A decade ago this month, the fifth and final episode of Life Is Strange was released, and avid players like myself — who had been hanging on the story’s every twist and turn for nine months — were faced with a terrible choice: Save our beautiful hometown in the Pacific Northwest (and its many inhabitants), or save our charismatic bestie-slash-girlfriend, Chloe.
It was basically the Trolley Problem, except it revealed that half the playerbase, myself included, are unabashed sociopaths and will happily flatten a town if it means getting to hang on to our main squeeze. The game tracks player statistics, and when I finished the game and saw that 52% of players had sacrificed an entire town full of people to save one character, the only thing that surprised me was the fact that the stats weren’t closer to 75%.
Chloe, despite her many flaws — and despite not being the protagonist — is the heartbeat of Life is Strange. She’s impulsive, quick to anger, occasionally manipulative, and somewhat emotionally unstable. But she’s also extremely likeable. At her best, she’s funny, brave, and deeply loyal. She feels like someone you know in real life, who you love with all your heart in spite of their shortcomings.
Life is Strange lets players choose the course of Chloe and player-character Max’s relationship, but whether you play them as a romantic couple or platonic best friends, their connection is fierce and believable. Chloe’s presence makes Max feel like a real person. Without Chloe, Max is effectively a sentient charisma vacuum, and that honestly works just fine for a player-surrogate character. Players relate to Max via their shared love (platonic or otherwise) for Chloe. The fact that so many players made the choice to save Chloe speaks to the strength of her character; she’s likable even when she’s doing something unlikable, she’s funny even when she’s being objectively cringey, and most importantly, she brings Max to life.
But the downside of creating a game with a narrative shaped by player choice is that sequels inevitably become more difficult to write, especially when you’ve got time-travel and multiverse theory involved, as is the case in 2024’s Life is Strange: Double Exposure. There are plenty of things I dislike about this sequel, but its most glaring issue is Chloe’s absence. If you sacrificed her in the end of the first game, she’s obviously dead in the second, which at least makes sense, even if it leads to a dull plot with a new character serving as a stand-in Chloe. But if you saved Chloe at the end of the first game, as many players did, she’s still nowhere to be seen in Double Exposure. Why? Well, according to Max, they “grew apart.”
I’m sorry, what? You expect me to believe that Max and Chloe “grew apart”? The same Chloe who got super pissed any time she felt abandoned by Max? The Chloe who Max repeatedly wrenched from the claws of death by screwing with the flow of time itself? The Chloe Max flattened her hometown to save? That Chloe? You’re telling me they drove off like Bonnie and Clyde after allowing a time-tornado to massacre everyone they knew and then just… casually drifted apart? I don’t buy it.
Max Caulfield and the Life is Strange franchise itself are at their best when Chloe’s in the picture. But if the game’s writers are determined to make Chloe a thing of the past, she needs to be definitively killed off.
Hear me out: Chloe and Max need each other. Max is a pretty lackluster character without Chloe, and without Max, Chloe has no one to keep her from dying in a freak accident. The original Life is Strange makes it pretty clear that Chloe is basically a Final Destination character: She is destined to die. It’s literally the first thing we see her do in Life is Strange. Throughout the course of the first game, Chloe dies in bathroom altercations, target practice mishaps, freak train accidents, and more. Without Max around to constantly provide do-overs when things go sideways, she would stay dead. My biggest issue with Double Exposure isn’t the fact that Chloe isn’t there — it’s the fact that if she’s not with Max, there is no way she should even be alive.
Life is Strange 2 focuses intensely on Max’s ability to slip between two universes: one in which her friend Safi is dead, and another in which she’s alive. If the series plans to continue Max Caulfield’s story, I’d love to see it take that premise and allow players to explore dual universes where the character whose life hangs in the balance is the one we all initially fell in love with a decade ago: Chloe Price.
Thankfully, we’ve got the Life is Strange television adaptation to look forward to. But the show’s writers will certainly face two major hurdles: getting Chloe (and the way she influences Max) right, and deciding whether she canonically lives or dies.