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It's time to be an everyday hero.
Max Caulfield: I'm so glad you're my partner in crime.
Chloe Price: As long as you're my partner in time.

Life Is Strange is a 2015 episodic Adventure Game and the first entry in the Life Is Strange franchise. It was developed by DONTNOD Entertainment and published by Square Enix.

It's October 2013, and Maxine "Max" Caulfield (Hannah Telle) is an 18-year-old High School senior who just recently moved back to her hometown of Arcadia Bay, Oregon, after an absence of five years. When she sees a girl get shot by a fellow student, Max discovers she can rewind time, allowing her to change what happened and save the girl. The girl is later revealed to be Chloe Price (Ashly Burch), Max's former best friend, and the two have a rather strange but heartfelt reunion.

As Chloe and Max try to patch their rusted friendship, and figure out how the other has changed in their mutual absence, Max learns of Rachel Amber, a former Blackwell Academy student who disappeared six months ago under mysterious circumstances after meeting someone who allegedly "changed her life". Chloe, who had formed a strong bond with Rachel after Chloe's father died and Max moved away, is desperate to find her. To try to reconnect with her old friend, Max decides to help Chloe look for Rachel. At the same time, Chloe and Max try to investigate the ramifications of Max's new power, spurred by Max's recurring visions of a tornado wiping out the town in four days.

This new power comes in handy with the other major difficulty in Max's life: Arcadia Bay. Coming back after five years of total absence is difficult enough, and Max's social life is made complex by her choice of high school: Blackwell, an elite institution to which Max has a full ride scholarship, studying photography. The town and school are filled with a diverse cast of characters, all of whom have their own secrets and agendas. Max must not only do her best to help Chloe find the missing Rachel, whom everybody seems to know, she must navigate the treacherous waters of personal relationships with the people around her, and not all of them have good intentions at heart.

Focusing primarily on the relationship between Max and Chloe as the world goes wrong around them, Life Is Strange is an emotional, story-driven game that offers a twist on the typical adventure game: Max's ability to rewind time. This power allows her (and thus the player) to explore the immediate outcome of choices and dialog options, then rewind to test other possibilities, even creating new ones using information gained from previous interactions. It creates an interesting in-universe form of Save Scumming for our heroine. Max must make choices that will deeply affect herself and those around her, and seemingly small or insignificant decisions can have a huge impact down the line. With time running out and the tornado looming, will Max's choices save Arcadia Bay, or doom it?

Season 1 consists of five episodes, which were released roughly eight weeks apart throughout 2015. It is available for download on iOS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Mac, Linux, and PC (the last three through Steam), and you can download the entire first episode for free to try it out if you're on the fence. It's available for disc retail (with an optional limited edition) only on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The limited edition featured the game's licensed soundtrack on CD, a 32-page art book in the style of Max's journal, and a director's commentary which was released to all players. You can find launch trailers, developer videos, and other such context at the official YouTube channel.

A remastered version was released in 2022 as part of the Life Is Strange Remastered Collection, or in the case of the Nintendo Switch version, the Acardia Bay Collection.

Related works include:

  • A three-episode prequel game about Chloe and Rachel titled Life Is Strange: Before the Storm was released in 2017, set three years before the start of this game. The Deluxe Edition, which was released on March 6, 2018, contains a bonus episode, titled Farewell, that takes place two years earlier still, and follows Max and Chloe on the last day they spent together before Max moved to Seattle.
  • Life Is Strange, a comic book series published by Titan Comics that's set after one of the endings of Season 1.
  • In late 2016, Legendary Pictures obtained the screen license, and they've announced their plans to create a live-action digital series based on the game.

For other not-as-related-but-still-tangentially-related works, check out the franchise page.

No relation to the film Love Is Strange, but yes relation to the visual novel Love Is Strange, which is a fan game for Life Is Strange.

Beware! Due to the choice-based nature of the game, there are many spoilers. Proceed with caution!


Tropes found in this game:

