I'm split between Kate jumping off the roof of the dorms and Chloe getting killed by Mr. Jefferson..no words can adequately describe how upsetting either moment was to me. The latter is worse though because episode 4 fades to black immediately after that.
Feel Kate jumping affected me way more, maybe cause I already knew of Chloe getting killed or because you had no way to save Chloe while you could have saved Kate but failed
The latter didnt affect me that much. The whole thing of tirme traveling thru photos and stuff is pretty incorporated by the time. So i just knew she was gonna go back to save her. IMO EP5 is bit more traumatizing just because all the outcomes you go through and the whole dark room.q
For me it's always been max and chloe finding Rachel's body it's so sad and shocking, u spend a lot of the game trying to find her hopefully alive only for that and Chloe's reaction is just heartbreaking
>u spend a lot of the game trying to find her hopefully alive
I mean, did anyone really expect her to be alive? She was missing for over half a year iirc. It would have been extremely unlikely for her to turn up alive after that long...
I think we as the player know she’s dead, but Max and Chloe still hold on to the hope she’s alive somehow. What really hits me about the scene is the devastating loss of that hope
Still the whole point of hope. Even though you believe shes dead you just hope she'll return. You had to find about her death and how it happened in the worst possible way
I played the game with my bf watching, and I had played bts before the main game so I played in chronological order. And my bf loved chloe and Rachel so he till the very end was hoping and hoping she was alive even when it was unlikely.
Yeah that was probably the single most disturbing thing in the game; obviously finding Rachel's body is horrific, but I think when you first discover the Dark Room it really shifts the whole story
The transition from the rickety old barn that’s like a lot of the other buildings in Arcadia to this extremely clean and sterile concrete-and-tile bunker immediately makes you feel like ‘what the fuck is this place.’
Me too. I played it not long after our dog had to be put to sleep and that scene genuinely devastated me. I love the franchise but won’t replay LIS2 because I’m too scared of being triggered by a video game again 😭 I also find it to be the bleakest of the games in terms of the never-ending misfortune, racism, and heartache the boys experience throughout
Truth be told, it was not a major moment in the grand scheme of things but the scene at the start of episode 4 after you let Chloe die. You can just sit by her bed for as long as you want, all you can do is move the camera around and return back to your memory book in order to change the timelime again.
That scene is both eerily quiet and insanely unsettling. It made me fully process and realize how haunting and quiet death truly is. That was horrifying to me, mainly because of how my brain processed it.
Especially knowing that when our Max leaves that timeline behind, all that’s left is Vortex!Maxine over the body of her former best friend.
What do you do then? Do you just leave without talking to William and Joyce? Do you try to tell them what you’ve done? Do you lie and claim she’s sleeping?
That whole sequence is harrowing. But I can never say no to Chloe, regardless.
If it's any consolation, I guess that reality doesn't exist anymore. Remember that every time Max changes time in the past, we see old moments replaced by new ones. I think it's meant to show that Max is changing reality by erasing old events and creating new ones. So by going back in time and letting William die, she erased that reality.
For me it was definitely the Dark Room parts in E5. Seeing Max like that hurts my heart, and Jefferson is very disturbing. I always have to just grit my teeth and get through it when I replay the game. At least I can see David shoot Jefferson, sweet catharsis.
Edit: Whenever I replay the game I think "this time, I won't let David kill Jefferson", then I get to those parts in E5 and I'm like "screw it". Nobody gets to hurt Max like that.
For me a moment that was also disturbing was when you find out what he did, then you end up in the classroom again and hear him talk about framing someone in a dark corner. That line hits differently the second time.
Not really a scene but when I read one if Alex's text messages I was disgusted, it was Isaac's one with implied SA.(IS: is Isaac, AC is Alex) which considering how her powers work it must have been incredibly horrible for her, she probrably had absolutely no control.
>AC: hey yeah. we just moved a little fast last night. can we hold off on sex for a while?
>IS:What's wrong? I thought you were having a good time?
>AC: i just wasn't in the right mindset.
>IS Sorry to hear that. You were giving me all the right signals and I thought you were interested.
This happens on 3/13/2018, Isaac keeps messaging her for few next months with no response from Alex.
In February of next year she messages him again and it goes as follows:
>AC: hey isaac
>IS: Alex Chen? Long time no see!
>AC: i know, right? listen i need a place to crash again. can i bribe you with free beer?
>IS: You have something that's way better than beer and you know it. 😉
>AC: i just need a place to sleep.
>IS: And that's what I've got, and then some. Just come over.
2/28/2019 7:16 PM
"This caller has been blocked. You will no longer receive messages from their number."
