The Ordinary Joys of “Life is Strange: Before the Storm”

How does the ordinary become extraordinary?

Videogames often specialize in the extraordinary. Games like Uncharted, Destiny, Zelda, Mass Effect, and so on tell stories of what it means to be the exceptional and to do the unimaginable. These games carry with them their own particular pleasures, but often obscure the secret lives, joys, and insights of ordinary people, places, and things.

Set in the fictional, idyllic town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, DONTNOD Entertainment’s 2015 hit, episodic game Life is Strange achieved widespread critical success and developed an incredibly passionate following by blending supernatural intrigue with strong characters and an insistence on calling our attention to everyday objects and people. The ending, equal parts tragic and inevitable, ostensibly marked the conclusion of our time in Arcadia Bay. But now two years later new developer Deck Nine is taking us back to Arcadia Bay in their prequel Before the Storm and insisting on the extraordinary lives of ordinary things.

Set three years before the original, Before the Storm allows you to play as Chloe Price — the best friend of the original game’s protagonist, Max. Chloe, just two years removed from the death of her father, is struggling in high school, her best friend Max has gone off to Seattle taking her time-rewinding powers with her, and her mother has begun dating. All this leaves Chloe with lots of pent up frustration, grief, and cynicism.

The ability to rewind time in the original game has been replaced with a new mechanic known as “Backtalk.” Backtalk is a series of conversational puzzles that if navigated correctly allow Chloe to unlock new ways to progress in the world and shut down undesirable conversations. The mechanic is fairly easy to figure out, but the broader shift it reflects is ingenious. Rewinding time allows us to enact fantasies of always doing and saying the right thing. Backtalk, on the other hand, asks us to understand the precarity and anxiety of navigating conversations — especially as a high schooler. Conversations become the site of meaningful action and the place where selves and relationships are (per)formed.

More or less, the rest of the gameplay mechanics involve doing mundane things. Chloe spends vast amounts of time writing diary entries, reading posters, and checking her text messages. The elements that make up the “extra stuff” in other games are brought from the peripheral and given center stage. Often, when narrating our own lives, we skip the minute and the mundane for fear that they are somehow irrelevant or insignificant. But, Before the Storm asks us to re-examine these elements to find what extraordinary secrets lie beneath them. It’s not that we need to get past the mundane and the ordinary to find meaning, it’s that the mundane habituations which make up so much of life are the sites of crafting meaning.

This tension between the ordinary and the spectacular is most fully realized in the characters that Chloe shares a high school with. Often, high school dramas leave characters as tropes — the jock, the nerd, and so on — but for those willing to spend some time with the characters, Before the Storm goes to great lengths to show the fascinating hidden lives and ambitions of all the characters. Even the ways — some of which include playing a D&D style table top game, listening to a mix tape, and discussing a book — you come to know and understand these characters are so wonderfully quotidian.

More than all the other characters, though, it is Rachel Amber — whose conspicuous and tragic absence animates much of Chloe and Max’s actions in the original game — who throws into relief the coalescing of the mundane and the incredible. Effortlessly cool, beloved by faculty and students, and brimming with confidence and charm Rachel is a compelling foil for Chloe and when she shows up about halfway through the episode sparks fly between the two of them. Here is a different sort of mystery: the joys and anxieties of new relationships.

On Rachel’s request, the two of them ditch school to chase adventures elsewhere. There is no crime to solve and no aliens to fight. Instead, there are two girls skipping school and testing the boundaries of what they can share and who they can be with each other. They do things like play two truths and a lie, steal a bottle of wine, and listen to music together while saying things they don’t feel and feeling things they don’t say. The writing can be snarky or funny, but it’s never anything less than genuine. Their budding relationship is remarkably tender and a bit awkward — as teenage romance can be. In one way, this feels revelatory and refreshing for a medium that often ignores the stories and experiences of young women. On another level, though, what’s most remarkable about this section is just how ordinary it all is.

What we often call the “supernatural” is nowhere to be found in Before the Storm. Instead, we see the affect of the ordinary. It is about the quotidian, everyday items, places, conversations, and most of all people who shape us, help us create meaning, and make us feel less alone. These are the people that we share drinks with, complain about our family to, and imagine better futures with. Rachel and Chloe may not have super powers, but by the end of the episode it’s clear that they have each other and that is its own kind of magic.