There are spoilers below

The third episode of Life Is Strange was a tough one to play ‘wrong’. The process of avoiding time travel in my previous writeup just wasn’t possible here. Speeding from a school shrouded in darkness to a diner and a suburban home there’s a greater focus on plot than puzzles.

What little puzzle solving there is does have one huge development, the player is introduced to the fledgling spatial powers that Max finally acquired, or possibly fatefully exhausted, with Kate on the verge of suicide at the end of Episode Two. The use of her evolved power is introduced with a twist on a locked door puzzle. Max and Chloe produce a makeshift bomb to blow their way into the school principal’s office. It doesn’t go well.

With the stupidity of that idea hammered home the player simply stands in the now unlocked office and rewinds, restoring the door and switching off the alarms. The second spatial puzzle is a simple stealth game with a solution that’s even telegraphed earlier in the episode. Ultimately there isn’t much fun to be had with this new power just yet. Even a later locked-door puzzle, breaking into a RV, has no space-bending elements thanks to the oddly familiar addition of an angry dog that needs feeding.

Whilst the excellent characters and decent dialogue keep Episode Three afloat I had hoped time-travel gameplay mechanics would become more advanced. I also expected Max to be smarter. With a wall-full of time travel research collated for the player to read she still makes, and thus forces the player into a tragic equivalent of Marty McFly’s Back to the Future misadventure. The game’s demand that you save Chloe’s father fails on several levels. It doesn’t only takes away the player’s agency in a game about choices but it also butchers the titular ‘Chaos Theory’ of the episode.

With Max only travelling at most a few minutes back through time the ‘Butterfly Effect’ of her actions is negligible, or at least unobserved given she can’t wind forward far enough to experience the results. With her newly gained ability to jump years through time and space to re-experience a memory the established rules of the game are broken apart. This happens when you try to save Chloe’s father.

Even though Max remains calm and has researched her powers extensively her reaction here is still an emotional one. Her decision to save Chloe’s father might make narrative sense but it sits at odds to her experiences and Warren’s stacks of science-fiction lore. At first I let Chloe’s father’s leave, then I tried in vain to just delay his departure as little as possible, thinking just a few seconds would make the difference in preventing a car accident. Eventually, the player is forced follow a chain of objectives to make him to take the bus instead.

When Max returns from this jump the expected ‘Butterfly Effect’ is shown off and falls far short of my expectations. A new social circle, a disabled Chloe and beached whales by the dozen. That’s all we’ve seen so far and arguably the changes in this world should be much more drastic.

For gameplay purposes Max’s power remains spatially limited to her body and objects in her possession. However, if the player were a separate entity in the game world then they would see everything revolve around a stationary Max. Effectively this means that she cannot ‘run into herself’ like Marty could in Back to the Future. However, her huge jump through time sees her land in a new timeline where she is already established at Blackwell in a social circle, The Vortex Club. This means she hasn’t physically jumped or wound but somehow assumed the body and conscious of a version of herself in a different timeline with no memories of that life.

Even if there’s a way to impart Max with all the knowledge of her life in this new timeline there’s no easy way to give it to the player. Life is Strange has reset the universe and all the player’s feelings and opinions are moot. Got a crush on Warren? Hate Victoria? Been religiously watering that plant? Realistically none of that matters now and it would be even more frustrating to have a new timeline where “things are exactly the same except for these few things that are relevant to the immediate plot”.

If this jump is more than a minor segway or learning experience then Life Is Strange will be in a very problematic position with three episodes of player decision wiped away for the sake of drama. The game has worked well so far because of it’s limitations, players could only make small changes in a linear timeline with most outcomes present in the episode or as an ending statistic. For better or for worse those rules have gone out the window. No matter how you feel about this chapter of Life Is Strange it’s going to be a long wait until Episode Four for all of us.