Life is Strange: Before the Storm is a three-episode prequel story set a few years before Life is Strange and built with the same engine, focusing on Chloe Price's teen years in the period between when Max Caulfield was out of the picture and before she came back to Arcadia Bay and Chloe's life. Still dealing with the tragic loss of her father and bereft of confidants and outlets for her grief, Chloe's been on a slippery slope with drug use and truancy, eventually resulting in the blue-haired firecracker we first saw dealing drugs to a twitchy Nathan Prescott in Blackwell Academy's bathrooms. In this stage of Chloe's childhood, she stills attends Blackwell herself - well, nominally, see above about the truancy - and stresses about how her life continues to fall apart with the absence of a load-bearing parent and best friend, though in a way that also suggests that she's toughening up and learning to become self-reliant. Curiously, Chloe's circle of colleagues at Blackwell also includes those who aren't seen in Life is Strange, suggesting that Chloe wasn't the only one that left the prestigious center of learning prematurely: this ties in with the early signs of Arcadia Bay's economic downward spiral that are visible everywhere, as the moneyed Prescott family continues to throttle the town and deprive it of its various livelihoods.

Before the Storm also introduces us to Rachel Amber proper, the Laura Palmer-esque missing ingenue that was the impetus for Chloe and Max's detective work in Life is Strange and an excuse to reconnect. In Before the Storm, Rachel's a gregarious and popular model student who is herself on the cusp of a rebellious streak prompted by unhappy developments at home, and she sees the more confidently irreverent Chloe as something of an idol. Likewise, Chloe's besotted with the school's golden girl in turn and over the moon that she wants to hang out, her latent queerness a little more on show here than it was in Life is Strange. The first two chapters (I've yet to see the last) explore that burgeoning relationship - like Max and Chloe, the player can opt for either platonic or romantic - and the way the two girls start leaning on each other for emotional support. Even with her presence, however, she still retains an air of mystique: she's adept at reading people and playing a part, and Chloe (and the audience) can never be quite sure if her reciprocated feelings are genuine. Life is Strange will, of course, muddy up Rachel's ambitions even further.

Even without the time-travelling powers of Max Caulfield the game figures out ways to create enough challenges and tough binary decisions to break up the story scenes, though the former has to resort to simple inventory puzzles and clue-finding while the latter now lacks the safety net that came with rewinding choices. Then again, when the impetuous Chloe makes a decision she sticks to it no matter what, so it's a serendipitous twist that these decisions can no longer be retracted for the road less travelled. There's also Chloe's trademark aggressive browbeating that has her vociferously berate people obstructing her progress with a mix of insults and backtalk, which is represented in this game as a more bellicose version of the insult sword fighting from the Secret of Monkey Island games: to win, you need to pay attention to what your opponent just said and quickly counter it with the best dialogue options available.

Technically, the game has a few issues. Most immediately obvious of which was losing Ashly Burch as the voice of Chloe Price, the result of a voice actors strike happening during the game's development. The new actress does fine, but doesn't quite hit the same acerbic notes as Burch's performance. It has also more than a handful of visual glitches, especially with the way characters animate in an odd and violent way just before a scene or camera change. Beyond that, the graphics are still perfunctory: like the first game, it does a fine job finding and framing the beauty and ugliness in Arcadia Bay, the characters are expressive in ways that are mostly unambiguous, and there's a huge amount of attention to detail that the player can choose to indulge in - there's a lot of set dressing that Chloe can lend her opinion on, and even vandalize with some graffiti as the game's new collectible side-quest - or ignore to focus on the story.

Before the Storm is definitely a bittersweet experience, seeing this relationship play out between these star-crossed lovers (or star-crossed very close friends, if you'd rather) and knowing that canonically neither are long for this world. Those ominous fates don't really seem to matter while in the game itself, however; you can quite easily forget that these crazy kids will never solve their problems or make their dreams happen, which pushes you harder to... well, change history. I suppose in that respect some of the original game's timeline-manipulating magic is still figuratively present.

Rating: 4 out of 5.