Life is Strange and the Five Stages of Grief

I think this game is much better narratively than a lot of people say. Everyone seems to see the ending and say, "What was the point after all that work Max did? It's like nothing ever happened!" With either ending, you feel like you don't get a satisfactory conclusion and you get no explanations. I felt that at first too but then I realized that there seems to be a much deeper message/question about life and death.



So of course the game references a lot of other media, especially The Catcher in the Rye. Chatcher in the Rye is essentially a story about how a teen handle the death of his older brother. This game takes this another step further and actually has us as a the player drawn into the story as part of it. At the core we are playing a game that makes us experience the five stages of grief. The five stages are the five episodes.



The chapters of the game more or less align with the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. There's some mixing going on though and it's not cleanly seperated completey into each 5 chapters.



Max is in denial about the storm and her powers in the first episode and maybe deeper she is in denial about chloes ultimate fate as are we. The game does a great job of making us believe there's some great mystery going on that can explain everything that is happening but like in real life, there really isn't. The game puts us into a state of denial almost without letting us realize it.



Chapter two has a lot of subject matter regarding what Chloe has been doing since Max's absence. Obviously Chloe is an person angry at the world. We learn about the dissaperance of her best friend, her family troubles, and her substance abuse. There's a lot of blame for different things going on between the characters in chapter two. Chloe is angry at Rachael for not telling her about her relationship with Frank. There's a ton of stuff even the side characters express a lot of anger about one thing or another.



Chapter three is Bargaining. Max and Chloe keep telling each other than they'll abandoned one another again and they'll always be together. Then we have the whole photo jump sequence where Max spares Williams life with her powers but at the cost of Chloes health and eventually life. You can interpert this chapter as trading one thing for another, bargaining. This somewhat spills over later with Nathan making argreements with Jefferson in the next chapter.



Four is depression. We discover the fate of Rachel Amber and it's pretty sad. There's surely a lof of other stuff too.



Five is acceptance. Max literally confronts her own feelings in her nightmare. Max and Chloe come to the realization that Chloe needs to go and Max needs to let her go for the storm, possibly symbolizing grief itself, to subside. If she doesn't let go, grief will destroy everything. If we choose to accept Chloe's fate, the story ends with the wrongs commited by Jefferson and Nathan being exposed and the fate of Rachael Amber being revealed to everyone who can now have resolution. If we don't, the town is destroyed and Max and Chloe go off to an uncertain future.



So that feeling you get at the end of the game when you think, "What was the point of all this? Why did I get to play a game that give me all the choices yet in the end it didn't matter?" Well isn't that what life is, an experience where you make choices but your ultimate fate is death no matter what road you take to get there? There's no real explanation as to why the things in the game happen as they do just like in life there is no real rhyme or reason that we can understand that cause things to happen to us. It's a wonderful thing that even the criticism of this game is playing out like the same way as grief: People online didn't believe the ending was what it was, then they were angry, then some made alternate fan endings that they would rather have, people got depressed and sad that it had to end the way it did, and finally when you realize what the game is about, that's when you accept the whole experience.