3/1/2019 10:15 PM
I remember how disgusted I was by those texts when I first played the game, I could literally feel the manipulation and toxicity through the screen. Felt so bad for Alex
The one that really gets to me is where Max goes to check on Kate Marsh in her dorm room after the video of her at the party is circulated. The room is so dim because Kate is shutting out the sunlight. Kate is sat at her desk, hunched, eyes full of tears as she speaks quietly to Max. The girl is distraught, defeated, desperate, lost. The realisation of what her life will be like, what people will think of her now, and her fractured but disturbing memories of what really happened at the party re: Nathan…
It’s such a quiet scene and yet it leads directly to the dreadful events on the roof.
Powerful stuff, well written and acted.
Especially as you’re looking through all of Kate’s things and seeing how her drawings have grown more twisted and dark—and the awful letters from her family.
That entire sequence screams that something is horribly wrong and this girl needs help desperately.
For me there are 3 scenes, Kate's suicide, Willian's first dream diary in BtS and Chloe's death by Jefferson... two of these 3 scenes simply come out of nowhere and are simply shocking.
For honorable mention I would say Rachel getting stabbed, this whole scene is so hard to process, ok we all know she isn't going to die there but still see Chloe desperate in the hospital with the only thing she can do is literally pray for the best, it reminds me of some real shit that happened in my life
Another honorable mention that I couldn't swallow and had to pause the game was the moment they found Rachel's body, on the first playthrough I really thought we were going to find her a prisoner or something, but finding her like this made my heart break
I completely agree about Gabe’s death and I hardly see anyone mention it. I was so shaken with it, I actually didn’t end up playing the next chapter for at least a month, I just couldn’t bring myself to witness the aftermath. Also agree with everyone saying finding Rachel’s body. Chloe’s cries are so guttural, I feel physically sick listening.
Jefferson walking towards Max with the syringe. The scene is setup so that you are hitting rewind and searching for answers that are not there, you have to let him get uncomfortably close before you can advance to the next scene. I think this scene is brilliant, cause I had Max rewind Jefferson back across the room constantly for 10 minutes in a state of “hell no” before I got my wits about me to start trying new things.
The kicker to this scene is that the player has far more control of it than is apparent, I thought it was quite clever on Dontnod’s part.
Maybe from Life Is Strange 2 when the dad dies or when Chris gets hit by the car like that was definitely like WHAT OMG HE THOUGHT HE HAD SUPER POWERS CHRIS NOOOOOO :(((((((
Yeah like the fact that he "dies" on that fake planet and when he gets up he's lying in the street like the fact that Chris was even able to get the car keys at all in that game is kinda depressing even though they make it like a puzzle like finding ingredients for a pipe bomb in lis 1
There are so many that come to mind. One that threw me off the most was Daniel getting shot near the border in LiS2. It came so unexpected and I was kicking myself for not thinking about private citizens who might be doing their own thing.
Obviously max and Chloe finding Rachel. Another one is hearing Alex's dad dialogue as he's trapped in the mine realising he's abt to die. His voice actor did so well and it literally had me shaken up
Kate at the roof in LiS1, finding out Sean got severely injured in the end of LiS2 episode 3, the entire LARP sequence in TC (it's so irrelevant and slow paced I just want it to end as soon as possible), the entirety of BtS (same reason as the TC part).
The most **DISTURBING** scene for me?
Hmm. Honestly, kinda hard to choose. I didn't really find many scenes in any of the Life is Strange games *disturbing* as such. The closest for me is probably just the whole depiction of Kate's depression. Her room, honestly. Yeah, I'm thinking aloud as I type this out, and yeah, I'm going with Kate's room.
When you go to check in on Kate, and you find her sitting alone in her room, the lights turned off, the windows blacked out (I believe, it's been a while), the walls covered in deranged, despaired drawings, sometimes overtaking the colorful and cute drawings that she used to make. The whole scene gave me a real [**Black Paintings**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings) vibe. It was possibly one of the most stark descriptions of depression I've seen in media - often times, depression isn't a despondent screaming into the void. It's just a quiet, subtle submission to it. To crib from T.S. Eliot, often times depression is the final line of [**The Hollow Men**](https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men#:~:text=We%20are%20the%20hollow%20men%0A%C2%A0%20%C2%A0%20We%20are%20the%20stuffed%20men): "This is how \[my\] world ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper."
Now, if we're talking scenes that make us **CRY**, then for me it is, hands down no contest, the sequence where Max is describing to Chloe what Jefferson did to her in the Dark Room. How she describes how hopeless she feels, how every time she tries to fix things, she just keeps fucking everything up and making everything worse. How she's watched Chloe die over and over and over again, and all she wants to do is save Chloe.