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  • Absurdly Ineffective Barricade: The Prescott barn is kept locked on the outside, but the side door is blocked only by two thin sheets of rusted metal that Max easily moves.
  • Actually Pretty Funny: Max finds Victoria's "go fuck your selfie" line to be mean but funny.
  • Adults Are Useless: None of the adults in this game seem particularly helpful:
    • Principal Wells is almost guaranteed not to believe Max in any situation. If you tell him about Nathan Prescott having a gun in the bathroom, Wells will cite Nathan's family and status as an honor roll student as reasons why this is unlikely. The worst he does is call him to the office. The action also backfires on Max, as he'll then contact her parents and accuse her of "telling tall tales". If you try to report David Madsen before class in Episode 2, Wells always finds an excuse to not trust what Max says no matter what choices the player has made. The only time he's remotely helpful is in the aftermath of Kate's suicide. Depending on your previous choices, he can be convinced to suspend Nathan on suspicion of drugging Kate and recording the salacious video of her, suspend David for antagonizing Kate (but only if you have proof), or lightly punish Mr. Jefferson for Victim-Blaming Kate. Chloe picks up on this, deriding him as a drunk who's more concerned with the school's bottom line. In Nathan's case, Wells is being pressured by his rich father, to the point that Nathan's records are outright falsified.
    • The security guard, David, is outright antagonistic to Max and Kate, though he's at least shown intervening in the fight between Nathan and Warren after Chloe takes off with Max. He can be seen grilling Nathan in Episode 2. He does seem to mean well, it's just that he has trouble separating his prior military career from his civilian life. He ultimately turns out to be a subversion: David is actually the only authority figure investigating Rachel's disappearance and he's the key to defeating the culprit.
    • Mr. Jefferson is a nice guy in Episode 1, but when confronted with cruel gossip about a student in Episode 2, he resorts to Victim-Blaming. He also turns out to be the Big Bad all along and murders Chloe upon his reveal. It's likely he willfully invoked this to manipulate Kate and clean up a possible loose end.
    • While Ms. Grant is shown to be nice, the extent of her help is simply a petition to stop David from putting up security cameras. If Max signs the petition, it will pass.
  • Agree to Disagree: Victoria will note to Max that it appears the two of them just aren't meant to be friends. Max can in turn point that it might be the case, but it doesn't mean they have to be enemies. If Max has been nice to Victoria, she will agree with this.
  • Alleged Lookalikes: In Episode 3, both Joyce and Nathan mistake Max for Rachel Amber at first glance when they see Max wearing Rachel's old clothes; while Rachel doesn't appear in the flesh until Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, her face is clearly visible on her missing persons posters, and she doesn't resemble Max in the slightest. That's without getting into how radically different their personalities, voices, and mannerisms are from each other.
  • All for Nothing: This is basically the ultimate outcome if Max decides to sacrifice Chloe in Episode 5. Because of this, Nathan gets arrested, confesses about Jefferson and subsequently gets him arrested, Kate never attempts suicide, Max's power doesn't manifest, and the storm never happens. This gives off the impression that Max never really had to do anything to fix what needed to be fixed.
  • All Love Is Unrequited: Brooke likes Warren, Warren likes Max, Max likes Chloe, Chloe likes Rachel, Rachel likes Frank.
  • All the Worlds Are a Stage: During Max's Nightmare Sequence near the end, a lot of places are "revisited" while trying to escape from it. They include Mr. Jefferson's classroom, the girls' dormitory hall, the school, the swimming pool lockers, the junkyard, Chloe's house, the Dark Room, the Two Whales Diner and a lot of Max and Chloe's moments that happened during the game.
  • Alone with the Psycho: At the end of Episode 4, Max winds up alone with Mr. Jefferson in the Dark Room. She manages to alert David via time travel who then comes to her rescue.
  • Alternate Universe:
    • The game takes place in present-day Arcadia Bay, about five years after Chloe's father, William, died in a car accident. However, if he hadn't, things would be much different. He and Joyce would still be married, David becomes a school bus driver, Max would be part of the popular clique at Blackwell, and she'd be semi-sorta popular for a photo contest. Unfortunately, in this timeline, Chloe ended up in a car accident instead and has been paralyzed from it. Also, Rachel still goes missing. In Episode 5, it's revealed that each of her time jumps creates a new universe where something different happens.
    • By all technicality, the entire course of the game takes place in an alternate reality in which Chloe does not die in the bathroom in Episode 1. Choosing the "Sacrifice Chloe" ending brings back the "real" timeline in which she did die.
  • Always Save the Girl: Potentially your mindset at the end when choosing to save Chloe over Arcadia Bay.
  • Ambiguous Ending: In the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending, it is not clear how many people are killed by the tornado, and who of the protagonists (beyond Max and Chloe) are alive. Life is Strange 2 reveals that Joyce died, but David and Victoria survived thanks to the Dark Room providing shelter for them. According to David, nearly the entire population of the town died.
  • And Some Other Stuff: Averted. Episode 3 offers the combination of sodium chlorate (weed killer), sugar, and a soda can to make an improvised pipe bomb. The first two do produce a violent chemical reaction with an ignition source, though it's doubtful a mere soda can and duct tape would serve as an effective container to make a bomb with.
  • And This Is for...: In Episode 4, when you let Warren beat up Nathan, he does so in such a fashion:
    Warren: You like to hurt people, huh? [kicks Nathan in the gut] Like Max? [kick] Like Kate? [kick] Like me? [kick] Feel this, motherfucker!
  • Angry Guard Dog: Pompidou fiercely protects Frank.
  • Animal Motif:
    • There's a lot of birds featured in the game. You can take photographs of birds, they are frequently seen sitting around, and in Episode 1, you can save one of them from flying into a window. If you look closely at the sky at some parts of the game, you can see flocks of birds flying erratically in the distance. They might even have some connection to time, since in Episode 2 when Kate is on the roof and Max stops time, birds are everywhere. In Episode 3, one of the phenomena happening is birds falling dead from the sky.
    • Does. Max sports at least two shirts with a doe on it. Then there is The Marvelous Deer that occasionally pops up to guide her. It's been confirmed that this doe is Rachel's presence. Note that the spot where it appears in the junkyard is exactly where Rachel was buried.
    • Butterflies are associated with Chloe. The butterfly we see early on is blue like Chloe's hair and in the funeral ending the butterfly lands on Chloe's coffin. Also, Chloe has a butterfly tattoo.
    • Whales show up in the theme of the diner Joyce works at, and the numerous beached whales in the alternate timeline at the end of Episode 3 as well as both timelines in Episode 4.
    • Samuel tells Max his spirit animal is a squirrel. Looking in Samuel's shed, you see that he likes to collect things.
    • Dogs for Frank. He has a beloved pet and it's a good clue that despite all his figurative growling and biting, he's loyal and a bit more complex than you'd expect from a abrasive drug dealer.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Each episode has ten optional photographs. If you fail to get all ten in one playthrough, the chapter select tells you how many are in each chapter and offers a handy "Collectible Mode" that runs the chapter independent of your save file, allowing you to mess around to your heart's content. A patch just prior to Episode 5 enabled this feature to be used with any chapter, not just those with photographs.
    • Though the game doesn't let you skip cutscenes or dialogue normally, you are allowed to do so if you've already seen them after a rewind or if you replay that chapter in Collectible Mode.
    • Objects that Max can take a closer look at (like posters and books) are recorded in her journal, and can be re-examined at any time in any episode.
    • In Episode 2, during the bottle Fetch Quest at the junkyard, going long enough without finding a bottle causes Max to voice a hint as to where one might be. The hidden bonfire bottle is rather infamously difficult to find in spite of this, being nestled between two cars and pretty hard to spot, which isn't helped by Max's hint being fairly vague. A patch added more clues to make this even less frustrating.
    • If you're being really dense during some of the puzzles, after a few minutes, Max will gently remind you that she can rewind time.
    • During the Nightmare Sequence in Episode 5, Max is locked in the bathroom of the Two Whales Diner by a keypad. Once you fail the combination once, all the walls are covered in numbers, any one of which could be the right one. If you wait a bit, Max will give you a hint on how none of the numbers appear in the mirror.
    • A patch eventually added a feature to the focus minigame where if you take too long to complete the minigame, a notification will appear telling you to press a certain button to autocomplete the focus.
    • When searching for hints to unlock Nathan's phone, after three tries, it'll ask for the phone's PUK code, which is more conveniently found on his SIM card package.
    • If the confrontation with Frank goes poorly and Max rewinds it in Episode 4, she can talk to Chloe and Frank to make it easier. If Chloe has a gun and Max tells her to get rid of it, Chloe won't shoot Frank or Pompidou, preventing either from being killed. If Max asks Frank to lock Pompidou in his RV (provided Pompidou wasn't hit by a car in Episode 3), Pompidou won't attack Chloe.
  • Arc Symbol:
    • Spirals/vortices. Examples include the icon for Max's powers, the Vortex Club and their posters, and the tornado. Not to mention the swarm of ants beside the Two Whales in Episode 3. Even Max herself points out how ominous it seems.
    • Cameras and photography. Even characters not associated with photography are seen with cameras, like David. Several photography references show up in the game, including one of the episode titles and of all the pictures you can take for achievements/trophies. In Episode 4, it's revealed that Mr. Jefferson has been running a covert photography operation involving drugged women.
    • The butterfly, referencing the Chaos Theory, a.k.a. the Butterfly Effect, created through time travel. Max sees one shortly before she discovers her ability. Consequently, butterflies in the game symbolize an upcoming decision point. It's also associated with Chloe, given that it's blue and it first appears when Max first sees her. If you choose to sacrifice Chloe in the game's finale, it lands on Chloe's coffin, which somehow comforts Max.
    • Does. Two of Max's outfits have a doe on them, Chloe's snowglobe has a doe inside of it, and she runs into a phantom doe at a few points in the game.
  • Arcadia: In name only. Arcadia Bay is not one of the best places you'd want to live. However, if you speak with people around the town, they imply that it had been a much nicer place before the Prescotts took over.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Max mentions in her journal that she didn't want to tell everything to Warren:
    "He would want to marry me immediately, just so he could have his own human time machine. Or capture me for scientific experiments. Or make me go to the drive-in with him."
  • Artistic License – Animal Care: While taking care of Kate’s rabbit, it’s fed an exclusive diet of carrots, without any pellets or hay. This is roughly analogous to only feeding a human candy.
  • Artistic License – Chemistry: In Episode 2, Warren's science experiment can involve adding chlorine, potassium or sodium. Whenever anything's added, it's always from a beaker of some clear solution. Of these, only chlorine could be added this way (since it can be bubbled through water to form an aqueous solution,note ) since potassium and sodium are metals which are solid at room temperature (and need to be stored in oil to prevent them from reacting with the air).
  • Artistic License – Geology: A vortex that builds up over water is not called a tornado while over water but a waterspout. Once the waterspout makes landfall though, it can be called a tornado. Additionally, tornadoes don't stay in one place but move in an approximate straight line. Thirdly, given the size of the tornado, Arcadia Bay would have been utterly destroyed with buildings completely removed from their foundations.
  • Artistic License – Physics:
    • The game uses the chaos theory as a rough explanation as for why Max's powers are causing disasters. However, the theory only deals with the behavior of a system which can have radically different outcomes based on the initial conditions. In this situation, the theory would only apply to the changes that result from the choices Max makes, and would not explain phenomenon that are strange and/or outright impossible.
    • The creators admitted that tearing Polaroids apart like Max does several times in the game is not possible, as they have a fairly tough plastic coating, but they put it in for dramatic effect.
  • Ascended Meme:
    • In Episode 5, Max receives a text from Mr. Jefferson reading "How hard is it to turn in one fucking selfie?" during the backwards sequence, referencing the "I told you to hand in your fucking photo" meme that appeared after Episode 4's ending.
    • The bottle hunting sequence in Episode 2 became so notorious for its difficulty and pointlessness that in Episode 5, Max's nightmare sequence includes a large amount of bottles which, when picked up, will elicit an appropriately snarky response from her.
  • Attempted Rape: Possibly. Nathan drugged Chloe and took photographs of her while she was unconscious. Fortunately, she awoke and managed to fight back and escape before he got around to doing anything really nasty. Kate, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky, which resulted in a scandal when she was recorded doing it. Episode 5 outright states that even though Mr. Jefferson and Nathan drugged, kidnapped and took creepy photos of a number of girls, none of them were in fact sexually assaulted. However, as both Kate and Max's reactions show, the difference is largely academic, and Kate was clearly taken advantage of in her drugged state anyway, as she was coerced into making out with several boys.
  • Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Two tragic examples in Episode 5. The first one is from David towards Chloe. If Max lies and tells him that Chloe is alive and just separated from her to smoke pot, David will be relieved, saying that for the first time he's glad that Chloe's a stoner. If she tells him that Chloe is dead, David will kill Mr. Jefferson in a fit of rage. Afterwards, he'll look very depressed about everything. The second is from Chloe towards David, as she calls him her stepfather instead of "step-douche" for the first time, but this happens in a moment which either she is going to die or Arcadia Bay is going to be destroyed.
  • Axes at School: Nathan pulls a gun on Chloe for trying to extort him early in the game, and shoots Chloe with it when they get in a struggle. Luckily, Max is there to undo things. Or not, in the Sacrifice Chloe ending, but Nathan does get caught and punished.
  • "Back to Camera" Pose: Max's award winning photo is a selfie of herself facing away from the camera, looking at a wall of her own selfies. In-universe, it's considered an impressive work of art for a high school graduate, at least. Out of universe, it, along with her habitual selfie-taking, represents her own introversion, even more so the way she's reluctant to submit it for a contest she wins handily after going back in time to enter.
  • Back to the Early Installment:
    • In Episode Five, Max travels back to a scene near the end of Episode Four, to prevent Chloe from being killed by Mr. Jefferson.
    • One ending lets Max travel back to the confrontation in the bathroom where she first discovered her powers.
  • Bait-and-Switch: Max and Chloe are trying to find the missing Rachel, with Chloe repeatedly insisting that Rachel must still be alive. The only real way that could be true is if she's been held captive somewhere. This is reinforced with Nathan's scribbled Madness Mantra of "Rachel in the Dark Room." Eventually, Max discovers an underground bunker with lots of stored food, just the kind of place someone could be held captive for weeks. But it turns out that Rachel isn't there and has in fact been dead all along.
  • Bathroom Stall Graffiti:
    • Once Max enters the girls bathroom, we see "Rachel Amber is a bitch!" written on one of the stall doors. In the little space next to the stalls where Max can hide, someone has written "I hate Victoria Chase!". Odds are pretty good Victoria wrote the former. Several other locations have similarly derogatory graffiti; apparently the venue for Rachel hate is limited to wall-tagging.
    • The Two Whales diner bathroom also has some. Or way too many.
    • More can be seen inside the pool building changing rooms/bathrooms in Episode 3.
    • A particularly nasty example appears in the Two Whales' bathroom if you saved Kate in Episode 2: "KATE MARSH SHOULD HAVE JUMPED". Max is rightfully disgusted.
  • Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults: While taking a shower in Episode 2, Max will overhear Victoria and Taylor gossiping about her and Kate.
  • The Beautiful Elite: The greatest concentration of beauties makes up the Vortex Club. Rachel deserves special mention because no matter what her contemporaries think of her personality, everyone agrees that she's drop-dead gorgeous.
  • Because You Were Nice to Me: In Episode 5 Max finally tells Warren about her powers and he immediately begins theorizing about them causing the storm. If you choose the option to ask "You believe me?" he says he does because of this:
    Warren: ...and you've always treated me like a person, not... not a beta nerd. I told you before that I'll always believe you.
  • Behind the Black:
    • The game starts with Max's very first tornado vision. Said tornado is in plain sight for most of the segment, yet Max doesn't comment on or even consciously notice it until she's literally standing at the edge of the cliff overlooking the town and its coastline.
    • Early on in Episode 3, Chloe does a Jump Scare on Max in front of the school building. However, the place was empty when Max gets there and there was nothing for Chloe to hide behind to surprise Max from.
  • Betty and Veronica: Max has two possible love interests: the sweet, geeky Warren whom she's known for a while (the Betty), or the brash, adventurous Chloe who she's just reunited with (the Veronica). Depending on the player's choices, Max can kiss Warren, Chloe, neither, or both.
  • Big Bad: The kidnapper of Rachel Amber. The primary suspect is Nathan Prescott, popular honors student and son to the influential mogul, Sean Prescott, who kicks off the plot by murdering Chloe—prompting Max to discover her Time Travel powers to save her—and antagonizes Max throughout the story. The other two suspects are David Madsen, Chloe’s paranoid stepfather who serves as the school chief of security, and Francis "Frank" Bowers, an aggressive drug dealer who constantly tries to extort money from Chloe and seems to have a connection with Rachel. Episode 4 ultimately reveals that David and Frank are mostly innocent, while Nathan is the one drugging the girls at Vortex club parties and is responsible for Rachel's disappearance. However, Episode 5 reveals he was doing it under orders from the true mastermind—Mark Jefferson, Max’s beloved teacher and famous photographer, who wanted to satisfy his sick fetishes.
  • The Big Bad Shuffle: At least three characters are presented as candidates for being the culprit behind the disappearance of Rachel Amber:
    • David's paranoia and rudeness towards Kate make him look suspicious, along with a vague connection to Nathan. However, he turns out to be a completely uninvolved and is in fact trying to track down the real culprit.
    • Frank Bowers is shown wearing Rachel's bracelet, which immediately makes him a prime suspect. He is also a drug dealer who constantly tries to extort money from Chloe. However, the bracelet turns out to be a gift from Rachel who was dating him. This leaves Frank as an unintentional accessory through his drug dealing.
    • Nathan Prescott is the most evident suspect of Rachel's disappearance due to his reckless gun usage on Chloe, as well as Kate's testimony about the drugging incident at the Vortex Club party. However, as revealed in Episode 4, Nathan is only The Dragon to Mr. Jefferson, who manipulated Nathan.
  • Big Storm Episode: Episode 5 takes place (mostly; when not in an alternate timeline) during the storm that's foreshadowed at the very beginning.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • Episode 3. Max discovers a new power that allows her to save Chloe's dad, thus not having Joyce marry David and Chloe not be in her situation. However, the ending shot is a now-quadriplegic Chloe confined to a motorized wheelchair and with a ventilator, who is nevertheless happy to see Max. Episode 4 lets the air out of that by revealing that Chloe's treatment is driving her family to bankruptcy, and the nature of her injury means she is going to die soon anyway. She then leaves it to Max to decide to euthanize her or not.
    • The game as a whole:
      • The "Sacrifice Chloe" ending. At Chloe's urging, Max uses the butterfly photo to travel back to the start of the game and allows Nathan to kill Chloe, preventing Max's powers from manifesting and preventing the tornado from ever happening. Chloe dies, without ever reuniting with Max or learning what happened to Rachel, but her murder leads to Mr. Jefferson and Nathan getting arrested, everyone who could have died over the course of the game surviving regardless of what happened to them during the game, and the tornado never happens.
      • The "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" ending. Max refuses to kill Chloe to save Arcadia Bay and tears up the butterfly photo. The town is destroyed, with the implication that a good number (if not all) of its inhabitants are dead, but Max and Chloe survive and are together.
