life is strange before the storm episode 2 choices

This is then juxtaposed with a shot of Rachel’s phone. At one point, Rachel kisses Chloe on the cheek. In the first half, Chloe and Rachel are joking around in a photo booth. Almost all of Before The Storm avoids drawing attention to Rachel’s ultimate end, allowing players to become invested in her if they can personally overlook it.īut after the credits roll, a brief cutscene plays.

Such are the constraints of a prequel, and the fact that Rachel dies doesn’t mean that we can’t explore her life. When they’re happy, it’s only a reminder that it will be all too fleeting. When bad things happen to them, it just feels unfair because we already know that they suffer enough. It’s tragic, because we know that it can’t happen. When Rachel and Chloe talk about escaping their lives and moving to California together, as they do often, it’s not the hopeful (or perhaps fanciful) conversation that it should be. Or it would be, if it weren’t for the elephant in the room for its entirety. It is an altogether better story about queer young people falling in love, and a better overall game for it. Their exploration of the women’s relationship is, in many ways, better told than that of Max and Chloe, not least because the latter’s feelings are left more open to player choice and interpretation. Once Deck Nine and Square Enix decided to make a prequel focusing on Rachel and Chloe, their already fraught position became even trickier to navigate, because, as far as the audience was concerned, Rachel was already dead.ĭeck Nine did an admirable job in telling Chloe and Rachel’s story.

The other ending cutscene shows Max and Chloe leaving Arcadia Bay, but gives no indication what they do after that.īefore The Storm only exists in this context: a follow up to a game that appealed to queer women in a way that few games even try to, but that had left many feeling disappointed through its use of harmful tropes.

It’s given a much longer ending cutscene that revisits all the major characters – though you have to watch Chloe die alone on a bathroom floor first. Neither is a happy ending for Max and Chloe, and this is exacerbated by the fact that they only kiss in the “sacrifice Chloe” ending, as well as the fact that Dontnod seem to position this choice as the “correct” option. The player is asked whether they want to save Chloe, resulting in a storm wiping out the town of Arcadia Bay, or whether they want to save the town but sacrifice Chloe in the process. When it comes to Life Is Strange, Rachel’s death was largely overshadowed by the game’s second use of the trope: its ending. Taken together, they gives the impression that LGBTQ+ people (especially queer women) and their relationships are doomed to end in tragedy. The problem with this trope hinges on two facts: there are relatively few LGBTQ+ characters in media, and those that do exist are disproportionately likely to end up dead. Instead, we were given a scene of Chloe sobbing over the body of the woman she loved the first time that Life Is Strange leaned on the trope, known as Bury Your Gays, in which gay and lesbian characters are denied a happy ending. The fact that she was murdered isn’t revealed until the fourth episode, meaning fans had plenty of time to speculate about her: who she was how she and Chloe felt about each other and when she would return, alive.īut Rachel did not return. The first Life Is Strange focuses on Rachel’s disappearance. And in the original, one of its central characters is dead.īefore The Storm focuses on the relationship between Rachel Amber and Chloe Price. But it can’t avoid the fact that it’s a Life Is Strange game, specifically a prequel to the original. Life Is Strange: Before The Storm is, in its own right, a very good game. Spoiler warning: This article includes spoilers for the entirety of both Life Is Strange and Life Is Strange: Before The Storm.

Life is strange before the storm episode 2 choices