Life Is Strange: Before the Storm

Surprisingly, a prequel that feels quite unlike the first instalment. It's still set in Arcadia Bay, and it still features Chloe, but the focus and general sweep of Before the Storm does not match that of Life Is Strange - and not just because the time travel element has been completely removed. That was a game all about grand, dramatic, heavy-hitting emotional punches, but this one is all about the quiet spaces between those moments. The game's most memorable, touching moments involve a game of Dungeons & Dragons on the school benches, sneaking out of the house to go to a gig, a production of The Tempest, the budding romance between Chloe and Rachel Amber, their dreams of escaping their small town misery and finding a new life together, Chloe's memories of her father....I get far more of a sense of nostalgia from this, a feeling that this is a love letter to being a teenager, moreso than Max and Chloe's story was. (I would offer the fact that one of the game's main villains ends up being a typical teenage 'nice guy' who ends up briefly stalking Chloe and becoming threatening because she hasn't pay him enough attention - potentially the most realistic villain I've ever seen in a game - and that this scene feels more dramatic and dangerous than the massive forest fire Rachel starts, as evidence that this game's priorities have moved toward everyday life. The latter is headline news, but it's background noise, as headline news usually is for kids; the former is amplified, as school drama always is to those in school.) The big emotional punches still exist, but they're less frequent, they're applied with less shock and melodrama, and they're deployed in service of the relationship between Chloe and Rachel.

You can certainly see why this was never advertised as a full-blown follow-up, but honestly this does everything I would have wanted a hypothetical Life Is Strange 2 still set in Arcadia Bay to do. It fleshes out Rachel's character fully (much like the original, which was really a story all about Chloe even though you were controlling Max, this one has you controlling Chloe but is really all about Rachel Amber), it lets you spend quality time with Chloe and explore her life further, and it pulls away from the darkness and lets you see the characters in more fun, simple times. It makes absolute sense that a totally different team developed this; budget and high production values aside, it feels like a fan game, one made by people who had genuine affection for this world and its inhabitants.