  • Black Bug Room: The Nightmare Sequence in Episode 5, where Max has to directly confront all of her subconscious fears.
  • Blackmail: Chloe attempts to blackmail Nathan for drugging her, hoping to use the money to help her and Rachel finally escape Arcadia Bay together. It goes very poorly.
  • Blatant Lies: Victoria claims that she only posted the video of Kate because she got drunk and did it as a joke, but in Episode 2, a quite clearly sober Victoria writes the link to the video on the mirror of the girls bathroom, meaning she lied to Max's face.
  • Bleed 'Em and Weep: This is Chloe's reaction if she shoots Frank.
  • Body Horror: While exploring the Dark Room in Episode 4, you see an anime style poster of a young girl tearing her throat out with tentacles ripping out of the wound.
  • Bondage Is Bad: Used to codify the villainy of both Nathan and Mr. Jefferson since they tie up the girls that they drug, kidnap, and then photograph. Though what's highlighted as bad about this is its nonconsensual nature, rather than the bondage itself.
  • Book Ends:
    • The game begins and ends in the lighthouse, moments before the tornado destroys Arcadia Bay.
    • Both Episodes 1 and 5 end with Max and Chloe witnessing a phenomenon created by Max's powers with Syd Matters' "Obstacles" playing if you choose to Sacrifice Arcadia Bay.
    • The blue butterfly that signaled Chloe's first appearance in Episode 1 also lands on her coffin in the Sacrifice Chloe ending, signalling her last appearance.
  • Brand X: Despite the fact that the genericized trademark "Polaroid" has become the standard term, everyone scrupulously refers to Max's cameras as "instant cameras."
  • Breather Episode: Episode 3 is noticeably slower and more low-key than the first two episodes, especially after the whirlwind of drama that was the end of the second episode. That is, until the ending.
  • Brick Joke:
    • If you examine Chloe's truck in the parking lot, Max will comment on her poor parking job. Later on, if you look in Chloe's trash, you'll see that she's racked up a number of parking tickets. A parking ticket is also one of the four items in Episode 2 that you have to guess to prove your power to Chloe.
    • In the main school building, you can see a poster asking about a backpack and a tablet with pictures of dead cats. A small post-it note on another board indicates that the thief is attempting to sell the tablet. Around when you first go to the Vortex Club party, you can hear Stella say to someone that she didn't find a tablet with cat pictures. An apology note from the tablet's thief can be found in Episode 5, as Max navigates the street while attempting to get to the Two Whales diner. Also in Episode 5 is a slightly creepier example: during the nightmare, Max's journal has a single two page spread filled with some self-deprecating text and various mixed up references to game events. At the bottom left, the journal reads, "FIND MY CAT PIX. PLEASE. MY HEART IS BROKEN."
  • Brought Down to Normal:
    • When you need to talk down Kate from committing suicide near the end of Episode 2, Max has overtaxed her powers and can't rewind, meaning you only get the one go at it (Save Scumming notwithstanding).
    • At the end of Episode 4, Max gets sedated and cannot sustain her rewind powers, leaving her to helplessly watch as Chloe is shot in the head.
  • Bullying a Dragon: The entire game only happens because Chloe thought it was a good idea to extort and blackmail Nathan Prescott, a mentally-unstable man whose family has connections throughout all of Arcadia Bay. This directly leads to her death when she pushes him too far and he shoots her in response.
  • Burning the Ships:
    • In Episode 4, Max burns the photograph she had used to change history in the previous episode, making sure she isn't tempted to do it again.
    • Happens in the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending, where Max rips up the butterfly photo and lets it fly into the wind.
    • Happens in the Sacrifice Chloe ending; by not intervening, Max created a timeline where her powers never manifested, and therefore she cannot change her mind.
  • Bury Your Gays: An accidental implication of the endings is this. Only in the Sacrifice Chloe ending do Max and Chloe kiss. Word of God is that they thought it was clear in the other ending that they were in love; they just don't kiss because watching the town be destroyed is hardly the best moment for romance. They progress their relationship a few days later.
  • Bus Crash: Nathan suddenly disappears in Episode 4. In the beginning of Episode 5, when Max asks where is he, Mr. Jefferson says "dead and buried", implying that Nathan was Killed Offscreen.
  • But Thou Must!:
    • In Episode 1, when Max sees David bullying Kate, she has the option to either take a photo or intervene. Taking a photo may come in handy later as an evidence against David, but it also makes Kate angry at Max, making it more difficult to talk her down from the roof later. There is no way to take a photo, then intervene.
    • There's one part in the nightmare sequence when Max is forced with four equally horrible things to say to Mr. Jefferson and the game won't continue unless you choose one of them. Max even comments, "No way am I saying that!"
  • Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: You spot a beautiful blue butterfly right before Chloe is shot in the bathroom (death) and you save her life (rebirth). Of course, by doing so, Max may have caused greater ramifications. Episode 5 confirms that she has by saving Chloe's life.
  • Butterfly of Doom: Implicitly, Max's continued use of her powers is causing odd weather events and other problems, apparently leading to a tornado destroying the town at the end of the week. This is preceded by snowfall in early October, an unscheduled eclipse, birds and fish dying, beached whales in both timelines, and a second moon appearing, which may be from the alternate timeline. Episode 5 confirms this theory - saving Chloe's life is what caused all the crazy stuff to happen, and Max can fix it by letting Chloe die.
  • Butterfly of Transformation: Episode 1 is titled Chrysalis, and a butterfly icon appears anytime you make a decision that will have consequences, good or bad.
  • Call-Back: Max's line "Eat shit and die" in Episode 5 is a reference to a graffiti in the junkyard saying "Eat shit and live".
  • Canada, Eh?: The "weird lady" seen at the Two Whales in Episode 2 is a tourist who speaks with a stereotypical Canadian accent.
  • Cassandra Truth: Nathan wields a gun in the girls' bathroom. When Max tries to expose this to Principal Wells, he just brushes it off. If only David could install some metal detectors instead of cameras.
  • Casting Gag: This isn't the first time that Ashly Burch, Chloe's voice actress, has voiced a character who found herself caught in someone else's time travel shenanigans. An added bonus is that when she learns about Max's time travel powers, she dismisses it as something that comes from an anime.
  • Catapult Nightmare: In the beginning of Episode 3, Max is seen asleep on her desk and getting startled screaming "Kate".
  • Cel Shading: Each texture in the game is hand-painted to achieve this look.
  • Chekhov's Party:
    • The Vortex Club party that happened just before the game begun. Kate is shown on video kissing multiple guys and very drunk. Max eventually figures out that she was spiked by Nathan, who took her to the Dark Room and took pictures of her.
    • The Vortex Club party that Max sneaks into qualifies because Mr. Jefferson is presenting the Everyday Heroes contest, which is how he manages to sneak up on Max after she and Chloe discover Rachel's body. It qualifies even more so if you were nice to Victoria and she believes you that Nathan is dangerous - because, after he kidnaps Max, Mr. Jefferson reveals that she came up to him at the party and told him about Nathan, causing him to kidnap and eventually kill her.
  • Circling Monologue: Victoria disses Max while circling around her when the latter tries to enter the dormitory.
  • Cliffhanger: The endings of Episodes 3 and 4 are this, especially cruel ones at that:
    • Episode 3: Max went back in time to the day William Price died and saved his life, but in the altered present, Chloe is a quadriplegic due to a car accident.
    • Episode 4: After resetting the timestream back to its previous form, Max and Chloe find Rachel's body buried in the junkyard. When they try to get revenge on Nathan for his apparent responsibility, they're led into a trap where Max is drugged suddenly and Chloe is murdered. The culprit is then revealed to be Mr. Jefferson, with the teaser insinuating he took Max to the Dark Room.
  • Clock Roaches: The strange phenomena start happening around town after Max starts using her powers, but Max starts having visions of the town in ruins and nobody left. It begins to look that saving Chloe either messed with destiny or the natural order of the world. The phenomena like the eclipse, the snow, etc., appear to be "natural" results of screwing with time, and the universe is apparently trying to right itself. The truly threatening clock roach is a freak storm that appears practically from nowhere and threatens to wipe out the town and everyone there, but it's up in the air whether that's just as the last and the most dramatic of the the other phenomena, or if it's actually a sort of immune response as the universe rebalances itself and grounding to the natural ebb of time. If it's a sort of immune response, then whether Chloe survived is immaterial after the disaster. It's notable that all the strangeness appears to be occuring exclusively to Arcadia Bay, as well.
  • Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: During the Nightmare Sequence, Max is chased by shadowy characters asking her to come out to get captured (Mr. Jefferson) or to play (Nathan).
  • Come with Me If You Want to Live: Kind of. Max's encounter with Nathan in the parking lot in Episode 1 culminates with Chloe driving up and Max jumping in with her to get away from Nathan.
  • Coming of Age Story: Max, Chloe, and Rachel are all in their late teens. The story deals in some part with Max learning that becoming an adult means dealing with the consequences — good and bad — of her choices.
  • Compartment Shot: Seen when Max finds Frank's gun in the overhead locker of his van.
  • Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: The game will try to nudge you into getting on with the story if you take too long looking at objects or otherwise not progressing. For example, both Warren and Chloe will send an additional text to Max if she takes too long getting to them.
  • Controllable Helplessness: After Mr. Jefferson captures Max and takes her to the Dark Room, you can move the camera and look around, but there are very few objects you can meaningfully interact with.
  • Corner of Woe: In the Sacrifice Chloe ending, Max sits behind the bathroom stalls weeping while Nathan shoots Chloe.
  • Covers Always Lie: A minor case. The game's official art shows Max using her power while holding out her left hand. In the game, she does this with her right hand. Max actually reproduces this image in her journal.
  • Creator Cameo: Christian Divine, one of the game's writers, voices Truss Limpbow in Episode 5.
  • Credits Gag: "To All of You", the first licensed song in the series, plays backwards in Max's nightmare. Naturally, when the credits arrive at the music section, it's spelled backwards.
  • Cruelty Is the Only Option:
    • The only way to get Victoria to stop blocking the door to the girls dorm is to ruin her outfit with water and paint. This is then followed by a choice of being kind or cruel about her predicament.
    • In Episode 5, Max has to turn on a sprinkler that will put out the fire that is blocking her way. In the process, a nearby fisherman will get electrocuted and die. While Max can rewind from the other side of the fire to save him and turn on the sprinkler from there, there is no way she can save him without killing him first.
  • Cyberbullying: Kate suffers from this after the Vortex Club records and shares a video of her making out with at least one boy at a party; she was drugged and didn't even remember what most of she did that night. Kate is then bullied severely by her fellow students, her fundamentalist Christian family calls her a "Jezebel", and she will eventually attempt to commit suicide by throwing herself off a rooftop. Max can talk her down, if she's been consistently supportive of Kate throughout the game.
  • Darker and Edgier: The game slowly moves into this territory, starting out as a somewhat lighthearted coming-of-age story with high school drama and a mystery to solve. As the truth behind Rachel's disappearance comes to light, things become less and less light, with Max making harder decisions and the weather events getting steadily worse. By the time we've gotten to Episode 5, the town is on the brink of destruction, and at the end of it all, Max has to make the hardest decision of her life.
  • Darkest Hour: At the end of Episode 4. Chloe is dead, Max has been kidnapped by the Big Bad, and the day the tornado is supposed to strike Arcadia Bay is approaching with Max unable to do anything to stop it.
  • Death is Cheap: Played straight most of the time, but subverted in three occasions: Chloe dies on multiple occasions: shot by Nathan, shot herself while doing trick shots, ran over by a train, either euthanized or die of respiratory system failure in the alternate timeline and finally shot by Mr. Jefferson. Max uses her powers to reverse all but the last one. Her powers fail when Kate tries to kill herself and she has to save her without them. Finally, she manages to save William, but the consequences are so bad she decides to undo it. This is also subverted with the revelation that Chloe's not dying creates the massive weather disturbances and tornado that eventually destroys Arcadia Bay. In this case, death prevents a disaster.
  • Decided by One Vote: The success of Ms. Grant's petition to stop David from installing security cameras hinges on Max's participation.
  • Deconstruction: Of being a superhero. Max's storyline is similar to a Superhero Origin, what with the sudden gaining of superpowers and using them to help people and prevent an impending disaster, but saving people is not as easy or simple as "punch out the villain".
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • A twofer that spans Episodes 1 and 2: In the middle of Episode 1, you have to visit Max's friend Dana to get back a flash drive that Dana borrowed. While doing this, you can look around the room. Look in the trash can and you'll find a pregnancy test. Of course, since you did this right in front of Dana, she'll notice and call you out for snooping into her private business. At this point, you're meant to use Max's time powers to undo this action, but you can choose not to, in which case talking to Dana in Episode 2 will trigger a special sequence where Max apologizes and patches things up with Dana.
    • In Episode 2, one of the five bottles in the junkyard is located on a boat which is too tall for Max to climb. To get there, you have to go up the nearby hill and move a large plank to make a bridge. After collecting the bottle, you can rewind this action and trap Max on the boat. Max will comment on how she's just trapped herself, then jump down so the player can keep going.
    • Also in the junkyard, you can find a doe that will move a few meters away from its spot once it sees you. Attempting to rewind it back to that spot will not work and Max will even comment about it. It turns out that this doe is not normal.
    • In Episode 3, when you visit the Blackwell pool with Chloe, she'll let Max choose which locker room to go through. If you pick one, enter it, then rewind and unlock it from the other side, Chloe will call you on using the same trick you used to get into the principal's office.
    • In Episode 4, Max's journal has unique cellphone texts and diary entries in the alternate timeline. There are also alternate texts in Episode 5, when you're trying to reach the lighthouse.
    • In Episode 4, the player is given four long lists of GPS coordinates associated with different license plates, the intent being to find the one associated with Nathan in order to track where he's been. However, one of the other pages is associated with Mr. Jefferson's car, and if you compare those coordinates with the places the game says they belong to when you figure out Nathan's whereabouts, they make total sense. In fact, if for some reason you decided to work this out before the ending, you'd probably figure out that he was actually the ringleader.
    • In Episode 5, looking at Max's journal in the timeline where Mr. Jefferson burnt her journal shows only burnt paper. Looking at it later when you're trying to reach the lighthouse shows a page full of crazy scribblings.
  • Diabolus ex Machina:
    • In Episode 2, Max's powers go awry right when they would be most useful. In the first instance, Max has a vision, during which Chloe gets her leg caught in the railroad tracks. This resets Max's rewind potential and she can only go back to the moment she left the vision, preventing her from just warning Chloe beforehand. Later, her Psychic Nosebleed kicks in when Kate commits suicide, and though Max is able to rewind enough to get to the roof, her powers are burnt out for the duration of the following conversation, meaning she has to get it right on the first try.
    • In Episode 4, Mr. Jefferson drugs Max before shooting Chloe, which prevents Max from focusing and rewinding it. It wasn't like he knew about Max's power, but he took exactly the action he would have if he did.
    • In the beginning of Episode 5, Max uses her photos to create an alternate timeline where Mr. Jefferson is arrested early and she goes to San Francisco as the winner of the Everyday Heroes Photo Contest. However, she forgets about the tornado and goes back to when she took her winning photo, destroying it so she stays to help Chloe. As a consequence, Mr. Jefferson finds the torn photo in her diary and burns her entire diary with all of her photos in it out of anger for her not turning it in.
    • The whole concept of Max's time travel is this. She got her power, or discovered it, by first using it to save Chloe. This turns out to be the root cause of the strange weather that will ultimately will destroy the town, unless Chloe dies — in which case, if that's what's needed to set things right, why give Max the power in the first place? Why make the impetus for it her saving Chloe? Why allow her to realize what life is with Chloe, what life can be, and then force her to undo it or watch as her hometown is destroyed? The game's explanation seems to be that, in Chloe's words, "shit just happens."
  • Disproportionate Retribution: On a cosmic level, the universe is really pissed that Max saved Chloe and decides to exact payment for her life (so to speak) by blowing the entire town of Arcadia Bay off the map. All because she saved one person. Or it is a result of Max's constant time-travel uses which screwed up the butterfly effect.
  • Distress Call: At the art gallery, Max receives a garbled call from Chloe who is stuck by the beach.
  • Do Not Do This Cool Thing: In-universe. Max quips that an abstinence poster must drive people to have sex, which isn't that far from the truth.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Nathan and Mr. Jefferson drug girls at parties, take them to an unknown location and does something to them. It's explicitly stated in Episode 5 that the "something" doesn't strictly speaking involve sexual assault, but the objectification and loss of bodily autonomy still has a very similar emotional impact on victims like Kate and Max.
  • Doomed Fellow Prisoner: In the beginning of the Episode 5, Max wakes up tied up in a chair by the Big Bad. Depending on the player's choices, Victoria might be there, drugged on the floor. Later on, after returning to the same situation via time travel, it's revealed Mr. Jefferson has killed her, and he's about to do the same to Max.
  • Down in the Dumps: American Rust, a junkyard on the outskirts of Arcadia Bay. It used to be one of Chloe and Rachel's secret hiding spots, and Chloe takes Max there to further test out Max's powers after the first test in the diner. It's also where Rachel is buried, and Mr. Jefferson uses this fact to lure Max and Chloe into a trap at the end of Episode 4.
  • Downer Ending:
    • Episode 2. For anyone unable to save Kate, who will jump to her death after being bullied and victim blamed through the two prior episodes.
    • Episode 4. Rachel is revealed to be long dead, Chloe is killed by Mr. Jefferson, and Max is drugged by him beforehand so she can't rewind it, leaving her at his mercy.
  • Dramatic Ammo Depletion: In Episode 2, there's a scene where Chloe practices with a gun she stole from her stepfather in the junkyard. She hands the gun to Max to try, when Frank, a drug dealer who Chloe owes a lot of money to, shows up and begins threatening the girls with a knife, causing Max to point the gun at him, giving the player a choice of whether or not to shoot at him. If you decide to shoot, it will turn out that Chloe had already used up all the bullets, but the fact Max was willing to pull the trigger is enough to scare Frank off and impress Chloe.
  • Dramatic Irony:
    • With Max's time travel powers, this is a given. One of the primary uses for rewind is gathering information through dialog and then going back to appear as if Max already had that information, making her appear more attentive or clever than she may actually be. For instance, when Max questions Juliet in the hallway, Juliet will accuse her of not really caring and ask if Max even knows her last name. Unless you read the dorm map and know the right answer, Max will take a guess. If it's wrong, Juliet will call Max out and correct her, at which point the player can rewind and get it right. Juliet will express surprise at her remembering her name, but odds are Max only knew because she used her powers to learn it.
    • The player knows that there are ominous red binders with Rachel and Kate's names on them, but there's no way for Max to know that until Episode 4.
    • "Nobody would even miss your punk ass, would they?!" Said as Max (and potentially the player) weep just out of Nathan and Chloe's sight.
  • Dream Intro: The game starts with a scene of Max at night by the lighthouse during the storm which turns out to be a Daydream Surprise she was having in class.
  • Dreaming of Things to Come: Max's Daydream Surprise in the opening scene of Episode 1 is a premonition of what's gonna happen to Arcadia Bay four days into the future.
  • Due to the Dead: Chloe's funeral in the Sacrifice Chloe ending. Most of the main cast attends.
  • Dysfunction Junction: Nearly everyone in Arcadia Bay has some kind of issue:
