Life Is Strange: Episode 4 - Dark Room

Life Is Strange: Episode 4 - Dark Room answers a lot of questions we've had throughout the series' run, including some answers the player might not be too happy about. They say that the game changes depending on how you play, and while we've seen evidence of this in the previous episodes, episode 4 is where everything comes to a head, where your choices really do affect how the episode plays out.

This time we're introduced to an alternate timeline. We don't spend a lot of time in it, however – just enough to show us what would have happened if things in Chloe's life played out differently. In the previous episode, Max messed with the timeline and prevented Chloe's father from dying, which led to unforeseen consequences. The first hour of the game gives you a terrible choice and it's hard not to tear up when it presents itself. While you do return to the original timeline, the ramifications of what Max saw in the alternate timeline have a profound effect on Max's mental state.

In this episode we get to see more of what all of this investigating and time traveling is doing to Max as a person. She's exhausted and paranoid, and the game delivers this in a very believable way. Max is much more prone to jump to conclusions in dialogue that the player doesn't get to choose, and while it's good to see Max developing as a character independently from the choices we make for her, The choices you made in the previous episodes define Max's character in this episode far more than they did in the previous episodes.

The overarching plotline for Life Is Strange is that Max and Chloe are searching for evidence on the disappearance of Chloe's best friend, Rachel Amber, who's image has been plastered all over the town. She's been missing for a while, and even in the alternate timeline she's still missing. Rachel is the one thread that holds all of this together, and in this episode the investigation kicks up the danger several notches by putting our heroine in some dangerous situations like reasoning with a dangerous drug dealer, or exploring an underground bunker filled with horrors beyond her comprehension. This entire thing is a lot bigger than Max and Chloe; they both know this but continue investigating anyways since they're afraid that no one will believe them because of the corruption in the town. The game's plot transitioned from supernatural drama with independent movie elements, to a time travel mystery with some horror elements. There are aspects of this episode that seems like they'd be more at home in a crime procedural show than a video game. There's a puzzle where you help put the clues together and it's rather clever with the way it makes you find a correlation between the clues. It isn't extremely difficult, and you can cheese it by trying everything on everything, but it does bring a new element to the game that hadn't previously been there and had only been talking about.

While the previous episode focused entirely on Max and Chloe with their conflicts, this episode ends up branching out, allowing you to talk to characters you might not have seen in a while. This gives an overall well rounded narrative, but some of the characters you can talk to seem different than when we last saw them. A good deal of things has happened since then, but the way it's executed isn't really the best, there's some conversations that end up being pointless and you've just wasted your time on them. There are some that do influence the overall narrative, but the ones that don't stick out, which is surprising because up until this point things were integrated very well. It's not enough to completely remove you from the game's experience, but it's enough to make you pause and think about the characters' actions and what led to that. If you decide to go to the drive-in with a guy, a classmate of his will be completely intolerable to you, and even if you decide not to go and give her a chance she will still rub it in your face despite being nice to her. There are also great moments with some of the characters you were nice to in the past and your actions do determine how certain scenes play out. Most of them have to do with the Vortex Club members, who were originally antagonistic to Max, but in this episode are some of the best characters to talk to. If you were nice to them and decided not to fight fire with fire, they become some of Max's best allies, including Victoria, who you need to talk to in order to progress the game. Depending on how you handled past incidents with her leads to you either having a good conversation with a misunderstood artist, or a very negative conversation with the resident mean girl. It's at this point where the game does remind you that everything you did previously matters, and if you were a complete jerk to these people, they will treat you as an enemy.

The Vortex Club party, which the game has been building up to since the first episode, is everything you'd expect a teenage party to be, with most of the named student characters there for you to talk to. It has a real party atmosphere and it actually feels alive with the pulse-pounding music and teens dancing everywhere having a fun time. There's even some ambient dialogue with people talking about how drunk they are, or how much fun they are having, which is nice. It makes the player think they're in an actual party with a bunch of loud, noisy teens who have no idea that the apocalypse is coming and the fabric of space and time is falling apart around them. If there's one thing the game does the best in this episode above all others, its atmosphere between the music, voice acting and lighting. It really does show that the developers have learned from the previous episodes and have improved on those aspects. This is why even if the ending of this episode isn't shocking to you as a player, it's built up in a way that it will affect you in some way. Even if you saw something like this coming, when it hits, you might be too stunned to react.

Life Is Strange: Episode 4 - Dark Room is a great penultimate episode for this bestselling series, following up on a lot of questions we had from previous episodes, while giving us a bunch of new questions as well. While it does have some shortcomings, it's another solid entry into this narrative-driven game and by the episode's end, the player should be eagerly awaiting its conclusion in episode 5.

Angelina Bonilla, NoobFeed (@Twitter)