First episode was interesting. No spoilers here, just impressions of the game overall. Spoilers will come later.

- Took a while to get used to Chloe being voiced by a different person. Was a bit like whoever it was who voiced the Genie in Aladdin 2... Close but obviously not the same.
- There’s no time travel in this one (well that what they’ve said, at least) so the big feature outside of normal branching conversations is this thing called Backtalk. You basically have a limited amount of time to come up with a response and have to sorta keep responding correctly to keep intimidating / bluffing / charming / whatevering your way through a conversation. It should have felt tense but I don’t think I failed any of the checks so it didn’t feel like much more than choosing the next bit of dialogue quickly. There’s a little timer. Not sure what happens if it runs out.

- Early on it was kinda hard for me to play it. Walking around and looking at every little thing and musing about every flower and poster and person felt to me like Max’s thing so much. Doing it as Chloe felt... wrong. I was much more inclined to not care or walk past stuff because that what she would do.

Also a bit hard, because Chloe is so angry and negative at everything. For good reasons, sure, like dealing with the dead of her dad, but it’s hard for me to play so negative a character.

- Things picked up once Rachel Amber came into the scene proper. Pretty quickly it’s just Chloe and Rachel which I think worked a lot better than wandering Chloe around inspecting things as if she were Max. Chloe’s internal thought process felt much better when she was thinking through her immediate situation, or how to respond to conversation with Rachel, or to the other stuff that happened.

- The animation and look of the game was really good. It still has that Life Is Strange painting / low budget look to everything but it seemed more deliberate and more detailed than the first game. It had better models and better environments. One of the game’s real strengths so far has been animation, which seems crazy since one of Life Is Strange’s weaknesses was its animation.

There is a lot of good, non-motion-capture-jittered, custom animation for Chloe and Rachel. Lots of good subtle touches in the body animation. Like one of them doing one or two extra loop/twirls with their hand as they playfully hand something over to the other one. Quick, complicated, somewhat unnecessary animation that shows someone really cared.

Facial animation is also greatly improved. With Life Is Strange, you almost had to imagine what the characters were doing or feeling or how they were moving by extrapolating out from the somewhat limited animation of their bodies and the almost non-existent facial animation. In Before The Storm there were subtle smiles and raised eyebrows and smirks and gasps and shock and anger displayed on faces. Even with the Life Is Strange art style, a decent bit more character came through in the animation and models than before.

- Despite Chloe’s different voice actor, voice acting was pretty good across the board. The conversations and range of emotion and tone in all the characters’ voices was well above average. Timing on things like back and forth dialogue was very good as well. It always seems like these voice actors aren’t in the same room as each other when they are recording, but dialogue and conversations were snappy and it felt like the characters were really responding to each other and playing off each other.

There were a few not quite right pauses when choosing the next dialogue option a few times. Like as if the game had to load in the sound file so the characters stare at each other for a split second too long. But it wasn’t anything too major and nothing you haven’t experienced if you’ve played pretty much anything with choosable dialogue. I just wish these things were completely perfect, because they are getting so close now.

- Overall, this felt like a Life Is Strange game. The movement. The hand drawn UI that appears when you get close to things. The way you auto turn around if you try and leave the playable space. It all felt right when compared to the first game. I’m gong to hold off giving an official score for the moment so I can play it again, but right now I’d say it safe to buy and will provide a decent, story drive, dialogue heavy time, if that’s what you’re looking for. I’m gonna play the story again before I affix a letter or number grade to the Episode 1, though. It’s certainly has a B already, but it might move up from there.

- No text -

https://youtu.be/Su4Wmh4I_Ic

This video will work in about three hours. If any of you follow the Rampancy.net Let's Plays with Narcogen and Blackstar, Blackstar has said he would rather play through the whole thing, and not do it as each episode comes out, so don't expect it for a few months.

I went off on very few rants, as this was my first playthrough of the game so I didn't have time to stew much, but also because this game was much better. Very few things made me upset like they did in the first game, and the weird quirks of awful recycled animations and bad acting are gone.

This is absolutely twice the game, technically, as the first one.

The first one was fun because it had a gimmick and it told a story of reconnecting with someone. For me, it sold me when I had some of the exact conversations with people after leaving and coming back to Michigan, plus some of the same Chloe and Max experiences.