    • The Price family. When Max meets them again after five years after William Price's death, Joyce Price is married to a new husband traumatized by combat who physically and verbally abuses the borderline delinquent Chloe. After Max changes the timeline, William and Joyce are struggling to make ends meet and face the threat of eviction from the expenses of caring for Chloe, who is severely disabled and close to death.
    • The Prescotts. Their corruption spreads back over a century - in their secret barn, you can find photos and letters showing they were ruining people's lives right from the beginning. They're running (or at least funding) an illegal photography operation and might have been doing so for a long time. Sean Prescott is a greedy Corrupt Corporate Executive who seems to be trying to take over the whole town, and who willingly withholds help and treatment for his son Nathan's severe mental health issues. Meanwhile, Nathan is an aggressive, high-strung Jerk Jock who legally and violently threatens anyone who treads on his toes, appears to carry a gun with him at all times, and, willingly or not, drugs and abducts girls for Mr. Jefferson to use in his illegal photography operation. The only exception out of all of them is Nathan's sister, Kris Prescott, who works in the Peace Corps and seems to be oblivious to everything that's going on in Arcadia Bay.
  • Early-Bird Cameo: Joyce, Frank and Pompidou all briefly appear during the Episode 1 ending montage before their official introductions in Episode 2.
  • Empty Bedroom Grieving: In the alternate timeline, paralyzed Chloe is moved downstairs, leaving her upstairs bedroom empty, with some memories being left boxed up.
  • The End Is Nigh: Everyone in Arcadia Bay seems to think so, given the Signs of the End Times (flash snowstorm, the unscheduled eclipse and all those dead birds). Max can even comments that they might be right for once. There's also the homeless woman you can forewarn about this, and though it's not a major choice it does save her life when the storm finally hits. There are actually quite a few references to this, even casting aside Max's powers and the environmental weirdness that plagues Arcadia Bay over the course of the game. The Vortex Club is putting on an End of the World party (which they named before everything started going to hell), David is a prepper, and the Prescotts were funding what was essentially a doomsday bunker, even if that's not what it ended up being used for.
  • Enter Stage Window: Chloe and Max leave Chloe's room via her window in order to avoid David.
  • Establishing Character Moment:
    • The scenes that take place in Mr. Jefferson's classroom sets up a few characters' personalities.
      • Victoria takes the first opportunity to show Max up by flaunting her extensive research on photography. A bit before that, she tosses a ball of paper at Kate for seemingly no reason other than For the Evulz. This establishes her as an Alpha Bitch who preys on innocent, quiet students for a cheap laugh, as well as someone who is quite obviously hot for her teacher in the way she shows off for Jefferson's approval and chats him up after class.
      • Kate is being bullied by the "mean girls" posse in her class, and only sheepishly speaks to Max, a fellow Shrinking Violet. Later, she gets interrogated by David when she is quite clearly not the type of person he should be suspicious of, only being able to pathetically beg him to stop.
    • The bathroom scene in Episode 1 serves as a nice one for Max and Chloe, as well as Nathan (who serves as The Heavy):
      • Max gets stressed from class, makes her way to the bathroom while wearing her headphones to avoid interacting with anyone to try to collect herself alone in the bathroom, then sees something cool and photographs it. After developing her powers, and despite not having a clue what's going on, she endeavors to rescue the (apparent) stranger who just got shot.
      • Nathan aggressively barges in with barely any awareness. He also gives himself a pep talk while looking in the mirror, which quickly turns into a rant about how he could blow up the school. After Chloe pushes his buttons, by bringing the possibility of angering his father, he draws a gun to threaten her and accidentally kills her.
      • Chloe enters confidentially, sneaks in a complaint about David, methodically (but quickly) makes sure there's nobody in the stalls and then immediately starts trying to blackmail Nathan. When her browbeating accidentally sets Nathan off, she lets her mask slip enough to look scared while trying to threaten him into backing down, and when Max sets off the fire alarm as a distraction, she knees him in the crotch.
    • The scene right after the bathroom scene is one for David and Principal Wells. As soon as Max leaves the bathroom, David is being rude to her for not having left the building already. Wells then appears and tries to be nice to Max. However, he still won't believe her if she tells him that Nathan was brandishing a gun.
    • Warren is introduced attempting to hug Max, who obliviously leaves him hanging. He then chats her up about Video Nasties he pirated for her, and acts as a much-needed shoulder for Max to lean on after everything she just witnessed. Finally, he selflessly attempts to fight off Nathan after the latter assaults Max.
  • Everyone Is Bi: The franchise in infamous for always having a bisexual main character. Also a lot of the main characters and supporting characters are heavily implied to be bisexual. Though only two of the bisexual characters are male.
  • Evil Gloating: Mr. Jefferson does this to Max in the Dark Room for the sake of exposure.
  • Evolving Title Screen: Depending on the progress of the active save file, the title screen will reflect the time of day and other conditions. At the end of Episode 4, it depicts the tornado.
  • Experimented in College: Max will mention this in her journal if the player chooses the route where she kisses Chloe.
  • Extreme Mêlée Revenge: In Episode 4, Warren beats Nathan to a pulp if you let him. It's meant as a revenge for when Nathan beat Warren up in the parking lot and also for his mistreatment of Max and Kate.
  • Failed a Spot Check: In the scenes where Max is hiding in the bathroom while Nathan and Chloe are having their argument, not only does Nathan not check at all to see if anyone else is in the restroom, but Chloe only does a cursory glance of each stall without looking behind them (where Max is). This is doubly stupid because, realistically, if either of them had looked at the mirrors, Max would have been easily visible.
  • Failure Is the Only Option:
    • In the confrontation with Frank in Episode 2, rewinding causes Max to try and avoid the confrontation altogether by getting Chloe to leave immediately. However, Frank's already close enough, and Max was out long enough, that there simply isn't enough time to do that.
    • Ultimately, Max can't save everyone. Either she sacrifices Chloe for the town, undoing most of the week and letting her best friend and/or lover die in the bathroom, or she sacrifices Arcadia Bay to keep Chloe alive, killing who-knows-how-many people.
  • Fake Texting: Max describes one of her classmates as "hiding behind his phone", presumably via this trope.
  • Family Portrait of Characterization:
    • Kate's family photo shows them as a Proper Family, with all of them sharply dressed in black and white. Max dubs it "the All-American Zombie Family".
    • The photos in Chloe's house show her relationship with her family. In one photo, she is happy with her parents Joyce and William. In another one, Joyce looks happy with David, Joyce's new husband after William died, but Chloe is unhappy.
    • There is one photo of a child Nathan with his father Sean. Sean has a broad smile, while Nathan is crying. This emphasizes Nathan's family background as his Freudian Excuse for being the bully he is.
  • Fanservice Faux Fight: While they're in the school pool after hours in Episode 3, Max and Chloe play-fight by splashing one another with water.
  • Fantastic Aesop: Max suddenly manifests time travel powers after seeing Chloe shot. She discovers a lot of clever ways to use it, but no matter what she does, it never seems to make anything better in the end, and it's ultimately revealed that her use of the time travel is what's causing the coming apocalyptic storm, and the only way to stop it is to go back to the first time she used her powers and let the girl get shot. In other words, you shouldn't use time travel powers that are miraculously given to you after a terrible event, because the universe might have arbitrary rules that make time travel a bad idea to use.
  • Feminist Fantasy: You play as a female character who can rewind time and she uses this superpower to help others and catch sexual predators. Also, half of the game's main cast are females who have as much prominence as the males.
  • Fetch Quest: The bottle fetching at the junkyard, which was inserted to help the players get immersed in the universe.
  • Fire Alarm Distraction: After Max rewinds time following Nathan's murder of Chloe, she pulls the fire alarm during their confrontation. This distracts Nathan enough that Chloe can kick him in the groin.
  • Five-Second Foreshadowing: When Max first visits Chloe's house in the alternate timeline, sharp-eyed players will notice a wheelchair accessible ramp, hinting at Chloe's ultimate fate.
  • For Want Of A Nail:
    • Episode 3 plays it straight. Near the end of the episode, Max goes far enough back in time to save William Price's life, then returns to the present, where she finds a few things changed — David Madsen is now the school bus driver, Max is part of the Vortex Club, and Chloe has become paralyzed and wheelchair-bound.
    • Episode 5 has several instances due to Max's repeated hopping around through photographs, and it turns out the entire game is one - Max saving Chloe's life in the bathroom is what's causing the storm and other environmental catastrophes. This is also discussed by Warren and Max at Two Whales.
  • Foreshadowing: Has its own page.
  • Forgot About His Powers: In Episode 4, one major choice involves trying to get Frank's customer list. While there are several ways to get it, including killing him, it never occurs to Max to take the list herself, at which point she could rewind and avoid the whole confrontation. Instead, Chloe always takes it.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus:
    • A small one in Episode 2. If you take long enough searching for bottles in the junkyard scene, a freight train will rattle by. Quick eyes (or a well-timed rewind) will allow the player to note the engine's number: 1337.
    • Near the end of Episode 4, Chloe receives a text message from Nathan who is looking for her and Max. However, if you look closely, the way the message is texted is very different compared to the ones Max received from him. Turns out it is from Mr. Jefferson who may already have killed Nathan at that point and used his phone to lure them.
  • Frivolous Lawsuit: Nathan and his father are constantly threatening to sue everybody for defamation any time someone says anything they don't like, which indicates that they have a rather large misunderstanding of exactly what defamation is.
  • From New York to Nowhere: Max has come back from a five-year stay Seattle, a bustling metropolis that couldn't be more different than the small town of Arcadia Bay.
  • Full-Circle Revolution: A small-scale example. The Vortex Club was originally founded in The '80s as a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits group meant to counter Blackwell's dominant yuppie culture and offer support to the school's social outcasts. At the time the game is set, about three decades later, they have effectively become the school's new elitist hegemony of cool kids.
  • Full-Name Ultimatum: When you get Juliet's name wrong, then rewind, there is a dialog option to say this even before she asks for it:
    "Juliet Watson, you be nice!"
  • Funny Background Event:
    • When Max wakes up at the start of Episode 2, you can see Warren peeking out from behind the corner of the building if you look out the window.
    • In Episode 5, when Max is in San Francisco for the Everyday Heroes exhibit, you can run across a man and woman talking about Mr. Jefferson being arrested. The man is voiced by Derek Phillips, Jefferson's voice actor, who is using the exact same voice he uses for Jefferson.
  • Gallows Humor: Mr. Jefferson is a sadistic psychopath with an artist complex, but the guy can turn a clever death-related phrase with the best of them.
  • Game-Breaking Bug:
    • In Episodes 3 and 4, the photo focusing minigame glitches out with certain graphics cards, causing the photo to remain in focus constantly. Though it can still be solved, it has to be done by sound alone, which is much more difficult. The developers eventually just added an auto-focus option so players could bypass it.
    • During the Nightmare segment in Episode 5, Max will be pursued by warped versions of people she subconsciously fears and you have to rewind to get around them without being seen. If you happen to rewind too quickly, you'll get caught in a loop where Max will always be seen and you won't be able to rewind far back enough, forcing a restart. This largely occurs if you try to speed up or use the quick rewind.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration:
    • The contents of Max's diary and texts change at certain points in the story. In Episode 4, thanks to Max creating an Alternate Timeline at the end of Episode 3, the alternate version of her has an entirely different set of texts and barely any journal entries. In Episode 5, Mr. Jefferson burns her journal and thus the only page is charred, which is restored after Max changed history to prevent herself from being kidnapped, and save Chloe. Later on, during the Nightmare Sequence, her journal is changed to a bunch of hostile ramblings and her texts are likewise threatening.
    • In Episode 2, Max starts getting nosebleeds as she overuses her powers. Although this doesn't do anything for most of the chapter, at the end of the episode her powers burn out, and you have to talk Kate down without access to the rewind power, meaning if you make too many wrong choices, you won't be able to save her.
    • Max's lack of self confidence means she will always second guess the important choices the player makes. This serves as a handy reminder that you can go back and try a different one as well as giving some hints on what the potential consequences might be.
    • When exploring Chloe's house for the first time in Episode 1, it might seem odd that there are no opportunities for optional photos, until you remember that Max's camera is broken at this point in the story.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • Any items you pick up and optional photos you take remain in your possession if you rewind past the point where you obtained them, the former being important for certain puzzles. In Episode 1, however, two of the game's major choices give you the opportunity to either take a photograph or involve yourself in a situation. In both these cases, these options are mutually exclusive despite the fact that Max's rewind power should allow her to keep the photos in the same manner. In the subsequent conversations involving the photos, Max will claim not to have taken them if the player chose to intervene. While withholding the first of these is justified, as it would be rather mean-spirited to reveal the photo of Victoria after she took down the one of Max, there's really no reason why Max would choose not to use the photo of David harassing Kate as leverage, especially since she'll use it against him later if you didn't intervene, and the fact that you don't have proof is important in several later choices.
    • Max's rewind power does not affect her, meaning that any time she uses it, she effectively teleports if she's not in the same place. This is vital for numerous rewind puzzles, such as saving the dead bird in Episode 1. You even use it to teleport into a locked room in Episode 3, which impresses Chloe. As far as other people go, though, no one ever notices that Max more or less just vanishes into thin air or appears out of nowhere.
    • Max suffers a Psychic Nosebleed in Episode 2 after using her rewind too many times in the diner and junkyard scenes, indicating severe exhaustion of her powers. You can abuse Max's rewind powers to your heart's content otherwise until the scripted moment mentioned above. In the aftermath of Kate's suicide/attempted suicide, Max's monologue notes she can only just about manage rewinding, but you can still rewind your choice of who to blame as you please.
  • Girl on Girl Is Hot:
    • Invoked by Chloe if the player has Max kiss her. She'll claim Warren is out of luck unless he's into girl-on-girl. In a meta sense, it's worth noting that roughly 75% of players chose to do so.
    • Frank seems to have a spot for this as he has a poster of it in his RV, which becomes ironic when he admits to Max in Episode 5 that he was jealous of Chloe and Rachel's relationship.
    • At one point, Max can come across a man admiring a photograph of two women kissing. He claims to be appreciating fine art, but it's pretty obvious that this is the true reason why he likes the photo.
  • God Test: The first few chapters of Episode 2 have Chloe testing Max's rewind power to make sure it's legit. This includes guessing the contents of her pockets and predicting the immediate future.
  • Godzilla Threshold: The first time Max uses her focus power, she winds up rendering Chloe paralyzed and terminally ill and has to let William die once more to reverse that. Max resolves to never use that power again, but when she's captured by Mr. Jefferson, she realizes that the focus power is the only way she's getting out alive.
  • Gray Rain of Depression: Occurs when Kate attempts suicide.
  • Greasy Spoon: Some pivotal scenes take place at "The Two Whales", a local diner in Arcadia Bay where Chloe's mother works. The place is known for its "homestyle cooking"and "old-fashioned service". Shares features of a Malt Shop with the checkerboard floor tiles and the plot-relevant jukebox.
  • Groin Attack: Chloe will knee Nathan in the groin after you prevent her from being shot. She also mentions trying to do the same during his (possible) Attempted Rape, but she missed and hit a lamp.
    • Max doesn't actually kick anyone in the balls, but she thinks about doing it to several characters.
    Max [internal monologue]:Zachary, if you mess with Juliet I will kick your balls on a loop.
  • "Groundhog Day" Loop: Played with. When Max wakes up in the classroom near the end of Episode 5, she suspects that she is stuck in a time loop. It quickly becomes obvious that she is in a Nightmare Sequence instead.
  • Guide Dang It!: As the game encourages exploration and playing with the rewind mechanic, it's easy to miss minor things on the first playthrough:
    • The optional photos can vary from being obvious to somewhat obscure, and several need to be taken from specific angles. The game does offer hints via the placeholder photographs, but these can be hit or miss. For example, the first photo in Episode 3 requires taking a picture of a figurine in Victoria's room. What the game doesn't tell you is that the figurine is glow-in-the-dark, which you learn by rifling through the trash and finding the box it came in. Then you have to trigger that effect by shining your light on it for a few seconds. The figurine isn't even selectable until you've made it glow, so the player might dismiss it as a mere background element. Probably the most sadistic examples are the final photos in Episode 5. They're very well hidden in the nightmare sequences, which are not only much more difficult to navigate than any other part of the game, but also the last place you'd even suspect to contain photo opportunities because, you know, it's a living nightmare where taking photos is the least of anyone's worries.
    • Several of the minor choices can be easily missed, particularly the ones that happen right near the start of the chapter. There are several choices that happen before you even see them, and thus you have to figure out that you need to rewind to affect the outcome. For example, in Episode 2, it's very easy to miss Alyssa being hit in the head with a roll of toilet paper because you weren't looking, and thus run right by that possible choice without realizing you can fix it. The game aids in this by detailing every possible choice at the end of the episode, so you can always go back and replay choices you didn't realize were there.
    • Thanks to a scripting error, most players who bought the game at launch didn't realize that watering Lisa the plant twice in as many days will kill her. Max's mother is supposed to send a text warning against this, but it was only corrected upon the release of Episode 3.
  • Hairpin Lockpick: In Episode 3, Chloe and Max break into the school to steal some files. When trying to get into the principal's office, Chloe tries to pick the lock with hairpins (claiming she learned how to from Frank). This is subverted in that she'll never succeed.
  • Happily Failed Suicide: If you kept Kate from jumping, she will later express how happy she feels to still be alive.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In-Universe: If Max ignores Kate's call in Episode 2, Chloe says that she'll survive. Taking it automatically clears one of the prompts at the climax. However, if the player ignores it, she very well may not.
  • Hate Sink: Mark Jefferson initially appears to be a charming and friendly teacher but is revealed to be the true villain of the game as the mastermind behind the Dark Room - his chamber where he takes the girls he has drugged and kidnapped for torture and occasional murder for the sake of his art. He is also an emotional manipulator; using his students’ admiration of him to form close but false friendships with them; taking advantage of Nathan Prescott's need for a father figure for his operations, later killing Nathan to provide himself a scapegoat; and even trying to subtly goad his previous victim Kate Marsh into killing herself in the midst of her bullying. While most of the other antagonistic characters are shown to have depths and are not entirely bad people, when Jefferson's true colours are revealed, he's shown to be only a dark, narcissistic sadist, with no care or empathy for anyone around him.
  • He Knows Too Much: Mr. Jefferson knows how to clean up after himself:
    • First he shoots Chloe when he finds out she and Max have discovered Rachel's body.
    • If you successfully warn Victoria about the Dark Room at the End of the World Party, Jefferson will kidnap and kill her.
    • Max was going to be silenced as well but she escapes due to a power that Jefferson didn't know about.
