Life is Strange: Before the Storm is nine years old, and it still makes a bet the original game never had to make. The first Life is Strange had a time-rewind mechanic to lean on. Before the Storm strips that away and hands the controller to 16-year-old Chloe Price, three years before Max returns to Arcadia Bay, with nothing but her mouth and a mechanic called Backtalk.
That bet mostly pays off. The game received generally favourable reviews, with praise landing on its characters, themes, and story. The criticism was just as steady: plotholes, the central relationship, and how much the player’s decisions actually mattered near the end. Both sides are right, and the split tells you what kind of game this is.
Trailer, via outsidexbox.
Chloe Price and the Backtalk mechanic
Chloe is the player character here, and she is not a hero. She sneaks into a punk show at an abandoned lumber mill, gets into conflict with two men inside, and only escapes because Rachel Amber causes a distraction. That opening sets the tone. Chloe survives on nerve and luck, not power.
Backtalk is the game’s one real invention, and it is a good one. The player can call on Chloe to talk her way out of precarious situations. It can also make things worse. That second clause is the whole design. A dialogue tree drives conversations and commentary, and occasional decisions change outcomes, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. You can also mark walls with graffiti and alter the environment around you.
None of this is a rewind. You cannot take it back.
Rachel Amber and the viewfinder
The story is the meeting, the bonding, and the growth of Chloe and Rachel into what the game calls a force of nature. It runs through Arcadia Bay, Oregon, in 2010, and the beats are specific. Chloe and Rachel reunite at Blackwell Academy, ditch class, stow away on a cargo train, and end up at a lookout point.
At that lookout they people-watch through a viewfinder and see a man and woman kiss in the park. Rachel is upset. The game lets that sit. They steal wine from campers, walk to a scrapyard, and Chloe confronts Rachel about the mood shift and gets nowhere.
Then the confession. Rachel saw her father, James, through the viewfinder, cheating on her mother Rose. She destroys a family photo in a burning trash bin, kicks the bin over in a rage, and starts a wildfire. That fire is not a set piece. It becomes the engine for everything after it.
A wildfire, a principal, and a truck
The wildfire closes roads. That matters because a student cannot make the school’s theater production of The Tempest, and Chloe gets pulled into it. Before that, she and Rachel are reprimanded by Principal Raymond Wells for ditching. Chloe fights with her mother Joyce and Joyce’s boyfriend David Madsen, then hides at the scrapyard and finds an old truck that needs repair.
The truck is the best thing in the game. It is a project, a place to go, and a small promise that Chloe might build something instead of only breaking things. It also sits inside a plot that keeps handing her debt, drug dealers, and other people’s money problems.
Frank Bowers, a local dealer, calls. He wants to settle Chloe’s debt. She agrees to help him steal money from classmate Drew North, who owes Frank a large sum. Then she learns Drew is being violently extorted by another dealer, Damon Merrick. This is where the choices start to feel less like branching and more like a corridor with a few doors.
The voice cast and the strike
One production fact shapes the whole performance. Ashly Burch, who voiced Chloe in the original game, did not voice her in Before the Storm because of the 2016–17 game voice actor strike. Rhianna DeVries plays Chloe here. Burch returned for the bonus episode Farewell once the strike resolved.
That is not trivia. Chloe’s voice is the character, and the switch is audible. DeVries does the work, and the writing supports her, but the gap between the two performances is one of the reasons the prequel can feel like a cover version of a song you already know. Kylie Brown plays Rachel, and the relationship lives or dies on her scenes with DeVries. Mostly it lives.
The rest of the cast fills the town: Patrick Finerty as James, Kelly Handcock as Rose, Marcus Oliver as Principal Wells, Bootsie Park as Joyce, D.W. McCann as David Madsen, Nick Apostolides as Frank, Trey Hutch as Drew, and Kyle Williams as Damon Merrick.
Daughter wrote the score
British indie band Daughter wrote and performed the score, and it is the single most successful choice in the game. It gives Arcadia Bay a texture the original never quite had, and it makes the quiet stretches — the train, the lookout, the scrapyard — feel like they carry weight rather than mark time.
Deck Nine began development in 2016 on the Unity engine, with Square Enix London Studios working alongside them. The three episodes shipped for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in late 2017. Ports to Linux and macOS came in September 2018, then Android and iOS later that month. A remastered version landed as part of the Life Is Strange Remastered Collection in February 2022.
Where Before the Storm falls short
The plotholes are real. The game sets up the wildfire, the debt, the truck, and the Tempest production, and it does not always pay them off with the care the setup deserves. The central relationship is the bigger problem. Chloe and Rachel are supposed to become a force of nature, and the game tells you that more often than it shows you. The bond arrives fast because the plot needs it to, not because the scenes earn it.
The ending is the weakest part. Player decisions near the end carry less weight than the game has spent three episodes implying. If you have been treating Backtalk and the dialogue trees as real choices, the last act asks you to accept that they were mostly texture. That is a legitimate complaint, and it is the one that keeps this game out of the top tier of the series.
What the prequel gets right
Life is Strange: Before the Storm is worth playing, and it is worth playing for Chloe. The Backtalk mechanic is a genuine idea, a conversation system where the failure state is just as interesting as the success state. Daughter’s score is excellent. The scrapyard truck, the train, the viewfinder, and the burning trash bin are memorable scenes, and the game understands that a prequel’s job is to make you feel the weight of what you already know is coming.
What holds it back is the same thing that holds back most prequels. You know how this ends. The game knows you know. Instead of using that, it spends its last act rushing toward the finish. The characters are strong, the themes land, and the story has real moments. The plot does not hold together as tightly as it should, and the relationship at the center needed more room to breathe.
It is a good game with a great central performance and one great mechanic. That is not a dismissal. It is a measurement.
Numbers behind the release
- Title: Life is Strange: Before the Storm
- Release year: 2017
- Developer: Deck Nine
- Publisher: Square Enix
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One (2017); Linux, macOS, Android, iOS (2018)
- Structure: Three episodes
- Engine: Unity
- Score by: Daughter
- Chloe Price voiced by: Rhianna DeVries (Ashly Burch in Farewell)
- Remastered: Life Is Strange Remastered Collection, February 2022
- Critical score: 7.6/10, IGDB critic aggregate, 12 outlets
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
