My 10-year journey to save Life Is Strange's Chloe Price, and how doing so saved me, too

I know why Life Is Strange grabbed my generation by the throat. Many associate the game with its indie movie aesthetic, but the appeal has always been power over choice and consequence. What choice will you make? What consequence will you accept?

The opening is electric. A fateful dream places Max Caulfield on a cliff in a storm. Above her looms a lighthouse. Before her, an impossibly massive cyclone bearing down on the town of Arcadia Bay. Max is shocked awake before she sees what happens, regaining consciousness at a desk in her bougie school’s photography class. Yet the dream remains, hanging like the Sword of Damocles over her story.

As Max goes to the bathroom to calm herself, she witnesses two students enter. The wealthy and unstable Nathan Prescott, designated rich boy. The mercurial and vibrant Chloe Price, a broken bird filled with grief and anger and fear and a heart that is loyal and kind nonetheless. Chloe is Max’s estranged best friend, who she hasn’t seen since Max’s family moved away years ago.

As Max watches, Chloe and Nathan argue about the whereabouts of Rachel Amber, Chloe’s missing “friend.” Chloe is forceful, caustic, determined. Nathan is flustered, erratic, dangerous. But Nathan has a gun, and Chloe doesn’t. 

The gun does what guns do. Max watches Chloe bleed out on the floor.

But then…time rewinds. Not long. Just enough to save Chloe, to set the girls on the path to discovering what happened to Rachel, the path to the lighthouse and the cliff and the storm.

It’s all there, right in the opening. Max Caulfield, normal girl, empowered to save her town from disaster. Yet she only gains that power to save her best friend. Two competing drives: saving Arcadia Bay, saving Chloe. 

But you can’t save both.