  • Heal the Cutie: Possible to do in stages to Kate by paying attention to her welfare and protecting her, then doing it if you prevent her from jumping off the roof, which allows her to get some medical help.
  • Headphones Equal Isolation: After you've played through the prologue, Max pops in some earbuds while she heads to the bathroom. This has the effect of drowning out everything but the music, and the credits run over the scene as you walk through the hall. Max will comment if you examine objects or people along the way, but that's it.
  • Heroic BSoD:
    • Max and Chloe both suffer from this in Episode 4. Max because she realizes that no matter what she tries to do, Chloe's life is going to be terrible. Chloe suffers one when it's revealed that Rachel, Chloe's one best friend since Max left, has been Dead All Along. She breaks down crying.
    • Frank has one if you tell him that Nathan and Mr. Jefferson killed Rachel with drugs that he supplied Nathan.
    • David, should the player decide to tell him that Chloe is dead. It will result in him shooting Mr. Jefferson before breaking down sobbing, asking himself how he can ever explain this to Joyce and that he was never able to tell Chloe that he loved her.
  • Heroic RRoD:
    • If the player attempts to rewind past the limit as indicated by the spiral, the edges of the screen redden like a burning photograph and Max will complain that she can't go any further.
    • In Episode 2, Max sees Kate jump to her death and tries to rewind it, but her Psychic Nosebleed kicks in and threatens to derail the attempt. Max pushes herself to the limit, inadvertently stopping time until she can reach her destination, but at that point she's so burnt out that even attempting a rewind just leads to a migraine. You thus have to play through that sequence without the safety net. In Episode 3, Max worries that she may accidentally trap herself in this state if she isn't careful.
    • In the finale, Max's overuse of her Time Master powers finally comes back to bite her as she is trapped in her own personal hell via a Nightmare Sequence, complete with a stealth sequence, a withering "The Reason You Suck" Speech by an Alternate Universe Max, and a How We Got Here corridor leading up to the ending. Oh, and the sole journal page remaining takes on a Room Full of Crazy quality.
  • Homage:
  • Hostile Weather: A tornado is set to destroy the town on Friday, which Max discovers when she jumps forward to that day and sees it from the lighthouse. This is a direct consequence of Max using her powers to save Chloe. It's either her or the town.
  • Hypocrisy Nod: In Episode 3, Max will note in her journal that Victoria is always trying to manipulate people despite already being successful. She immediately follows this by hoping she isn't doing the same with her rewind. She'll make a similar comment if you look in the mirror at the pool. Her alternate self calls her on it during the nightmare sequence as well, using it to tear down any other justification Max may give for her actions.
  • I Always Wanted to Say That: During their nightly break-in into Blackwell, Max reveals that she always wanted to say the word "nab".
  • I Cannot Self-Terminate: In Episode 4, the quadriplegic Chloe in the alternate timeline asks Max to assist in her suicide. You can choose whether or not Max goes through with it.
  • I Just Shot Marvin in the Face:
    • Nathan apparently only brought the gun to school in order to threaten Chloe, and ended up shooting her by accident only after she pushes him.
    • In Episode 2, Chloe will hit herself with a ricochet if Max suggests shooting the bumper of a car in the junkyard. Thankfully, rewind is there to save the day.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: Said by Chloe after Max makes her shoot Frank in Episode 4.
  • I Will Find You: The main plot revolves around Chloe trying to find Rachel.
  • I'll Pretend I Didn't Hear That: Mr. Jefferson says this three times. The first two are to Victoria in Episode 3, first for coming on to him and second for trying to blackmail him. Strangely, in Episode 4, Jefferson declares her the "Everyday Heroes" contest winner anyway, the contest being one of the main reasons she kept coming on to him, although it's heavily implied that she only won by default because Max, Jefferson's favorite, didn't enter. The third time being to Max in Episode 5, where she can snark him out in the middle of his lesson after she finds out that he helped cover up Rachel's murder, he helped Nathan kidnap Kate, and he murdered Chloe and Nathan.
  • Idiot Ball:
    • At the end of Episode 4, there's the scene at the junkyard when Max, in this extremely creepy scenario, walks backward. Right into Mr. Jefferson's syringe.
    • In Episode 5, when Max desperately needs a photo that Warren shot the night before, she drives a long way through the murderous storm to find him. Granted, the photo in question is a Polaroid, but the game never gives a reason why Max' powers wouldn't work just as well with a digital image, so Warren could've just taken a shot of the physical photo with his smartphone and sent it to Max.
  • If Only You Knew: In Episode 4, after Max returns from the alternate timeline, she is happy that Chloe is "alive/back", depending on whether you chose to kill her in the previous scene. Chloe is confused why Max acts so strangely:
    Chloe: I hope you weren't messing around with time while I was sleeping.
    Max: Not anymore. I'm just spaced out, too.
  • In Spite of a Nail: The plot tends to play out mostly the same regardless of your choices:
    • Nathan and Victoria will always be sitting at Max's desk before class in Episode 2, no matter how she's acted towards them. If Max was nothing but nice to Victoria, she'll lampshade that it doesn't really change anything. Being nice to her is important for warning her in Episode 4, though.
    • Events conspire to make sure Chloe has a gun by the end of Episode 4. Even if you lose her gun, don't take it from Frank's RV, and don't take Nathan's gun, she'll get the original back from Frank after the confrontation with him.
    • The circumstances of Rachel's disappearance still play out, even in the alternate timeline.
  • Informed Attractiveness: Rachel is described as beautiful a number of times.
  • Instant Death Bullet: Most of the game's gunshot wounds are treated as instantly fatal, regardless of where they land:
    • The whole event that kicks off the story is Nathan's shooting of Chloe in the first episode, but he appears to have hit her in the abdomen around the stomach; a survivable shot assuming she gets immediate medical attention. Even if he hit a major vital organ (heart, lungs), there would at least be a few moments of bleeding out before she lost consciousness.
    • Subverted when Chloe accidentally shoots herself in the junkyard. She appears to have hit herself in the heart, but instead of collapsing, she just keeps shouting "Jesus I shot myself!" until Max rewinds.
    • Chloe's shooting of Frank and his dog. Neither shooting is shown clearly enough to see where the bullets land. Examining their bodies afterwards, however, shows that they weren't shot in the head. Again, they both died instantly.
    • This is justified when Mr. Jefferson shoots Chloe in the head.
    • When Mr. Jefferson shoots David, he does appear to hit him in the heart, but again, no staggering or bleeding out, just instant ragdolling.
  • Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: Victoria published video footage of drugged Kate going off the rails at the Vortex Club party, which drives Kate to commit suicide, unless you manage to talk her out of it.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: When Victoria and her two friends block the entrance to the dormitory, there is still enough space on the left to bypass them but the game doesn't allow such action.
    • Though in fairness, they could certainly move to block Max, which explain why she doesn't try to use the gap on the left.
  • Interface Screw:
    • The journal acts strangely at certain points:
      • In the beginning of Episode 4, the journal now belongs to the alternative timeline Max, who is much less contemplative than the original one. As such, the diary portion of the journal is only two pages and Max is the only major character listed.
      • After Mr. Jefferson destroys the journal, attempting to access the diary section just results in seeing burnt pages. This lasts until shortly before the final choice.
      • During the Nightmare Sequence, the diary section is replaced by a bunch of Room Full of Crazy style scrawling of all of Max's self-doubts.
    • One portion of the Nightmare Sequence has everything running in reverse and all the interface text mirrored. To take one of the optional photos in this section, you have to open your journal when the game tells you to, starting a reverse sequence of Max taking the picture.
  • Interrupted Suicide: The climactic scene with Kate at the end of Episode 2 has Max attempting to talk Kate off a high leap. It's up to the player if she succeeds.
  • Ironic Echo: If Max doesn't take a photo of David hassling Kate in Episode 1, when you bring it up with Mr. Jefferson in Episode 2, he says "My number one rule - always take the shot". He repeats this line early in Episode 5, literally injecting Max with an extra dose of the drug he used to knock her out.
  • Irony:
    • Max complains about the Vortex Club, but when she changes history in Episode 3, her alternate self is a member and (as indicated by various texts and letters) acts the part.
    • Frank has been selling Nathan large amounts of GHB, which was likely used to dose his girlfriend Rachel to death.
    • Episode 3 has Chloe tempted to steal several thousand dollars out of the school's handicapped fund in order to pay off Frank. Later in the same episode, Max decides to return to their childhood and make a small change to Chloe's past, which, as it turns out, results in her being a quadriplegic in the present and no longer being able to attend Blackwell (despite her outstanding academic performance) due to the school's buildings not being fit for the handicapped. Max even comments on this, slightly, in Episode 4.
    • Not warning Victoria about the Dark Room at the End of the World Party initially seems to end up saving her life, since she goes to Jefferson for help, and he's the one behind it.
  • It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The game starts with Max in a dark and stormy night at the lighthouse, until the scene is revealed to be a Dream Intro.
  • It Works Better with Bullets: In Episode 2, if you choose to shoot Frank, the gun clicks and he says to consider getting bullets next time.
  • It's Always Sunny at Funerals: At the end, you can choose to undo everything and let Chloe die so the storm won't happen. This makes it justified that the weather is sunny during Chloe's funeral.
  • Just in Time: In the Railroad Tracks of Doom scene, no matter how you time your rewinds, Max will always manage to get Chloe free just moments before she's hit by the train.
  • Kids Raiding the Wine Cabinet: It is mentioned that when they were younger, Chloe and Max broke into Joyce's wine cabinet and sample some before they accidentally spilled some of it on their white carpet. The stain is still there today and is remembered fondly as a symbol of better times for all parties involved. Years later, Chloe and Rachel partook in underaged drinking frequently and it isn't nearly as cute.
  • Kick the Dog:
    • After ruining Victoria's outfit, you have the option to mockingly take a photo of her as she did with you, then tell her off so she'll move. She'll retaliate by vandalizing your room and stealing the picture.
    • In an example involving an actual dog, one of the two options for dealing with Frank's dog is to toss the bone into the street, where it'll be hit by a semi. Thus, this crosses with You Bastard!.
  • Killed Off for Real: By nature of the game mechanic, there are several instances where you can let a character die instead of rewind and save them:
    • Kate if she commits suicide.
    • Frank if Chloe kills him and Max doesn't reverse it in Episode 4.
    • Victoria, if you successfully convince her that her life is in danger at the End of the World Party.
    • Quite a few instances happen when the tornado is devastating Arcadia Bay in Episode 5 and you choose to save Chloe instead of the town:
      • Several of Max's schoolmates are encountered on the way to the Two Whales diner, all of which will die very sudden deaths if you don't intervene in time.
      • The homeless woman behind the diner will be found dead if you didn't warn her of the coming disaster during an earlier episode, much to Max's horror.
      • The fisherman who's trapped in the burning building Max has to traverse at one point must be killed to proceed, and he'll stay dead if you don't rewind afterwards.
      • Even if you managed to avoid all these deaths, an unknown number of people die from the tornado. Max, Chloe, Victoria and David are the only unambiguous survivors.
    • All of the aforementioned death can be subverted if you choose to sacrifice Chloe at the end. The story resets, and Everyone Lives—except Chloe.
  • Kidnapped from Behind: At the end of the penultimate episode "Dark Room", Max and Chloe return to where they found Rachel's body to stop the (apparent) Big Bad from destroying the evidence. They find it's still there, and while Chloe is sobbing, Max steps back, which allows the Big Bad to drug her silently, giving him time to draw a pistol and shoot Chloe before Max can warn her.
  • Kilroy Was Here: The hideout in the junkyard has "Chloe was here" and "Rachel was here". Max can add her own "Max was here".
  • Laser-Guided Karma: Nathan and Jefferson, both of whom kill Chloe at one point, claim that no one would miss her because she's a punk delinquent. Then they get their asses kicked by her angry ex-military stepfather (with a potentually lethal outcome for the later).
  • Last Kiss: In one of the endings, Max goes back in time in order to let Nathan shoot Chloe, which leads to the tornado never happening. Depending on the player's choices, Chloe and Max will have a last kiss before that.
  • Last Request: Max asks for one while she's tied up in the Dark Room.
  • Last-Second Ending Choice: Which ending you get is decided entirely by the very last choice: either you travel back in time to the start of the game and let Chloe get shot in the bathroom, preventing the Butterfly of Doom that results in a tornado destroying Arcadia Bay, or stay with her in the destroyed town.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships: In-universe example in Episode 5. In a rare tragic version of this, Max sees Chloe in the Dark Room hooking up with Victoria, Warren, Nathan and Mr. Jefferson.
  • The Law of Conservation of Detail: We get a couple of close-ups of Blackwell's bus driver so it can be a surprise when David replaces him in the alternate timeline.
  • Leitmotif: "Max & Chloe", which usually plays whenever the two girls have a touching moment.
  • Level in Reverse: In Episode 5, one part of the Nightmare Sequence is the same as the school corridor scene at the beginning of the game, but people move and talk backwards (except for Max herself, who moves normally, but still talks backwards), the music plays backwards, and all the texts on the interface are mirrored.
  • Lighthouse Point: Where the game opens, and a recurring viewpoint for the tornado which will destroy the town. It's also where the game's climax occurs in Episode 5.
  • Limited Wardrobe:
    • In Episode 2, Max will lampshade this when going with an almost identical jeans/shirt/hoodie combo (the shirt is different but still has a doe on it), claiming that Einstein got by just fine with one outfit. Averted in Episode 3; Chloe lends her some of Rachel's left-behind clothes (a plaid jacket, torn jeans, and a shirt) so Max doesn't have to wear her still-wet and chlorine soaked outfit from the previous day, and in the new timeline she has an entirely new outfit. In Episode 4, she trades the doe shirt for a black butterfly shirt.
    • Episode 5 averts this: Max gets several new outfits when she does her several jumps through time and wears several others from previous episodes during the extended nightmare sequence.
  • Lingerie Scene: Chloe and Max's sojourn to the Blackwell swimming pool plays out as an extended one. Chloe then has another brief one in Max's Nightmare Sequence while making out with Warren.
  • Lured into a Trap: At the end of Episode 4, Max and Chloe are lured to the junkyard by Mr. Jefferson, who then shoots Chloe and kidnaps Max.
  • Madness Mantra: "RACHEL IN THE DARK ROOM RACHEL IN THE DARK ROOM RACHEL IN THE DARK ROOM." Thanks for that creepy bit of artwork, Nathan.
  • Magical Homeless Person: Max meets a mysterious homeless lady, who seems to know a little more about the strange happenings around Arcadia Bay than she lets on. If Max warns her she's been having dreams of a storm, she leaves town without any further prompting (without Max's warning, she's found dead).
  • Malicious Misnaming:
    • Chloe constantly refers to her stepdad as "step-dork" or "step-douche", and once even as "step-führer".
    • Nathan likes to make fun of Max's last name, calling her "Cockfield" or "Crackfield".
  • The Marvelous Deer: An ethereal doe shows up at a couple points. It's immune to Max's rewind and seems to lead her places. It's implied to be Rachel's ghost, trying to help Max learn what happened to her.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
    • Explicitly discussed by the characters in relation to Max's time travel powers in Episode 5. Ultimately this is played straight — nobody ever figures out why or how Max gained her power.
    • Downplayed with the graffiti littering the environments, which is often explicitly targeted at characters' psychological insecurities at an exacting extent, which could technically be just mean-spirited graffiti if it didn't keep showing up at the perfect time to reflect the characters' worries. The most psychologically predatory graffiti returns in force during Chapter 5.
  • Meaningful Funeral: If you choose to let go of Chloe at the end, you are treated to such a funeral. Even Frank is paying a visit (if Chloe has let him live).
  • Meaningful Name: The Price family name. Remember the old saying "Everything comes with a price"? Episode 3 is this in a nutshell.
  • Mental Time Travel: In Episode 3, Max is able to travel back into the body of her 13-year-old self by looking at a photograph of that day. This enables her to save Chloe's father, altering the past five years significantly. When that doesn't pan out as well as she hoped, she undoes it and swears not to use that power again. She ends up being forced to several times in Episode 5, as the alternative is far worse than doing nothing.
  • Mind Screw: The Nightmare Sequence in Episode 5 is pretty twisted.
  • Misplaced Wildlife: Several nighttime scenes show fireflies flying around. Max even comments that they look "magical", which they are — in the sense that bioluminescent fireflies are extremely rare on the west coast of the United States.
  • Missing Time:
    • In the first scene, after her vision of the tornado, Max finds herself back in class. She doesn't know what happened, but she is sure that she didn't fall asleep.
    • After a time jump through a photograph, when Max returns to the present, she doesn't have any memories of the new timeline between the changed past and the present. In Episode 5, after returning to the Dark Room, she is confused how that could have happened. Mr. Jefferson even comments that she is "spaced out".
  • Moment of Silence: In the Sacrifice Chloe ending, right after Nathan shoots Chloe, the ending music starts and all sound effects are silenced. Even the photo effects are silent.
  • Montage Out: The first two episodes end with a montage of major characters going about their daily work while indie folk music is playing in the background.
  • Morton's Fork: No matter how you handle Nathan drawing a gun on Chloe, the outcome is virtually identical. If you report him, the principal calls Max's parents to tell them she lied, while Nathan deduces that it was Max who got him in trouble (presumably from the ripped photo on the floor) and angrily confronts her over it. If you don't report him, the principal instead calls Max's parents because he finds her dodging his questions suspicious, and Nathan instead confronts Max over his belief that she has seen and heard too much. The choice does play into later confrontations, but the immediate effect is the same.
  • Multiple Endings: Episode 5 has two possible endings that determine the ultimate fates of both Chloe and everyone in Arcadia Bay. Both are very bittersweet.
    • "Sacrifice Chloe": with one last kiss/hug between Max and Chloe, Max goes back in time to let Nathan kill Chloe, undoing the events of the game and in-turn stopping the tornado from forming and wiping out Arcadia Bay. Nathan confesses to his and Mr. Jefferson's crimes out of guilt for Chloe's death. The game ends on Chloe's funeral, punctuated with the same blue butterfly that appeared during Chloe's death.
    • "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay": Max refuses to let Chloe die and tears up the photo that would have allowed her to go back in time. The two watch as the tornado destroys Arcadia Bay, presumably killing many of its inhabitants, before leaving together through the ruins.
  • Mundane Made Awesome:
    • The game tells you when your actions will have consequences. This includes watering the plant in your room. Square Enix even got in on the fun for April Fools' Day, putting up a merchandise page for the one object that lets you be like Max: the plant.
    • At two points in the game, you're given a choice between two kinds of breakfast. Like most choices, you can rewind and change it.
  • Mundane Utility: You can rewind time at almost any point in the game. This can be used for dramatic things like stopping a potential shooting to mundane things like fixing a snowglobe you accidentally broke. Max herself considers using it to catch more sleep.
  • Murphy's Bullet: When Chloe and Max are shooting targets at the junkyard, if Max tells Chloe to aim at the car bumper, the bullet will ricochet and hit Chloe in the stomach. Fortunately, Max can easily rewind to prevent what might have otherwise been a fatal injury.
  • Muse Abuse: Exaggerated by Mr. Jefferson who explains that the torment in the faces of his "models" is what makes his photographs so special.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Chloe is overcome by remorse in case you let her kill Frank and his dog in Episode 4.
  • Mysterious Watcher: We see somebody in the foreground watching Max and Chloe leave the Two Whales diner. The character is later introduced as Frank.

