortunate and repeating pattern in Episode Five. As a whole this episode has some moments in it that work as good or even excellent standalone pieces, but when when the game desperately needs to use every drop of time it has to let you say your goodbyes to the characters and perform ending exposition, it too often turns to story sequences that feel superficial and don’t speak enough to the larger cast and plot.

I am however holding Dontnod to a very high standard. I still think aspects of these sections deserve more praise than they’re getting. These scenes utilise a lot of the conventions of horror or stealth titles, but use the emotions evoked by those genres not simply for their own sake, but to be metaphorical of and reflective on a complex plot. Plus, the game clearly flagging the contents of these sections as not being part of its literal canon allows it to convey a fantastical emotional experience that’s still grounded in its reality. Additionally, a lot of what you find in these scenes is comparable to parts of The Stanley Parable or Batman: Arkham which have rightfully been praised for pulling off such mind-bending feats of self-deconstruction and subversion of player expectations. You’d think people would also be more enthused about seeing an elaborate homage to P.T. in a recognisable game today. The tragedy isn’t that these sections are devoid of anything positive as much as it is that those positive elements aren't put to better use.

And that’s the end of part one of this piece. Next time round we’ll be discussing the endings and what they mean for the plot and characters. Thanks for reading.