Game Review | Life is Strange | Season 1, Episode 2 | "Out of Time"
Episode Summary: Max tries to convince Chloe that she can rewind time but starts to suspect that her power may not last forever. Meanwhile, Kate tries to deal with the public shame over a viral video that was leaked and shared around the students of Blackwell. (Life is Strange wiki)
What a waste of time this episode felt like, repeating the same problems from the first episode, and then dragging things down to an even lower level. Now, I know from reviews last year on various websites that the final episode is considered to be a bit of a let-down. Anticlimactic even.
How? Seriously, episodes 3 and 4 are going to need to be sen-f**king-sational for the finale to be a let-down considering how little has actually happened so far. Think I’m joking? In this episode, Max spends time with Chloe, and then - SPOILER ALERT - Kate has her suicide attempt. - END SPOILER ALERT -
That’s it – no more plot, no other developments, still no clue why Max is having these visions of a cyclone destroying the town. Nothing else of any importance actually happens. I was unable to save Kate, but apparently you can save her.
The big problem there is that I didn’t care whether she lived or died. There is no-one truly likeable in this cast of characters. Warren is probably the closest to being someone I actually like, but he can also be irritating.
Part of that issue is how dreadful the main characters seem to be – Max is extremely submissive when the player can’t choose what she says, allowing her ‘best friend’ Chloe to walk all over and generally cause more stress in her life. And no, hugging Max after making her pass out from pressuring her into abusing her time-rewinding powers really doesn’t count.
This then led to the problem of making me so annoyed at how much time I was being forced to spend with such a pain in the neck as Chloe, by the time the game put Max in a situation where she could interact with others, I just skipped over them so I could just get the episode over with.
I later found out that there were apparently some significant events missed out on when the comparison of my choices to other players came up, but hopefully this will lead to more stuff actually happening in later episodes to counter my refusal to pander to the game’s dreariness.
As above, the same problems of what was needed to progress being vague, the fairly poor graphics and animation that fancy lighting just can’t compensate for, and now I’m getting so tired of the characters, it’s making the voice acting seem worse because I wish most of them would just shut up.
This might sound like I wasn’t in a good mood going in or am trying to be negative, but I was really hopeful and eager about starting “Out of Time”, assuming that – with all the set-up out of the way – things would really kick on and the story would get going, but it just didn’t happen.
There’s one situation that is entirely contrived off-screen to put Chloe in a situation where her foot is trapped under a rail as a train approaches. Due to the aforementioned vagueness of what you’re supposed to do, plus the time-rewinding powers Max possesses, there’s no urgency at all.
Plus, Chloe has spent pretty much every minute of her considerable screen time being selfish, bullying and pretty much one gigantic irritation, it would’ve been cathartic just to see the little shit get splatted by the train at least once, but Max’s powers always kick in before that can happen.
As for Kate and her suicide attempt, it’s hard to be too harsh because what she goes through would be really bloody hard for anyone, but the problem remains the same: I just didn’t care about the character enough. Things really better improve next time.
"Out of Time" wastes the player's time, barely moving the story forward while forcing you to interact with irritating, unlikable people who prove so annoying that I just gave up on caring about the story at all. Not exactly great for a story/character-driven game.
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