    N-Z 
  • Needle in a Stack of Needles: The Nightmare Sequence in Episode 5 has a door with a keypad and possible combinations to it scrawled all over the walls. The mirrors in the room don't reflect anything other than the right code.
  • The Needs of the Many: What the final choice is about. Will you have Max save all of Arcadia Bay or just Chloe?
  • Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer: When Chloe and Max break into the principal's office, Chloe scans the monitor and calls Max to "better come and check this out" instead of telling her what she found.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer for Episode 4 has Chloe edited out of every scene, and Max's exploration of Chloe's house is narrated with the line "there's no sign of life," which was taken from Max looking into the forest in an entirely different scene.
  • New Ability Addiction: In the opening of "Out of Time", it's revealed that Max has abused her newly discovered Time Master powers to stay up all night studying time travel and quantum theory. You then meet up with Chloe, who encourages this further, by testing it (to prove she has it), and then taking her to the junkyard to help her shoot bottles with perfect accuracy. This is deconstructed when Max starts suffering from a Psychic Nosebleed and dampening of her powers from overuse causing them to short out right at the end of the chapter, meaning that you can't rewind if you fail to talk down Kate from her suicide attempt.
  • New Powers as the Plot Demands: Max gains new abilities that help her when she needs it. In Episode 2, she manages to stop time long enough to get to the rooftop before Kate jumps when she can't outright reverse it, and in Episode 3, she learns how to time travel with a picture just so she can prevent the death of Chloe's dad. It is implied that these are all different applications of the same power. She has no idea how it works, after all.
  • Newspaper Dating: Early on, Max discovers her vision takes place on October 11, four days later, thanks to a newspaper clinging to a post.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: One of the game's main themes is that Max's time travel powers can sometimes make things worse:
    • If you water Max's houseplant Lisa in both Episodes 1 and 2, it drowns. Due to a scripting error that prevented a text from Max's mother warning about this, most players didn't know any better until Episode 3, where it was patched.
    • At the end of Episode 3, Max changes history so William Price never died. As a result, the five years between then and the present are radically altered. Max is now a member of the popular crowd, Warren doesn't have eyes for Max, David is a school bus driver, and Chloe is paralyzed from the neck down. Furthermore, since Max has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, she has no memory of this version of herself or others.
    • In Episode 3, Max can erase a voicemail from a cop alerting David that the police (correctly) suspect that Chloe broke into the Blackwell swimming pool. If Max deletes the message before David and Joyce can hear it to spare Chloe the trouble, the police decide to question Chloe. Allowing David to hear the message causes him to lie to the police and give Chloe a fake alibi.
    • In Episode 5, if Max warned Victoria about Nathan and she believed her, Victoria will go running to Mr. Jefferson for help. Jefferson decides that Victoria has learned too much and kidnaps and murders her.
    • In Episode 5, Max finds out that saving Chloe from being killed in the first place is what causes the storm.
  • Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: During the Nightmare Sequence, Max's journal is changed to a bunch of hostile ramblings and her texts are likewise threatening.
  • Nightmare Sequence: Episode 5 has an extended one featuring a scary and strange landscape filled with subconscious fears.
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed:
    • During the game, you come across several self-help books written by a "Dr. Bill", an obvious stand-in for Dr. Phil.
    • In Episode 5, Max turns on a car radio to a rant by one Truss Limpbow, an obvious parody of American conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.
  • No Communities Were Harmed: Arcadia Bay is a fictional town, but its location (as shown by the coordinates listed in David's locker, plus a map you find in Life Is Strange 2) places it right in the middle of the real-life Tillamook Bay, a water-filled estuary. This could, depending on how deeply you interpret it, foreshadow the destruction of the town in a violent storm. The actual layout of the town, plus some landmarks, is based on the city of Garibaldi, which is adjacent to Tillamook Bay.
  • No Ending: The Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending is like this. Max and Chloe watch the storm destroy the town and we see them drive through the destruction as they head out of Arcadia Bay, but aside from knowing they're alive, we know little else: who survived the storm (if anyone), where they're going next, what they're going to do, if the universe will keep coming after Chloe, and so on.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Warren's fight with Nathan is more like Warren beating him until he's crying.
  • No OSHA Compliance: The End of the World Party (and possibly other Vortex Club parties not seen on screen). Swimming pools don't mix well with electrical equipment or intoxicated people.
  • No Periods, Period: Averted. There's a tampon machine in the girls bathroom. Max declares she's fine on that front if you examine it:
  • Not Quite the Right Thing: Convincing Victoria to be wary of Nathan results in her turning to Mr. Jefferson for help and getting kidnapped and murdered in Episode 5. Going to the Cool Teacher for help with a troublesome student sounds like the right thing to do, except when Jefferson is the real threat.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: Depending on your choice earlier, Mr. Jefferson will tell Max that she is not so different from him since she let Warren beat Nathan till he was bruised and bloody.
  • Notice This: Things you can interact with are outlined in a messy doodle-like texture and have an arrow pointing to them, even from a distance, allowing the player to easily see what can be fiddled with in a given scene. In the case of the first interaction, failing to figure out what to do will eventually cause the game to interrupt and move to the next task, by which point the player should get the idea.
  • Number of the Beast: During a specific sequence in Chapter 5, Max gets an e-mail of pure Sdrawkcab Speech. The e-mail's timestamp is a string of sixes and the picture is Mr. Jefferson's.
  • Obvious Villain, Secret Villain: Max knows Nathan is bad news from the moment he shoots and kills Chloe. Then Chloe tells her that he drugged her and took pictures of her tied up and unconscious, and then Kate compounds it by telling Max that Nathan "took her home" after her drugging. The hidden villain is Mark Jefferson, the manipulative mastermind and brilliant photographer to whom Nathan was the apprentice. They murdered Rachel.
  • Once per Episode:
    • Alyssa suffers some sort of harmless misfortune in each episode, which Max can warn her of. Her final misfortune in Episode 5 is anything but harmless, though, and will get her killed without intervention.
    • Chloe, on the other hand, suffers much more dangerous misfortune each episode, which Max must then rescue her from. Episode 3 plays with this, making Max the cause of the misfortune as a cliffhanger.
    • Max can take a picture of a squirrel outside the dorms once per episode, culminating in Max taking a picture of two giant squirrels standing outside the dorms during the Nightmare Sequence.
    • A major environmental or astronomical anomaly that captivates everybody - usually as part of the end sequence.
  • One Degree of Separation: Chloe's stepfather just happens to be the Jerkass security guard Max has to deal with a couple times before bumping into Chloe for the first time in over five years.
  • One of These Doors Is Not Like the Other: The dormitory puzzle during the Nightmare Sequence. Only specific doors let you progress, all other doors lead back to the starting point.
  • One Password Attempt Ever: Subverted. While most cases where you need a password or electronic PIN have a limit on the amount of guesses (as you'd expect), you can simply reverse time and try as many times as you like.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted on several occasions:
    • Aaron Price and Harry Aaron Prescott.
    • Two odd examples with surnames; there's Alyssa Anderson and Anderson Berry, and Taylor Christensen and Samuel Taylor.
  • Painting the Medium: When time is traveling backwards in one sequence, all of the text prompts are written backwards.
  • The Password Is Always "Swordfish":
    • David's password for his computer is the date of the day he met Joyce for the first time.
    • Nathan's pin code for his phone is his birthday, though if you can't figure that out, you can always use the PUK to reset the password.
  • Pet the Dog: One of the few things Frank is said to care about is his dog. A cop relates a tale about how he freed a bunch of dogs that were part of a dog fighting ring, one of them being the one he owns now. He later mentions he rescued Pompidou from a highly abusive owner.
  • Philosophical Choice Endings: Let your best friend / Love Interest die to save the town of Arcadia Bay from destruction, or save her and let the town be destroyed, killing who knows how many people?
  • Phlebotinum Breakdown: Max is unable to use her time travel powers when she has to save Kate. It is implied to be due to earlier over-use of Max's powers.
  • Player Data Sharing: Downplayed; the game records your choices, and the final screen displays the total percentage of people who picked each choice.
  • Plotline Death: Most character deaths are either preventable by rewinding (e.g. Chloe on the rail tracks) or is undone by cutscene right after it happens (e.g. Chloe at the beginning). Some can only be prevented by playing the right choices (e.g. Kate in Episode 2, Alyssa and Victoria in Episode 5). There are some exceptions that cannot be avoided though:
    • The most notable is Chloe getting shot at the end of Episode 4. Max spends most of the next chapter trying to undo it and ultimately succeeds.
    • Nathan is killed offscreen by Mr. Jefferson. There is no way you can save him (except by choosing the Sacrifice Chloe ending in which case you undo everything that happened in the game).
  • Pool Scene:
    • Chloe and Max sneak into the Blackwell pool room and have a private dip after hours.
    • The End of the World Party in Episode 4 takes place in Blackwell's indoor swimming pool, with the bars and dance floors set up around the pool and lots of beautiful young bodies on display.
  • Popular Is Evil: Downplayed. Nathan Prescott and Victoria Chase are popular and mostly evil, but they're still not without some humanizing qualities, and it's possible for Victoria's posse, and even Victoria herself, to become friendlier to Max over time. Dana Ward, a cheerleader, is very kind to Max despite being a member of the Vortex Club (and indeed, most of the club's lesser members are neutral towards Max rather than overly hostile). In the alternate timeline shown in Episodes 3 and 4, where Max herself is popular, she's more thoughtless and irritable, but she still cares about her new friends, and she made more of an effort to keep in touch with Chloe during her five-year absence than her mainstream self did.
  • Power Perversion Potential: Chloe suggests Max could use her powers to bang people with no consequences, even specifically suggesting that Max has hit on her with this method. Max disagrees. The player gets a chance to make good on this in Episode 3, after Chloe dares Max to kiss her. If you refuse, Chloe suggests you went for it then rewound.
  • Power-Strain Blackout: After using her powers a bit too much at the junkyard, Max faints.
  • Precision F-Strike: In Episode 5, Max is asked to answer a question. Unfortunately, as she has just come round after changing the past using a photo, it isn't revealed what the question was. The only options are "Fuck You" or "Eat Shit and Die".
  • Pretty Little Headshots: When Mr. Jefferson murders Chloe in the last scene of Episode 4, there's only a small red hole in the middle of her forehead. It's the same gun Nathan had in the first episode, which appears to be an FNP-9. The 9x19mm (which the FNP-9 chambers), .38 Special, and .357 Magnum rounds all use projectiles that are .355 inches in diameter. The difference of course comes down to the amount of propellant (each of these rounds have different case lengths) and the weight and even length of the projectile itself. This should be a spectacularly gory scene, but it plays this straight and isn't.
  • Previously on…: Each episode starts with a clip montage of earlier scenes.
  • Product Placement: An odd, yet hilarious subversion. One of the lead writers insisted on putting in a reference to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within despite Square Enix being hesitant due to how poorly received it was.
  • Pseudo-Romantic Friendship:
    • Chloe's friendship with Rachel was quite close. She calls Rachel her "angel", and the creators have remained ambiguous as to if the two were romantically involved. In Episode 3, Chloe admits she "crushed" on Rachel, though she did not think she was perfect. Chloe also does not take it well when she learns that Rachel was apparently in a full relationship with Frank. In the confrontation with Frank in Episode 4, Chloe can state after specific dialogue choices that she and Rachel loved each other. Alternatively, Frank speaks of Rachel and their relationship as something he deeply valued, and through specific dialogue choices he will tell Chloe that Rachel blamed her for the problems she and Frank had in their own relationship. Regardless, Chloe becomes absolutely distraught and bursts into tears when she and Max discover Rachel's corpse.
    • As the game progresses, Chloe becomes increasingly affectionate and flirty towards Max, mainly depending on player actions. With dialogue ranging from asking her if she prefers boys or girls, telling her she's even smarter and more talented than Rachel, calling her hot, calling her cute, commenting on getting her a stripper (if they steal the handicapped fund), commenting on sex, implying that she's daydreaming about kissing her, telling Max no one's good enough to date her "except me", getting all fluttery at the kiss... There's a reason the "PriceField" pairing is so popular, even among a few developers. The endings of the game solidify that, even if they aren't romantically involved, they both mean a great deal to the other. Though romance is the most frequent endgame, it depends on player decisions.
  • Pun:
    • Mr. Jefferson uses the phrase "selfie-expression" when Max takes a selfie with her old camera, then apologizes to the class.
    • If Max examines the tampon dispenser in the girl's bathroom, she mentions that she's "good to flow".
    • Victoria tells Max to "go fuck your selfie". Max admits this is "mean, but funny" if you're nice to Victoria later on.
    • Near the beginning of Episode 2, you can check Max's computer. There you'll see that Warren has left some movies related to time, and he makes some pretty good puns:
      Warren: That's all the TIME I have for now as I have actual quantum physics to plow through.
    • In Episode 2, Max tells Warren to "go-dium" when she recommends using sodium for his science class experiment. He calls out the pun, but does it anyway. He's not quite as harsh with "go-tassium" (potassium).
    • In Episode 3, Max calls Chloe her partner in crime. Chloe responds that Max is her "partner in time."
      Max: Insert groan here.
    • There's two puns on the the last name Price in Episode 4. Max calls Chloe "priceless", then swears it wasn't meant to be a pun. Later, William says "the Price is always right" and apologizes for it.
  • Railroad Tracks of Doom: In Episode 2, Chloe and Max hang out on the railroad tracks. When Max goes off to take a picture, she has a vision and wakes up to find that the track switcher has pinned Chloe to the tracks. She has to then free Chloe, either by breaking the switch or messing with the fuse box so she can switch it long enough to free Chloe without sending the train down the wrong track.
  • Reckless Gun Usage: Chloe shows off her gun to Max by pointing it directly at Max's face.
  • Red Herring:
    • The ax in the train puzzle. Max refuses to consider using it on Chloe, and it's of no use in cutting the wires in the fuse box.
    • Trying to stop William Price from taking Joyce's phone call. You'll get caught trying to intercept the call, attempting to call her first doesn't work because you only know her work number, and unplugging the land line causes her to call his cell phone instead. You have to hide William's keys to fix things.
    • The Prescotts. Other than being indirectly responsible for Nathan's unstable and dangerous behavior, they're ultimately irrelevant to the larger plot, despite their talk of Nathan inheriting his "legacy" and a number of conspicuous references to the Pan Estates in Episode 4.
    • The Vortex Club. They're heavily implied throughout the game to be a conspiracy with some connection to the apocalyptic storm, but in the end, they really are just an exclusive group of rich kids.
    • Nathan and his role in the drugging and photographing of young women against their will. While he's far from innocent, he isn't actually the Big Bad. Mr. Jefferson is.
    • Several characters, major and minor alike, turn out not to be what they seemed at first. David starts out as an unsympathetic Control Freak who seems to be stalking (especially female) students, but this very trait leads to him finding and saving Max from the Dark Room. There's a whisky bottle in the Dark Room implying that Principal Wells, the only character in the game known to drink whisky, might be involved, but he isn't. Samuel has a suspicious box filled with women's clothing and his comments to Max about time suggest that he knows more than he lets on, but none of this is ever resolved.
  • Relationship Values:
    • In the first three episodes, there are four choices involving Chloe: her pot in Episode 1, Kate's call at the diner and the confrontation with Frank in Episode 2, and taking the money for the handicapped fund in Episode 3. If at least three of these are resolved in a way that she approves of, examining Chloe's phone in her bedroom shows that she has changed her background to a picture of Max. Otherwise, it's a picture of Rachel. The relationship with Chloe is complicated in further episodes, with the argument between David and Chloe thrown into the mix. If Max sided with Chloe three times and kissed her in Episode 3, then she and Max will share a passionate kiss before Max travels back for the last time in the Sacrifice Chloe ending. Otherwise, they have an emotional hug instead. Even interactions with Warren can affect the Sacrifice Chloe ending; Max can fail to get Chloe to "replace" Rachel on her phone, but also do the other actions in favour of her kiss Chloe and side with her in the argument with David, but if she kisses Warren (after these previous decisions), she won't kiss Chloe.
    • Throughout episodes 1 and 2, there are various interactions with Kate that Max can handle in different ways: choosing to intervene when David hassles Kate, supporting her idea to go to the police, and taking her call in Episode 2 among others. If Max is reassuring and non-judgmental, it will color Kate's perception of Max. For each instance that Max has been supportive of Kate, it makes it that much easier to talk her down from her suicide attempt in Episode 2 by eliminating one of the variables that can cause Kate to jump. If Max handles those interactions negatively, Kate won't trust her unless Max can adequately justify those instances.
    • If you take the time to save Alyssa from misfortune Once an Episode, she becomes more trusting of Max. If not, she will eventually become convinced that Max is a Doom Magnet, and ask she keeps a distance. If Alyssa thinks the latter in Episode 5, she will fall down a hole and die if Max tries to talk to her when she's trapped in the storm. Max can still save Alyssa's life but it is harder.
    • Whether or not Warren and Max can share a kiss near the end of Episode 5 is based on four choices in previous episodes. If Max accepted Warren's invitation, helped him with his exam, changed the grade on his exam, and/or wrote on his whiteboard, she will have the option to kiss him before using the photograph to change history. If Max did none of these things, she will not be able to kiss Warren.
  • Released to Elsewhere: Subverted. In Episode 5 after Max returns to the Dark Room by destroying her award-winning photo, she notices that Victoria is not there (given that she got kidnapped along with Max in the first place). This results in the following dialogue:
    Mr. Jefferson: I had to let Victoria Chase go.
    Max: You let her...
    Jefferson: Don't be stupid, okay? She's exactly where she deserves to be.
    Max: No...
  • Replacement Goldfish: After Chloe's father died, she became friends with Rachel to help fill the void that Max had left. Max is implied to fill it once more after she returns and Rachel is gone.
  • The Reveal: Two in Episode 4: Rachel was Dead All Along and Mr. Jefferson is the Big Bad.
  • Riddle for the Ages: How or why Max got the ability to time travel remains a mystery, as do all of Chloe's prophetic and/or otherworldly dreams.
  • Ripple Effect Indicator: In Episode 3, Max can draw a butterfly for this purpose when she travels back to the day William died. Doing so is up to the player.
  • Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory:
    • Max recalls everything she learned in alternate timelines before using her rewind to change things. This allows her to mine people for information, rewind, then use that information to coax further details from them. At the end of Episode 3, she winds up changing the past five years and remembers nothing of the new timeline, which is a problem considering everyone around her is essentially a different person.
    • Zigzagged in Episode 5. Max goes back in time to the night before, explains what's happening during the plot with Chloe and readjusts their plans, and explicitly tells Chloe to explain everything back to her as they go through the stages. Max mentions that this is an important step, since she won't remember anything until she catches back up to herself from the point that goes back to change it.
  • Roadside Wave: At one point, Alyssa gets splashed with puddle water by the roadside, which you can warn her of.
  • Royally Screwed Up: The Prescotts seem to be mostly comprised of sociopaths. Nathan is a psychopathic Spoiled Brat who kindaps girls and makes pervy pictures for Mark Jefferson's illegal photo studio and also sells drugs on the streets. His father, Sean, is a power hungry Corrupt Corporate Executive who seeks to "take over" Arcadia Bay through some very shady ways. Also, there's a letter in which a Prescotts' ancestor threatens to ruin the live of his debtor.
  • Rule of Symbolism:
    • The fictional town of Arcadia Bay is named after Arcadia, a historic region of the Greek Peloponnesus which symbolises unspoiled, harmonious utopia of the wilderness of an out-of-the-way area closed off by the mountains. Arcadia Bay is an old-fashioned rural town located in the mountains of Oregon that has a lot of reverence for the Good Old Ways and seems to be stuck in the past century. Both in this game and the Before the Storm prequel, the town and its economy are suffering from the parasitic influence of the Prescott Foundation, which aims to take over the town and rebuild it in their image. Ironically, one of their latest developments, Pan Estates, which is rumored to be built on sacred Native American tribal land, is named after a Greek god of wilderness, flocks and shepherds.
    • In Episode 4, there are two moons in the sky. Just before a certain scene, one moon fades. In the next scene, Chloe dies.
  • Running Gag:
    • The missing tablet with cat pictures.
    • Alyssa having a Butt-Monkey moment (typically getting hit by balls, crumpled paper, puddle splash, etc.) that Max gets the choice to help her get out of the way at the last second. Alyssa might or might not return the favor in Episode 5.
  • Running Gagged: Alyssa suffers a harmless misfortune in every episode with which Max can intervene...until the final episode, when Max needs to try and save her from one such misfortune during the storm — which will kill her if she does it wrong.
  • Sadistic Choice:
    • Episode 4 offers a pretty cruel one. Help Chloe commit suicide or refuse. She gets mad about the latter, but Max has to live with the former.
    • The ending. The tornado was created when Max prevented Chloe's death by Nathan in the girl's bathroom. The only option left at the end of the game to stop the tornado from manifesting in the first place is by going back in time and letting Chloe get shot by Nathan. No other option (argued by Chloe and Max or not) can stop the tornado from destroying Arcadia Bay.
  • Sarcastic Confession: In Episode 5, Max travels back to the beginning of the game. She arrives exactly when Mr. Jefferson says that he could easily put any of the class in a dark corner and photograph their despair. What appeared to be Jefferson criticizing Diane Arbus was actually a sarcastic confession of doing exactly that.