This one is just the best choose your own adventure game I've played so far. I have zero of Raga's issues with stepping into Chloe. Max seemed bored with the world, so was just looking at stuff. She'd see a thing, then make a dumb comment, adding information neither about the world nor about her personality the majority of the time. Every time Chloe looks at something, she's curious, and there's a story there. Where Max looks at a medicine cabinet and says "wow, that's a lot of drugs," or something, Chloe looks at it and says "My mom is dying her hair to hide the grey hair for David. That must turn him off. I should dye my hair grey," or something.

The first LIS was great, for real, but it's like if your mom made a pizza. Good, it's pizza, but it doesn't compare to a real chef who knows pizza. At this point, I consider Deck Nine to have made a superior game to Don't Nod, but we'll see if it speaks to me like the first one.

Look at your phone and go to the texts with Max. She's such a dick!

I think Deck Nine is trying very hard to portray the world from Chloe's perspective, even undoing, or undermining, some of the stuff Don't Nod tried to do. David is such an asshole in this game that any self respecting mother would punch him in the throat if she saw how he treated Chloe, despite only knowing her a short time. This goes against what Don't Nod was going for, that he was a strict guy who was trying his best but has some massive character flaws. David was literally the hero in the last game.

Now, Frank is cool, David is a butt, Max is an asshole, Principal Wells is the head of a high school Gestapo, and so on. I am not sure if they're knowingly doing this, so we can identify more with Chloe, or if they totally missed the story that was being attempted last game.

I do sympathize with Max. She's not good at keeping in contact; look at her messages to her parents. I've been Max before. To me, there is zero difference between seeing someone after years and years and not talking, and I don't need to talk to the people. Like Max. And, at some point, if you realize you've been ignoring someone for long enough, and his/her message is recent enough, you just have to keep it up. Honestly, I blame Chloe for taking it so personally. She should have known how Max worked by then.

This chapter didn’t get off to as much of a lightening flash, time storm of bay down destroying start. The walk down to the Firewalk party was a bit more subdued than Max waking up in the pouring rain and having a lighthouse drop on her.

The stuff inside the mill was actually really good. From conversing with Frank to maybe stealing a shirt and some money and definitely to the Firewalk concert. The part where Chloe sits upstairs and rocks out to the band was well done.

Nearly getting beat up by those two guys was tense and the choice to run or fight was actually a bigger choice that it seems. Nothing too crazy, but choosing to fight gets Chloe punched in the face and a lot of comments about her black eye the next day.

The scene with Chloe and her mom and then Chloe and David were, like I said in the No Spoilers post, kinda hard for me to play. I’m fine with directing Chloe to be an awesome jerk, but directing her to be mean to her mom and even David isn’t easy. I’ve played her about as nice as possible in those moments during both my play throughs.

The first dream sequence with William is well done. Chloe is so happy just relaxing to the country music but there’s several little elements wrong and out of place in the dream and getting hit by the truck is pretty well done. They actually committed to it for the most part where some games might have set the scene at night and just had bright headlights and a crashing sound.

At school I felt like maybe Victoria Chase was slightly out of character. Maybe she was just sucking up to Chloe to try to be in a position to suck up to Rachel later, but I felt like the V.C. that Max knew was a bit more “take no crap I’m in charge”. Who knows, maybe this V.C. will grow a bit more into that? The payoff to messing with her homework is pretty fun later on though.

Samantha the shy girl was interesting. I loved her little shy laugh after Chloe owns the jock in that Backtalk session.

The D&D game is easily the highlight of the school grounds section. With the right choices Chloe can shock the GM girl with her character’s outright brutality. The scene doesn’t branch quite as much as I hoped, so my recommendation is to fight the boss last to get the most out of it.

Not too much to say about the scene at the play rehearsal except I thought it was a neat touch to have Rachel offer to put some makeup over Chloe’s black eye. I’d been thinking she should do that and even went to the bathroom to look for supplies to do it before Chloe leaves for school, so I really liked that they gave you the option later.

Riding on the train is fun and the Two Truths and a Lie game does branch pretty well. And, while it’s not outright blatant about it, Rachel is eally good at determining truths and lies and specific reasons for them. The game isn’t exactly implying she has Max style superpowers, I don’t think, but there’s still this very, extremely subtle hint of mystery there.

