In 2015, when I first played as Maxine Caulfield in the original Life Is Strange, it was only the second time I had ever played a game starring a teenaged girl. (The first time was The Last of Us: Left Behind, which came out the year before.) It was an awkward game in a few ways, particularly its cringeworthy (mis)use of teen slang, but the intense, life-changing and sometimes conflicted relationship between Max and her (more than) friend Chloe rung true. It carried the whole game, actually, more than Max’s time-rewinding powers or the murder mystery that powered the plot. I believed in Max and Chloe. The end of that game forces you into a horrible choice between, as Max would put it, two shitty futures, proving that even time travellers must live with the consequences of their actions. The reverberations of that choice run through this sequel, nine years later.
Grownup Max is now artist in residence at a prestigious arts college, placing her somewhere between the students, with their parties and dramatic breakups and secret societies, and the teachers in the faculty, whose pettiness and preoccupations with their own agendas rarely paint them in a flattering light. She abandoned her home town and stopped using her time-rewinding powers after the events of the first Life Is Strange. Now she is tentatively trying to form new relationships in this fresh place. And, as she discovers when one of her new friends is murdered, she has a new power, too. She can slip between timelines, investigating the murder both in the timeline where it happened, and in an alternative reality where it didn’t.
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