  • Save Scumming:
    • Played both traditional and In-Universe. Max's rewind power is based on this. You can rewind time to get the choices/information that you want. In some conversations where you give the wrong information and are given the right one, the latter will appear as a new choice in your rewind. For the former, this is something that you would normally do in a Visual Novel when you try to get the desired choices. Even if Max cannot use her power to prevent Kate from committing suicide (as she is too burnt out to use it), you can still do this and it can be done at any point during this segment. This way, you can get the result you want on your "first" try while keeping the choices you have picked throughout the episode without having to start over.
    • Most of Episode 5's Nightmare Sequence will feature the various characters in them calling Max out on using her powers in this way. This reaches its apex when Max is receiving a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from herself over how she's been abusing it and her inability to get by without it.
  • Saw It in a Movie Once: If you don't remember the red three-digit code on Nathan's list of numbers and try it on the Dark Room keypad, you can also guess the passcode simply by hitting the faded numbers]]. Either way, Max will exclaim, "Yes! I thought that only worked in the movies!"
  • Scenery Porn: Some of the sets are just gorgeous, especially the ones where the whole town is visible in the background. Despite its limited graphics, the game absolutely nails the look and feel of a small Pacific Northwest town.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: When Max and Chloe sneak into the school after-hours to search for evidence, Chloe is confident David won't report her to the police if he catches her, since that would be an embarrassment. She turns out to be right since David will cover for her if he gets the message from the cops about spotting her car on campus.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Nathan boasts of being above the law because his family owns half the town. Since the police are heavily implied to be on his father's payroll, the cop in the diner admits it when questioned by Max, and reporting Nathan to the principal does nothing so it's not an unjustified opinion. Though you can get the principal to suspend him in the wake of Kate's suicide attempt, he just threatens to sue the school and treats it flippantly. His father, however, does not take it so well, and by the time you see him in Episode 3, Nathan's not in that great of a mood. Episode 3 also shows that Nathan's father has bought Nathan's record expungement on more than one occasion, and if Nathan is suspended or expelled, he threatens to pull his funding to the school unless Nathan is reinstated.
  • Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere: The Dark Room is located under a barn in the middle of nowhere.
  • Searching the Stalls: In the bathroom early on, Chloe checks the stalls to see if anybody is there to overhear her talk with Nathan. However, she Failed a Spot Check and missed Max hiding in the janitor space at the end.
  • Second Hour Superpower: Max doesn't receive her powers until after you play through a dream sequence, a scene in class and then the title credits sequence.
  • Second Love: Max eventually falls in love with Chloe. Rachel is heavily implied to be Chloe's first love. Life Is Strange: Before the Storm confirms this.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: In the end, it's revealed that Max's use of her time travel powers is what causes the superstorm that destroys Arcadia Bay. Or at least, that's the characters' best guess. They have no confirmation of this at the time, nor on how it works, nor do they have any idea if going back one more time will actually fix things and not just make the storm worse: it's various characters making guesses and suppositions based on their familiarity with time travel tropes.
  • Serial Escalation: If you thought Episode 3 was a Wham Episode, Episode 4 tops it in every way. Nathan and Mr. Jefferson have been kidnapping, drugging, and possibly raping students after taking photos of them in tortured positions and fetishist poses. With Rachel, they murdered her. Furthermore, Chloe gets shot in the head, and since Max gets drugged, there's no undoing it.
  • Serkis Folk: Characters are animated using motion-captured performances.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong: In Episode 3, Max stares at an old photograph and travels back in time to the day William died. She saves his life, changing everything from then on. She still left town and came back, but now she's a popular girl in the Vortex Club. Chloe, on the other hand, is confined to a wheelchair and slowly dying. Then she has to reset again to fix what was wrong with this timeline.
  • Set Wrong What Was Once Made Right:
    • Max finds out in the middle of the story she has the power to travel back in time via any old photos she uses her powers on. So she attempt to go back to when she was younger and prevent Chloe's father from going on a trip that resulted in his death. When she goes back to the present, however, she finds out that Chloe is paralyzed from the neck down since her father brought her a car for her 16th birthday and she got into an accident. The lifestyle is so hard on Chloe and her parents' finances that she ultimately ask Max to kill her (which is up to you). Either way, Max goes back in time to correct history.
    • This is ultimately the result of the "Save Arcadia Bay" ending. Since Max first started using her powers, this caused a temporal anomaly to form as a typhoon that'll destroy the town. The only way to prevent it is for Max to use a picture she took when she first discovered her powers and use it to go back to the day and allow Chloe to be killed by Nathan, which Max had prevented and set the events of the game in motion.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story:
    • The "Sacrifice Chloe" ending demonstrates that the entire game is one. If Max had let Chloe die in Episode 1, Nathan would have been arrested for her murder and then told the police about Mr. Jefferson abducting and killing women. This would lead to Rachel's corpse being discovered. The circumstances that lead up to Kate's suicide also don't occur. The game basically admits that there never was a practical, heroic reason for Max ever having her powers.
    • The "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" ending is only marginally better in this case. Chloe survives and it is implied that other people do too but the death toll is officially unknown. Everyone's lives are completely uprooted even if they did survive. Nothing Max did altered her start-of-game vision in any way.
    • Whether you view the game as meaningless is up to the player: Word of God states that whoever survives in the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending is up to the player and was left deliberately ambiguous, and that the reason Victoria, Kate, and others show up at Chloe's funeral is because Max made a positive difference in their lives and they're there for her as a show of support.
  • Shipper on Deck: If you convince Daniel to go to the End of the World Party, then you can find him and Brooke happily chatting together, with the implication that the two of them are about to become a couple. This is a bit downplayed if you turned Warren down on his offer of a drive-in date, causing Brooke to take him up instead.
  • Shoot the Fuel Tank: In the junkyard, you can instruct Chloe to fire at the gas tank of a rusted car sitting atop a pile of junk. Not only does hitting the intake at an angle manage to ignite the gas inside, it explodes harmlessly.
  • Shout-Out: Has its own page.
  • Show, Don't Tell: The "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" ending has almost no dialogue after Max's fateful decision, relying instead on Max and Chloe's faces to tell the audience how they feel.
  • Shown Their Work: All the different birds in the game are species that live in the Oregon area.
  • A Side Order of Romance: Implied to be the case between Chloe's mum Joyce and her step-father David. They met while Joyce was working at the Two-Whales Diner, which is elaborated on a bit in the sequel.
  • Signature Line:
    • "Ready for the mosh pit, shaka brah." - Max
    • "I was eating those beans!" - Frank
  • Signs of Disrepair: In Episode 5, the Two Whales Diner sign is damaged, leaving only "DIE" and a "W" off to the side.
  • Signs of the End Times: The tornado premonition as well as the flash snowstorm, the unscheduled eclipse and the dead birds all seem to indicate that The End Is Nigh.
  • Sinister Surveillance: Chloe's home is under heavy surveillance by David and he plans to install security cameras all over the campus as well.
  • Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Chloe is deliberately edited out of scenes in the Episode 4 trailer, to the point of showing her truck racing down a road without anyone driving it. This is likely to keep up the suspense about the changed timeline, as Chloe walking around would give away that twist.
  • Sir Swears-a-Lot: Everyone curses to varying degrees. At best, some will spout at least one foul word throughout the game. At worst, some swear like sailors, which makes sense considering the game's setting. Chloe definitely takes the cake for having the most colorful language in the game.
  • Sleazy Photoshoot: Played with. Mark Jefferson is a famous photographer and his known photographs are all considered very respectable. However, he and Nathan Prescott have a sideline in drugging and kidnapping teenage girls and forcing them to pose tied up in the Dark Room.
  • Slipping a Mickey: Turns out Nathan drugged and then kidnapped Kate and Rachel at the Vortex Club party.
  • Slipstream: The only fantastic elements in the game are Max's time travel powers and their apparent connection to the coming storm, which are never given any explanation. Take those out, and you have a fairly mundane (if very dark, towards the end) high school teen drama.
  • Slow-Motion Fall: Chloe, when Mr. Jefferson shoots her at the junkyard and also when Nathan shoots her in the bathroom at the end.
  • Slut-Shaming: Everyone calls Kate the "viral slut" after her video spreads around. To add insult to injury, Kate gets letters from her fundamentalist Christian family (including a particularly nasty one from her Westboro-ish aunt) shaming her for what happened.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: After completing Episode 4, the idyllic sunset in the main menu is replaced by a massive tornado and violent thunderstorm. The peaceful guitar music in the background, however, does not change.
  • Stalker Shrine: In Episode 5, during the Nightmare Sequence, Max can open up Warren's locker and find a shrine filled with photoshops of Max's face on bikini models and a bikini clad Max doll.
  • Stealing the Handicapped Spot: In Episode 1, the first time Max sees Chloe's truck, it's double parked in the handicapped spot for no apparent reason.
  • Stealth-Based Mission:
    • There's a brief scene in Episode 3 where Max and Chloe have to avoid getting caught after sneaking into Blackwell in the middle of the night.
    • There's a much longer one in Episode 5 when you have to evade characters in order to reach the lighthouse during the Nightmare Sequence. The fact that the last two optional photos are hidden in this segment can make it all the more frustrating if you're a completionist.
  • Stealth Pun: When Max and Chloe were kids, they loved to pretend to be pirates. In the present, they start referring to themselves as "Blackwell Ninjas" during their more cloak and dagger antics. This echoes the old Pirates vs. Ninjas meme.
  • The Stoner:
    • Chloe, Stella, Hayden, and Justin all love pot. Max notes that Hayden is almost always high.
    • In the alternate timeline, there's an interesting new addition to the lineup if you read Max's texts:
      Alternate Victoria: I do try BTW I scored that Killer bud from You know who FYI
      Alternate Max: Save me a bowl. Gotta bounce TTYL
  • "Stop the Hero" Twist: The climax of Season 1 basically consists of Max and Chloe coming to the realisation that Max using her powers to save Chloe at the beginning is the cause of the storm that's about to destroy the town; Chloe tries to convince Max to go back and just let her die. The player gets to choose if Max does so, or Screw Destiny and sacrifice the town for Chloe.
  • A Storm Is Coming: A tornado is threatening the town and Max has four days to prevent it from happening.
  • Story Branching: The main gameplay mechanic, though the effect of your choices may not be apparent until following episodes. For particularly important choices, the game will pause and display the available options. At the end of each episode, a journal is brought up indicating every available major and minor branching point, along with percentages indicating how many overall players chose that option:
    • In Episode 1:
      • Choosing whether or not to report Nathan for having a gun, which more or less plays out the same in the relevant conversations to follow. Choosing to report him also colors the principal's perception of Max in later choices, especially if she can't back her accusations up, though it also helps make a case against Nathan later.
      • Comforting or making fun of Victoria after spilling paint on her in order to enter the dorms. Doing the former causes her to take down the unflattering picture she took of you. Doing the latter results in your own unflattering picture of her, only for her to vandalize your room later in retaliation. Rewinding won't allow you to save the picture and comfort her anyway.
      • Taking a picture of David harassing Kate or stepping in to help Kate. Kate will get mad at Max for doing nothing if you take the picture, and will be grateful if you intervene. Helping also plays into talking down Kate from committing suicide, while taking the picture can be used as proof of David's harassment later. As with the above, the options are mutually exclusive in spite of Max's rewind.
      • A four option choice in Chloe's room: hide/don't hide, and take the blame for the pot/don't take the blame for the pot. Not taking the blame always makes Chloe mad, but she's barely on speaking terms with you if you didn't hide and blamed her. By contrast, she'll be impressed if you come out of hiding to take the blame, this being the only scenario in which she reveals the gun she stole. David may also use it against Max later, if he needs to defend his own reputation or if Principal Wells questions how much he can trust Max. Having taken the photo of David will come into play here if applicable.
    • In Episode 2:
      • Telling Kate to go to the police or wait for more proof. She takes the second decision worse than the first. Waiting also factors into accusing Mr. Jefferson in the final choice of the episode.
      • Answering Kate's call at the diner. Though Kate is grateful if you do, Chloe will get into an argument with her mom in the background and be briefly mad at Max. Not talking to Kate avoids the argument, but this is a point against you in the later confrontation.
      • Resolving the confrontation with Frank by either trying to shoot Frank or not. In the former, you're out of bullets, so it does nothing, but he'll still leave while warning that he won't forget the attempt, although Chloe will be relieved and much happier than if Max doesn't pull the trigger. If you do the latter, he takes the gun and leaves with a warning to Chloe alone. Chloe will be glad it was taken despite her earlier enthusiasm for the weapon, though she'll also claim that she could manage to find another if necessary. She still nags you about it later, but doesn't seem to be too pissed off.
      • Whether or not Kate commits suicide. Previous choices involving Kate come into play here, as do details of her personal life that can be gleaned from her room. There are a total of six dialog options, five of which need to be correct to talk Kate down. The sixth only occurs if one of the previous five is answered wrong. Any previous negative interactions with her will have to be adequately justified, while positive interactions are counted regardless of which dialog option is chosen. Notably, you can't rewind on this one, so the choices you make have to be right the first time. If you succeed, Max is thought of as a hero for talking her down and the ending montage has a scene of Kate recuperating at the hospital. If you fail, Max is still praised for trying and she laments not being able to help, while the ending montage has a memorial for Kate outside the girls dorm. The results of this continue into the next episode, and almost every character will comment on it in some way — even people you meet for the first time or only speak to in passing, such as the homeless woman outside of the Two Whales diner.
      • A three option choice in the aftermath of the above. While talking with the principal and police about what drove Kate to attempt suicide, you have the choice of accusing Nathan, Mr. Jefferson, or David. The outcome of this choice can vary wildly depending on how you dealt with the participants in previous choices. If you reported Nathan earlier (or didn't report him and didn't take the blame for Chloe), accusing Nathan gets him suspended/expelled on reasonable suspicion, though he threatens to sue and seems rather cavalier about the whole ordeal. If you didn't report Nathan and took the blame for Chloe, accusing him gets Max suspended. Accusing David will get Max suspended if she has no proof of his harassment, reported Nathan, and took the blame for Chloe; result in nothing if Max has no proof and didn't take the blame for Chloe (or if she has no proof and didn't report Nathan); and result in his temporary suspension if Max took a photo of him harassing Kate. Accusing Mr. Jefferson means he will no longer represent Blackwell at the Everyday Hero competition and is put under faculty scrutiny, though he accepts his punishment and Max's accusation with grace. If Max didn't recommend Kate call the police, he'll say she hasn't been taking Kate's calls.
    • In Episode 3:
      • The first major choice you get is whether or not to let Chloe steal the money for the handicapped fund from the principal's desk. It's more than enough to pay off Frank, but that will prevent the dorms from receiving any upgrades in the next episode. Aside from Max regretting her decision when she learns of the cancelled upgrades, it doesn't have any negative consequences during gameplay.
      • Choosing whether or not to kiss Chloe after she dares Max to. Kissing her results in a brief peck on the lips, but neither of them seem particularly displeased about the situation, and they banter about it a few times afterwards.
      • Choosing to side with Chloe or David. If you side with David, Max does so primarily out of concern for Joyce and the already unstable family situation, though Chloe calls you out on how you were just calling him creepy. If you side with Chloe and talk about his files, Joyce jumps in and demands an explanation. She then tells David he should stay at a hotel for a few days, and talking with her after reveals that she doesn't blame Max or hold it against her. It will also allow easy access to David's files in Episode 4.
      • When entering Frank's RV, you need to get past Frank's dog. You can either toss the bone into the parking lot or the street. Throwing it into the parking lot means the dog barks as Max and Chloe leave. Frank hears the barking and turns around, watching the two of them leave in Chloe's truck. Throwing it into the street means the dog gets hit by a semi and Frank won't notice, but Max feels pretty bad about it.
      • If, in the confrontation with Frank last episode, you chose not to shoot him, David's gun is in his RV. You can choose to take it and give it back to Chloe, or leave it where it is. Otherwise, the gun will be in Chloe's room and the choice is skipped.
    • In Episode 4:
      • Whether or not to assist Chloe's suicide. Yes means she dies and no means she doesn't but criticizes Max.
      • Letting Warren beat Nathan to a pulp or stopping him. Warren thanks you for the latter, while doing the former causes Chloe to take Nathan's gun.
      • The confrontation with Frank. This can go a number of ways, depending on how the player chooses to leave things. If Chloe has a gun and Frank's dog is loose, she'll kill them both in self defense if he gets mad. If the dog is locked up (or was injured in Episode 3, and thus not around), he gets shot in the leg if he gets mad, or stabbed if Chloe has no gun. Finally, Max can convince him to cooperate with the right choices. The confrontation in Episode 2 and the money Chloe wants to steal in Episode 3 come into play here, though Frank can be talked down even if both options weren't done in his favor. Chloe will get her gun back from Frank if she doesn't have it already, regardless of the outcome.
      • Telling Victoria about the Dark Room. If Max didn't make fun of her for the paint spill and doesn't insult her at the party, Victoria will believe her. Otherwise, she won't. The player can choose not to tell her at all.
    • In Episode 5:
      • If Victoria believed Max in Episode 4, she'll be in the Dark Room with Max.
      • Telling David that Chloe is dead. If you don't, he'll take Mr. Jefferson to the police. If you do, David will kill him in cold blood.
      • Once you get Warren's photo, you can either hug him, kiss him, or do nothing. The kiss option may be absent depending upon past interactions with Warren. It factors into some later dialog.
      • Either save Chloe or Arcadia Bay. Doing the former causes the storm to destroy the town and likely many (but officially unknown) others whilst Max and Chloe leave town together. Doing the latter means Chloe dies, but Mr. Jefferson and Nathan pay for their crimes since Nathan is arrested for killing Chloe and apparently sells Jefferson out under interrogation. Everyone else gets to live, too, even Kate if you didn't save her the first time.
  • The Story That Never Was: As well as referencing a famous example of this in Star Trek in one of Max's journals:
    • Max realizes she can jump back in time via photos at the end of Episode 3 (as well as just reversing it briefly as is done in normal gameplay) and tries to fix the death of Chloe's near angelic father. In the new timeline, Chloe suffered a car accident instead and is dying a slow, painful death while confined to a wheelchair, suffering many of the bad things that were previously caused by her father's death,note  culminating in a choice of whether you kill her with an overdose at her own request, or not. This is finally enough to make Max restore the original timeline, where Chloe is miserable and went through hell for the last five years, but still alive. The entire scene is effectively foreshadowing for the endings...
    • You first see Chloe when she's shot by Nathan, causing Max to manifest her Time Master powers and undo it in a Justified Tutorial. At the end of Episode 5, you have a Sadistic Choice of endings; "Sacrifice Chloe" or "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay". The former follows this, as Max goes back in time (via a photo you took just before it happened) to let her get shot and Dying Alone (as far as she knows), never to be reunited with the former best friend crying her eyes out just feet away. A montage reveals that this also solves most of the story's other conflicts.note 
    • The other ending subverts this (as well as another). Max tears the photo up (echoing an earlier moment when she destroys her prize winning photo to retcon herself back to the town and be able to save Chloe), having decided to Screw Destiny and let the storm that this damage to the timeline summoned destroy the town (with a Shrug of God as to how many survivors there are). After it subsides an unspecified amount of time later, Max and Chloe leave the ruined town together, moving on with their lives.
  • Story to Gameplay Ratio: Often the puzzles take a backseat to the exploration of the environment and characters, making Life Is Strange a hybrid of Environmental Narrative Game and Adventure Game.
  • Stranger in a Familiar Land:
    • Max returns home after five years to find her former best friend a different person in the wake of Chloe's father's death and Rachel's disappearance. She comments a few times on how nothing's changed, and yet everything has. This is expanded upon in Episode 2, where Max gets to ask several people about how things have changed over the past couple of years.
    • At the end of Episode 3, Max changes history so William Price never died. As a result, the five years between then and the present are radically altered. However, because Max's memory hasn't changed with the timeline, it's a completely different town to her. She's now a member of the popular crowd, Victoria's now Max's BFF, Warren and Max aren't friends, David is a school bus driver, and Chloe is paralyzed from the neck down.
  • String Theory: All the evidence for David, Nathan and Frank is pinned to a drawing board in Chloe's room and you are asked to piece together the clues.
