Broken Homes and Rules Define Life is Strange 2’s compelling 2nd Episode – Review
Note: Hi all, Boo here filling in for Phil (Phil-ing in?) with a review of this latest installment of Life is Strange. I can only talk about this game from the perspective of my play-through which may differ drastically from yours. My thought is, you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t already fully invested so, while I will avoid heavy spoilers, I will be discussing the entirety of the story arc.
In Life is Strange 2 – Episode 2: Rules, fugitive brothers Sean and Daniel Diaz find themselves without a home, scattered to the winter wind, desperately seeking a sense of normalcy in abnormal circumstances. As the latest chapter in DontNod Entertainment’s teen melodrama opens, the brothers have taken to squatting at an abandoned cabin in the woods, scraping together a makeshift life from whatever the previous occupants left lying around. A pup tent becomes a secret base stocked with toys which Daniel has personalized via quickie crayon makeovers, a set of loose dice is transformed into a swashbuckling adventure game, and even a can of warmed over ravioli can become a gourmet meal when spiced with an older brother’s imagination.
It’s almost charming; the warm, glowing hearth, the puppy nuzzles, the bunny burrow, the monstrous snowman in the front yard that would do Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes, proud… until it’s not. At one point, Daniel innocently wonders where the bunnies that usually inhabit the burrow have gone and then, why his traps have not lead to any captures. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in the wild freedoms of their childhood world, I might’ve noticed the red flags and seen the bitter foreshadowing but I didn’t. On the outside of the cabin Sean has scratched a message warning of: wolves inside – but it’s a bluff. This version of Sean and Daniel aren’t wolves, they’re lambs and danger lurks everywhere, inside and out.
Eventually, the other side of this domestic bliss comes into sharp focus. In another room just out of sight with the volume turned low; a poop bucket, a short stock of fresh water, dwindling food supplies, clothes that never seem to fully dry before they have to be worn again, and Daniel’s worsening cough. At the center of all this, barely keeping it together, is Sean, forced to grow up too quickly and desperate to keep his brother safe from harm.
That’s why we understand when Sean makes the snap decision to take a detour from their journey south to Mexico and instead seek out help from his estranged maternal grandmother, Claire, the mother of the mother that abandoned the boys when they were young. After some initial misgivings melt into grandmotherly kindness, the boys are welcomed into their grandparents’ suburban home with open arms. Warm, clean beds, fresh pajamas, cough medicine and Christmas await them, if only they can abide by Claire’s rules.
At first these seem easy enough to follow. Keep a low profile (they’re wanted by the police after all) do your chores (nothing compared to the ones their father expected of them) and lastly, stay out of their mother’s old room which Claire keeps locked and unmarked. This is the price of paradise, they’re told. While the looming threat of expulsion keeps Sean on his best behavior, Daniel falls back into old habits and, still a child at heart, soon begins to stray. This is the part where you begin to see the lessons you’ve taught him as his older brother over the two episodes begin to manifest, and how Daniel behaves now is almost completely out of the player’s hands.
If you let him swear without comment or encourage him, expect him to keep doing it in front of his grandparents. If you didn’t make him do his chores and let him off the hook, no amount of scolding will get him to do them now. And to me, this is what makes Life is Strange 2 so wonderful and so different from the first game. Beyond the melodrama and the machinations of the plot is this simple mechanic that makes me feel like my decisions are more influential than in any game of this kind before.
In the wild, Sean’s three essential rules governing the use of Daniel’s telekinetic talents were easy to follow because there was never any one else around and the few rules of the cabin like “don’t drink the laundry water” were so pragmatic and necessary to survival that Daniel dared not break them. Back among society however, temptation abounds, and it becomes increasingly difficult to determine when rules were made to be broken and when they must be strictly upheld.
When Daniel makes a new friend (little Chris from Life is Strange 2 precursor The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit in a welcome tie in) it seems like such a small thing to gift him a short trip to the local Christmas Tree market while Claire and Stephen are at church but that trip. The subsequent breach of trust when the boys are caught breaking into their mother’s room to read a letter from her comes with a heavy price tag.
You can let Daniel use his powers to punish, to save, or to impress – but the outcomes don’t always align with the intentions. The lessons of Episode 2: Rules are muddled; a life of virtue might invariably lead to sin, and following the rules might end up hurting the ones you love.
Ultimately, Episode 2: Rules is about broken homes of both the literal and figurative kind and how the characters try and fail to make the pieces fit together. Claire has locked away the memories of the daughter who broke her heart because they disrupt her happy home life. Chris’ father ran rather than face the pain of losing his wife and now is losing his son. Even the cabin the boys take residence in has a backstory.
During the Christmas Tree trip, a run-in with some local teen troublemakers, the most fetching of whom catches Sean’s eye, offers the promise of a new kind of home; free from oppressive, hypocritical adults. A path all their own from which they can thumb their nose at the Claires of the world and their arbitrary rules. The adults don’t understand what they’ve been through. They’re only looking for an excuse to call the cops on them to protect their shitty flea market.
The deck is stacked against the brothers Diaz and, in the wake of the tragedies that have befallen them by the time the credits roll on this chapter, I began to wonder if it wasn’t time to bring out their ace in the hole, rules be damned.
Episode 2: Rules lacks the big plot developments, set pieces and imminent threats that were the most memorable part of Episode 1: Roads but more than makes up for it by putting us more squarely into the head space of these two brothers adrift trying to keep their heads above water. It’s less about grand emotional peaks and sweeping decisions this time than it is about inevitability and longing. The past stays with us, pain and all. It’s who we are. Sometimes as a sibling, a mentor, a parent all you can do is sit back and hope that the example you set for your charge was the right one.