The only thing I didn’t like about the train scene was that when you share your music with Rachel they didn’t think to cut the audio down to just the left channel to simulate only having one headphone in. I did it myself and that makes the scene better, I think. Would be better still with if I could still have train noises in my right ear.

The train scene is really well done from a directing and visuals standpoint, though. Everything from Rachel examine Chloe’s hands to figure out the lies to the slight bob of the camera that simulates the rocking motion of the train car are all really great.

The park scene with Rachel is fun and conning the couple out of their wine is one of the hardest Talkback challenges in the game. I failed at least two times even on my second play through!

The scene at the junkyard is pretty good. The argument with Rachel doesn’t branch quite as much as I wish it did, but the acting on both sides is pretty good. What’s really good though is Chloe’s rage after Rachel leaves. Smashing stuff is done pretty well and all of Chloe’s actions has the proper strength and weight about them. Even with a bat she didn’t outright destroy things for the most part. And the way she hefted and threw the toolbox was realistic.

And then the Smash Smash Smash Smash on her dad’s destroyed car along with the music and the great animation was excellent.

The dream sequence was interesting. That raven keeps showing up and Rachel catching fire was really interesting in the context of what happens next... Chloe even writes in her journal that she has the dream of riding in the car with her dad a lot. And later she writes that it was the dream after the smashes up her dad’s car that let her know Rachel would be back at the park. (As they drive by Rachel over and over note that she’s standing by the leaning tree.)

Rachel’s “you came” when Chloe goes back to the park is interesting to me. Maybe it’s not intentional, but it seems a kinda strange thing to say to someone who should have had no idea where you went. (Yeah, I still really want Rachel to be _special_ in a Max sort of way!)

Right at Rachel dropped the burning photo in the trash can I wondered if that was a good idea. Yeah, it wasn’t. But what the heck was that what happened as Rachel yelled at the fire?! Was it just some random wind that picked up?? Or was that Rachel’s anger spreading the fire?! It sure looked and felt like it!! Especially the first time through.

I love that same hint of mystery and implication that may or may not be true. They are playing with just slightly supernatural themes that make Arcadia Bay someplace Strange. And then, the forest fire? Wow. Another great cliffhanger ending for this series of games. Not quite as powerful as it snowing in Chapter 1 of the first game or the twin moons or beached whales later on, but still a great ending.

Oh, and what in the heck is with that woman just sitting their smoking as a forest fire rages?! (Note that the Rachel raven flies by near the top of the screen...)

While this episode has some points I personally wasn’t a fan of (Chloe being so mean to her mom for instance) I get why they are there. The rest of the episode from the D&D Game to the train ride to Chloe smashing up the junkyard were all great. So for a rating, I’d probably give this chapter a B+ or maybe even an A-.

And finally: Be sure to exit back out to the main menu after you finish! Wow. Just wow. (Note that it’s the same scene as the green happy daytime park!)

Rachael Amber plays the lead in the Tempest.

The lead in the Tempest is Prospero. Prospero was betrayed by his brother, and so conjured up a storm to maroon him.

That's not coincidental at all :-)

I didn't know; it seemed like you could since I let the timer run out on one and I failed, but I wasn't sure you could if you made selections.

I thought the best part of the game was the wine speech check and Rachel going "nooooooooooo" if you suggest mouth to mouth.

But yeah, Rachel's weird. Chloe's line about her being creepy (which is a dialogue option after truth and lie) shows that the developers acknowledge it, and the weird tree stuff wasn't just for effect.

The first half of the episode, I was afraid Rachel was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She got the depressed and brooding protagonist to do things with no pretense or explanation, and got her out of her depression temporarily. Then, Deck Nine subverted the trope and gave Rachel her own motivations and storyline, showing that she's using Chloe, among other things. I didn't trust them to deliver a story without stock characters by that point, since up until then, that's all it was.

Yeah, my binge watching TV shows has now given rise to binge gaming.

When they all are released we will probably go through the new series. I find that seeing/playing them together, or at least closer together, gives a better over all experience having the whole progression and character interaction details are fresher in one's mind from episode to episode.