  • Surprisingly Creepy Moment: When Max goes to pick up Warren's flash drive in Dana's room, an almost demonic voice-over by Max herself says, "Must protect my precious, so Max never has to chase it down again." While you might realize after the fact that this is something some people might say to themselves, considering this is just a simple errand for a friend, it may catch some off-guard on their very first playthrough, even if it was supposed to be funny.
  • Surreal Horror: The nightmare sequence in Episode 5. Among others it includes: Max sitting in a class that casually continues as normal while hundreds of birds pelt the windows turning it into a bloody mess, Max being forced to declare her love for Mr. Jefferson or something equally repulsive, and Max having to sneak around a maze of Jefferson's tortured photographs while he and other people Max know yell insults at her.
  • Survivor Guilt: This is written all over Max and Chloe's faces during the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending, stemming from the fact that the Bay is the cost for the latter's life continuing.
  • Symbolic Baptism: In the opening, Max excuses herself to the ladies room to splash water on her face. She then promptly acquires her Time Master powers (which make up the main game mechanic). At the end of the game, this moment is what she jumps back to, if the player chooses to sacrifice Chloe and Cosmic Retcon away the entire game's events.
  • Symbology Research Failure: The game draws attention to the use of spirit animals in the narrative, claiming that everyone has a spirit animal that guides them through life and offers advice. However, that element actually describes animal totems because (according to the belief) totems are said to be the animal that reflects who you are, while spirit animals are said to only appear at certain times (something the spirit deer does). Secondly, if spirit animals were of native american origin, then it would only restricted to a few tribes. The concept of spirit animals may have actually originate from native american tribes that designed themselves after animals.
  • Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain: Nathan Prescott and Mark Jefferson are a criminal duo of photographers responsible for drugging and abducting teenage girls for their illegal photoshoots in the Dark Room. While Nathan is a power-tripping violent bully and delinquent who aided and abetted Jefferson's crimes, he has a number of sympathetic qualities (his father's awful parenting, mental instability, alienation from his peers, and desperation for any kind of affection or respect of a father figure) and goes on to express remorse for his actions on several occasions. Jefferson, on the other hand, is a flat-out monster who only does what he does for his sick pleasure, and he doesn't hesitate to kill anyone who gets in his way, even going as far as to kill Nathan once he ceased being useful.
  • Take That!: Mr. Jefferson appears to be a fan of a thinly veiled Rush Limbaugh parody.
  • Take Your Time: You can walk around examining objects and admiring the scenery at your leisure, but the important events won't occur until you trigger them. This is especially noticeable with the bathroom confrontation in Episode 1. The first time around, you walk slowly and may waste a bunch of time looking at stuff. After the rewind, you run straight there and the event plays out the same. However, it's played with when it comes to events like Alyssa's regular misfortunes, Chloe being trapped on the train tracks or the Two Whales diner exploding during Episode 5. All of them can be rewound to set things right in case Max didn't intervene in time, but they do play out in real time again and again until you figure out the solution.
  • Talking Down the Suicidal: Max attempts to do this with Kate, who wants to jump three stories to her death at the end of Episode 2, due to all the bullying she's taken. Player choices decide if she succeeds.
  • Tempting Fate: When leaving the diner, you get a call from Kate. Answering the call leads to Max saying afterward that she could just not take the call. It's not like she won't see her later in class, right? Then, when she does go to class, Kate is somewhere else... On the other hand, not taking the call results in Max saying she feels bad about ignoring her friend in need. Chloe will then offhandedly tell her to not beat herself up as Kate will survive her not taking that one call. Max doesn't seem too convinced, and in fact, not taking the call will make it more difficult to talk Kate out of committing suicide later unless you say your phone was on silent mode, so Kate might not survive you not taking that one call after all.
  • That Makes Me Feel Angry: Max's internal monologues are prone to lines like "That's so sad" or "That makes me feel sad".
  • There Are No Bedsheets: Episode 2 starts with Max waking up in her bed, but there are no bedsheets. Similarly, there is a scene in Episode 3 where Max and Chloe wake up in Chloe's bed.
  • There Are No Therapists:
    • Justified with Nathan Prescott; there are indeed therapists available who are more than willing to help him. Unfortunately, his father considers allowing him to see them a sign of weakness, forcing him to self medicate with illegally purchased drugs.
    • Played straight in Blackwell, where Kate isn't offered any sort of counselling despite being publicly shamed and bullied to the point she's shut down (and showing obvious signs of suicidal thoughts even before her attempt at the end of Episode 2). Although Mr. Jefferson (noted as the teacher she had the most contact with) was trying to push her towards suicide to cover up Nathan (and his) crimes...
    • Chloe seems to have had absolutely no help recovering from the trauma of losing her father and Max moving away. Similarly Joyce doesn't seem to have had any help getting over William's death, and her attempts to move on with David are questionable at best. Also justified because it's unlikely Joyce could afford one.
  • This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: When Max makes a bucket of paint drop in Victoria, she says this:
    Don't mess with Max, bitches!
  • This Is Reality: At the end of Episode 1, Chloe tells Max that her insistence of having time powers is ridiculous, as "this isn't anime or a video game."
  • Time Crash: First altering destiny, then tampering with the timeline causes strange, scary things to happen in Arcadia Bay. Though we can't exactly say why or how, other than that the timeline appears to becoming unstable and reality is both "glitching" and trying to right itself by ultimately wiping out Arcadia Bay:
    • The strange things are: snowing unseasonably early, despite being 80 degrees; there's an unscheduled solar eclipse; whales and birds start dying inexplicably around the town; a double moon appears briefly in the sky; and finally the enormous twister that Max keeps having visions of threatens to wipe the town clean off the map. Needless to say, all of these things happening in rapid succession spook the citizens and are seen as Signs of the End Times, which seems to be true at the local level.
    • The "Nightmare" sequence is the penultimate point of the series. Max collapses, and is sent on a surreal, terrifying adventure. Whether this was because her time powers messed with her head too much or whether she fell into some...scary time thing, is open to interpretation.
  • Time Is Dangerous: The game goes to great lengths to stress the dangers of having time-manipulation powers:
    • Max's altering history from within history itself leads to a point in Episode 5 where she is "between realities".
    • Near the end of Episode 2, Max manages to freeze time entirely, but the fallout from this incident leaves her unable to use her powers for several hours, and she expresses fear of becoming stuck in time in the following episode.
    • After creating a timeline where she is a member of the Vortex Club, William Price is alive and Chloe is in a terminal condition from a spinal injury, Max decides that her ability to alter history using photographs is far too dangerous because the Butterfly Effect is in full force.
  • Time Rewind Mechanic: Max's strange ability to rewind time whenever she wants is the central fantastical element of the story. Gameplay-wise, it allows the player to try out different outcomes at critical plot points before committing to a particular story branch.
  • Time Stands Still: When Max tries to overtax her powers in Episode 2, this is the result. It gets her up to the roof in time to talk to Kate, but she's burnt out and has to talk Kate down without the benefit of rewinding. In Episode 3, Max worries that she might get herself permanently stuck like this if she isn't careful.
  • Time Travel: Max's powers, crossed with a bit of Reality Warper since her soujourns into the past of her photographs leaves the present progressively more and more distorted. It also effects her differently so she appears to cross space as well as time from the perspective of others.
  • Time-Traveling Jerkass: Max is accused of this by herself (or rather "one of the Max's you left behind"), in a Nightmare Sequence. She points out that Max has been using her powers to get the upper hand in social situations, manipulate people and avoid the consequences of her actions. She's then interrupted by a manifestation of Chloe, who delivers a counterargument. Whether this is true, or just an overactive guilty conscience is up to the player's interpretation.
  • Timey-Wimey Ball: The time travel logic is fairly consistent for a few notable exceptions:
    • The storm Max has a vision of at the very start of the game doesn't actually have any reason to exist, even in vision form at that point considering that Max herself is implied to be what causes it with powers she doesn't have yet. It could perhaps be excused if either the entire scene in itself was a flashback, or if by some logic You Can't Fight Fate so much that even time travelling to change fate itself is predetermined.
    • The first scene at the bathroom, where Max watches Nathan kill Chloe, ends with a time jump back to Max awaking in class. The creators have admitted that this was not according to the time travel rules established. We should have seen Max rewind from the bathroom to the classroom but that just didn't work as effectively so they changed it.
    • According to Chloe, the snowflakes and eclipse also happened in the timeline with her being paraplegic, though in this timeline Max never saved Chloe from Nathan which caused the anomalies. So the tornado should not be on its way to destroy the town. Given, this is still a move away from the timeline when Chloe died because she was shot by Nathan, which makes sense in theory, considering it's never clear if Chloe's survival caused the tornado or if Max changing the timeline at all caused it.
    • Episode 5's numerous photograph jumps are just short of needing a flowchart to explain. Max leaves her timeline to turn Jefferson in to the police and win the Everyday Heroes contest, which makes her out of town in the present, and unable to save Chloe from the storm, so she goes back to that timeline and destroys the photo she had turned in to the contest (before she turned it in), angering Mr. Jefferson and causing him to destroy all of Max's photos, meaning that in the original timeline she never went back to start the whole sequence in the first place.
  • Title Drop:
    • Subverted in Episode 5. At one point, Max remarks that "life is...", does a dramatic pause, and finishes with "weird".
    • Later in Episode 5, Chloe (or rather, one of many possible versions of Chloe) comes up with "life is.... so not fair."
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • There is a reason Chloe frequently dies/needs saving from lethal peril, and it is not strictly because Fate/Death/The Worse/etc. is mad that she didn't die at the start of the game. It's because she makes a lot of bad choices. In Episode 2, Chloe will shoot herself with a ricochet during the bottle shooting scene if you have her shoot the car bumper. She's also been drinking, a fact Max lampshades as a bad combination yet goes along with it anyway. Later on, Chloe gets her foot caught in the track switcher while hanging out on the regularly used railroad tracks. This is possibly justified in that she knows Max is there to bail her out if the worst should happen, which she repeatedly does.
    • In Episode 5, Evan is in the middle of a tornado trying to take photos. A fridge door will hit him if Max doesn't intervene.
  • Torture Cellar: The Dark Room, where Mr. Jefferson brings his victims after getting them drugged, just so that he can make photos of them in vulnerable situations.
  • Torture Chamber Episode: Max spends most of the first half of Episode 5 as a captive in Mr. Jefferson's Dark Room.
  • Total Eclipse of the Plot: There's an eclipse in Episode 2, even though there's not one scheduled.
  • Totally Radical: The dialogue is peppered with what is intended to be early 2010s slang, including "salty". There are also some odd British-isms, like "suss out" and "bum" (as in "ass"), among other examples. This is lampshaded by Chloe when Max uses the phrase "Are you cereal?" when she realizes her camera got busted:
    Chloe: Wow, I haven't heard that one in awhile.
  • Tragic Dream: Rachel never does get away from Arcadia Bay. Depending on the ending, neither does Chloe.
  • Trial-and-Error Gameplay: A lot of the dialog involves either accidentally or deliberately giving the wrong answer, then rewinding to give the right one or use what you learned to probe further. The confrontation with Kate near the end of Episode 2 is a straight example, as you don't have the option to rewind and there's not much margin for error in the dialog choices.
  • Two Decades Behind: Max and her social circle are highly intelligent and geeky hipsters with an encyclopedic knowledge of art and media, but most of the works they reference would be a lot more popular with Gen-X video game developers than Millennial high school kids. From Blade Runner to Get Smart to Duran Duran, they seem obsessed with stuff that was made before they were even born.
  • Two-Teacher School: Ms. Grant and Mr. Jefferson. The rest of the faculty includes the principal, groundskeeper and chief of security. Theoretically, there are more teachers, but they are never shown.
  • Uncertain Doom: In the "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" ending, the town is wiped out but there's no indication as to who died in the process. Max and Chloe simply drive out of town, not another soul in sight.
  • Updated Re Release: The 2022 remaster, released 7 years after original game, has subtle graphical and lighting improvements but the most notable change is replacing the old key-frame animations with actual motion-captured performances.
  • Use Your Head: In Episode 1, Nathan headbutts Warren in the parking area when the latter tries to help out Max. Warren returns the headbutt to Nathan in Episode 4 at the boys' dormitory.
  • Vanity License Plate: Chloe somehow managed to get the license plate "TWNPKS" (Twin Peaks). Somebody else at the school has "TWLTZN" (The Twilight Zone (1959)). Nathan Prescott, somewhat disturbingly, has "SXFTNDR" (Six Feet Under). A show about a creepy town with a missing girl, a show about the dark side of sci-fi concepts, and a show about death and the acceptance thereof. Hmmm.
  • Vengeance Feels Empty: David executing Jefferson for killing his step-daughter has... a lot less bravado to it than expected. Hell, the latter is not even conscious to see the former shoot him. Once the deed’s done, there’s no sense of satisfaction for neither Max nor David. In fact, Max actually regrets telling David the truth and driving him to a Heroic B So D.
  • Video Game Caring Potential:
    • Some of the optional photos can only be obtained if you do certain good things, like helping Warren with his science experiment.
    • In a case overlapped with Video Game Cruelty Potential, some of the optional photos can also be obtained if you do certain cruel things, like re-arrange Victoria's wall of photos into a shape of middle finger or ask Trevor to do tre flip so he accidentally hit himself in the crotch for you to snap a photo of him in pain. Fortunately, since you retain items and optional photos even after you rewound, you can simply rewind so you retain those photos while your cruel action is undone.
    • Multiple choices in the game let you extend a helping hand to the people Max interacts with, such as being nice to Victoria after you dump paint on her, watering your plant, saving Alyssa from flying objects, and taking the heat for Chloe's pot. This is actually important for talking Kate down from suicide, as it's more difficult to get through to Kate if you haven't been nice to her.
    • You can choose to tell Victoria she's going to be the next victim, which, ironically, gets her killed if she believes Max.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential:
    • On the flip side, they also let you be kind of a jerk, such as adding insult to Victoria's paint injury and doing some petty vandalism to the photo wall in her room, taking a picture of the kid who messes up his skateboard trick, and letting Alyssa's Once an Episode misfortune go unfixed.
    • At one point in Episode 2, Chloe uses a junkyard as a shooting range with Max telling her what to shoot. You can have Max tell Chloe to shoot a car bumper, which causes the shot to ricochet back into Chloe and injure her. This can be rewound and performed as many times as the player wants.
    • A "cruelty" option comes in Episode 3: you can choose to throw a bone to distract Frank's dog. If you choose to throw it into the street, the dog gets hit by a semi. Doing so means that Frank doesn't notice Chloe and Max leave, meaning he has no reason to suspect them when he finds his keys missing and his RV broken into. It's worth noting that almost every player will toss it into the parking lot instead, so the dog isn't harmed.
    • In Episode 3, there are several methods Max can try to steal Frank's keys. Two of these are spilling his beer on his lap or dropping his plate of beans on the floor, pissing him off and resulting in him trying to kill Max. These accomplish nothing, but you can rewind and do them over and over to your heart's content.
    • You can not tell Victoria about her being the next victim in Episode 4, which, ironically, ends up saving her life.
  • Villain Has a Point: During Episode 5, Mr. Jefferson makes an offhand comment about how Rachel would have died in Los Angeles had she not died by Nathan's hand. He's technically right in the sense that Chloe and Rachel would have just left their families and Arcadia Bay and gone hundreds of miles with no money, no place to go and no actual plan for when they do make it there.
  • The Villain Knows Where You Live: Max receives an anonymous text threat claiming someone "knows where she sleeps." It's likely from Nathan, as there can be another text in Episode 3 proclaiming that "feminazis will be exterminated"note  or that she is a "fukup looser"note You get proof it was him in Episode 4.
  • Volleying Insults: Max's conversation with Victoria in Episode 4 can degenerate into this.
  • "Wash Me" Graffiti: Early in the game, you can write "I'm so dirty" + a smiley face on the window of an RV that belongs to Frank as an optional photo. If you do so, the graffiti will be there for the rest of the game. Max's thoughts about the situation currently provides the page quote.
  • Watching the Sunset: Episode 2 ends with Max and Warren, among others, watching the unscheduled eclipse.
  • Watching Troy Burn: If you choose to save Chloe at the end, the two of hold hands while watching Arcadia Bay getting destroyed by the tornado.
  • Weather Dissonance: Episode 1 ends with snow falling in October during fairly mild weather. It's just one of several anomalies heralding the deadly tornado approaching Arcadia Bay.
  • Weird Moon: Episode 4 has the moon doubled in the sky. It's implied to be another version of the moon bleeding over from an alternate timeline.
  • Wham Episode:
    • Episode 3: Max changes history, saving William but putting Chloe in a wheelchair. A bunch of whales also beach themselves at the end.
    • Episode 4: Rachel was Dead All Along, murdered by Mr. Jefferson and Nathan. They have been drugging and kidnapping teenage girls and taking grotesque pictures of them to put into photo albums. Finally, Jefferson kills Chloe and kidnaps Max.
  • Wham Line:
    • In Episode 2, when trying to stop Kate from jumping off the roof:
    • It might not have a lot of impact on the plot, but this line in Episode 3 certainly turned some heads:
      Chloe: You can afford to take chances! Whenever and whatever you want to try... for example, I dare you to kiss me!
    • Then in Episode 4, we get this:
      Alt!Chloe: I just wanted to feel like when we were kids running around Arcadia Bay... and everything was possible. And you made me feel that way today. I want this time with you... to be my last memory. Do you understand?
    • In Episode 5, one of two Wham Lines happens, depending on what dialogue option Max picks:
      Max: I think the storm started... everything started... when I learned I could rewind time... There's no way this is just a coincidence, right?
      • Or:
      Warren: Max, going back in time is what caused the storm!
  • Wham Shot:
    • The reveal of Chloe in a wheelchair in Episode 3.
    • The reveal that the one who killed Chloe and drugged Max is Mr. Jefferson, not Nathan.
  • What the Hell, Hero?:
    • After Chloe has saved Max from Nathan and shared some witty banter, she will call Max out on never contacting her after she moved away, and still not contacting her after she moved back.
    • If you have Max choose not to intervene while David the security guard is hassling Kate for no reason, Kate will angrily say, "Hope you enjoyed the show! Thanks for nothing, Max."
    • In Episode 5, an alternate version of Max will ream into Max for using the rewind power to mess with people's feelings and saying what they want to hear.
  • What the Hell, Player?: If you move a plank to take a photo of a birds' nest in Episode 4 and don't replace the plank (by rewinding or by moving it back), the nest will be destroyed before the scrub jay eggs hatch. Joyce's texts and pictures of the damage done essentially call the player out for their carelessness in pursuit of minor objectives.
  • White Sheep: Of the Prescotts, Kristine, Nathan's sister, seems to be the only decent one.
  • Where It All Began: Comes into play in two distinct ways:
    • The lighthouse in the first scene is also the site of the game's final decision point.
    • If you choose to save Arcadia Bay in the end, Max's final act with her powers is to use the butterfly photo to jump back to the moment her rewind powers first manifested and stop herself from preventing Chloe's murder.
  • Wire Dilemma: When trying to save Chloe from the onrushing train Max can use the pliers to cut a wire in the fuse box. There are three wires present (green, yellow, red) but only cutting the red one leads to the desired outcome.
  • Xanatos Speed Chess: Max has to play a difficult game of this in Episode 5 in order to defeat Jefferson and save Chloe/Arcadia Bay.
  • You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Towards the end of the game, Max realizes that the tornado was created by her powers and claims that all she has done with her powers was cause more death and destruction. Chloe won't have that:
    Chloe: Fuck all of that, okay? You were given a power. You didn't ask for it... And you saved me. Which had to happen, all of this did... except for what happened to Rachel. But without your power, we wouldn't have found her! Okay, so you're not the goddamn Time Master, but you're Maxine Caulfield... and you're amazing.
  • You Are Not Alone:
    Max: My powers might not last.
    Chloe: It's okay, we will. Forever.
  • You Can't Fight Fate: After Max saves Chloe in the opening, Chloe has numerous close calls within the span of a week, verging on Cosmic Plaything territory, even dying by gunshot at the close of Chapter 4, until Max jumps through a lot of hoops to reverse it. The implication being that Chloe was destined to die early in the story, and that all of these close calls is the timeline trying to right itself, while the strange phenomena around the town is a side-effect of the timeline being tampered with. However, you can save Chloe for good, at great cost:
    • Near the end of the game, Max and Chloe conclude that it was Chloe's fate to die in the bathroom. However thanks to Max's powers and her saving Chloe, she has caused the tornado and other calamities. Chloe is willing to accept her fate of dying in the next timeline if it means to save Arcadia Bay. However, the decision lies in Max's hands.
    • This sums up the Sacrifice Chloe ending. Max goes back in time where she met the blue butterfly in the bathroom and lets Chloe get killed by Nathan.
    • On the other hand, this is averted by the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending. Max and Chloe watch the tornado as it destroys the town and the two leave the next day.
  • You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Frank pulls this one on Max at the junkyard when the latter draws a gun on him. Of course, he's quite shocked if you do decide to pull the trigger and backs off.

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Victoria

Victoria being her usual bitchy self.

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Main / AlphaBitch

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