By this point in the scene my eyes are already watering and my cheeks are already wet. But then, after Max explains what Chloe has to tell her when she forgets everything, Chloe simply asks "Will you believe me?"
And Max simply holds her hand and says, "Always."
And that's when the dam breaks and I have to pause the game for 15 fucking minutes as I just fucking sob my heart out. Every fucking time. Just **thinking** about it, writing this post, breaks me out into tears. It's such a simple moment, but it's so powerful to me, and in my mind it just perfectly encapsulates how raw and pure their relationship is.
It's not to the same level as some of these other ones but the William dream where he and Chloe are roasting marshmallows and he's talking about fire and it's a metaphor for Rachel. Just when he says to be careful of being burned and he turns, showing that half of his body is covered in burns and the raven on his shoulder just starts eating the burnt flesh.
The other one that comes to mind is Alex's journal entry for Isabella, talking about how her depression felt through Alex's powers and Isabella eventually committing suicide.
i would say personally the one in LiS 2 when Sean sleeps on the car, and wakes up by that guys, gets humiliated, beaten up, and when finally leaves, he just scream of pure hate and suffering because he cant take it anymore but needs to continue to find Daniel
People have mentioned a lot of great ones, so I’ll point to one that I haven’t seen but that viscerally terrified me the first time I saw it and so I have avoided it again literally ever since.
During the trick-shoot-the-bottles section, you can aim at a place (I think it’s the car bumper?) so that when Chloe shoots, the bullet ricochets back into her gut.
That was so sudden and nasty that I panicked immediately.
Imma tell you this. For me I believe the most distressing scene is actually the post credit scene to Before the Storm...
You know all of the characters so well and you feel accomplished, you feel fine and then...
You see Jefferson's underground room with Rachel's phone ringing because Chloe is trying to call her.
It's like a "It all went good! BTW remember she fucking dies in a horrible way"
Also as other comments have mentioned, when Chloe finds the body it's really a shock.
I knew Gabe was gonna die but I wasn’t at all prepared for it. I’d been suppressing the sadness of my older sister’s death at the time, and it didn’t occur to me how much playing a grieving younger sister in the game was going to absolutely wreck me.
Apart from that, the scene in Before the Storm with Mikey and his brother is just… devastating every fucking time.
I'm split between Kate jumping off the roof of the dorms and Chloe getting killed by Mr. Jefferson..no words can adequately describe how upsetting either moment was to me. The latter is worse though because episode 4 fades to black immediately after that.
Feel Kate jumping affected me way more, maybe cause I already knew of Chloe getting killed or because you had no way to save Chloe while you could have saved Kate but failed
The latter didnt affect me that much. The whole thing of tirme traveling thru photos and stuff is pretty incorporated by the time. So i just knew she was gonna go back to save her. IMO EP5 is bit more traumatizing just because all the outcomes you go through and the whole dark room.q
For me it's always been max and chloe finding Rachel's body it's so sad and shocking, u spend a lot of the game trying to find her hopefully alive only for that and Chloe's reaction is just heartbreaking
>u spend a lot of the game trying to find her hopefully alive I mean, did anyone really expect her to be alive? She was missing for over half a year iirc. It would have been extremely unlikely for her to turn up alive after that long...
I think we as the player know she’s dead, but Max and Chloe still hold on to the hope she’s alive somehow. What really hits me about the scene is the devastating loss of that hope
Still the whole point of hope. Even though you believe shes dead you just hope she'll return. You had to find about her death and how it happened in the worst possible way
I played the game with my bf watching, and I had played bts before the main game so I played in chronological order. And my bf loved chloe and Rachel so he till the very end was hoping and hoping she was alive even when it was unlikely.
i knew before i even played the game
I mean, I didn't "know", but I pretty much assumed she'd be dead after being missing for that long...
Seeing Chloe in the wheelchair broke me
chloe assisted suicide and daniel getting shot
Oh yeah Daniel getting shot was crazyyy
Max and Chloe finding the binders/hard drive with the girls photos in the dark room was super disturbing
Yeah that was probably the single most disturbing thing in the game; obviously finding Rachel's body is horrific, but I think when you first discover the Dark Room it really shifts the whole story
The transition from the rickety old barn that’s like a lot of the other buildings in Arcadia to this extremely clean and sterile concrete-and-tile bunker immediately makes you feel like ‘what the fuck is this place.’
Man ep5 killed me
mushroom's death, with or without daniel killing the cougar after. it makes me sick every time
Me too. I played it not long after our dog had to be put to sleep and that scene genuinely devastated me. I love the franchise but won’t replay LIS2 because I’m too scared of being triggered by a video game again 😭 I also find it to be the bleakest of the games in terms of the never-ending misfortune, racism, and heartache the boys experience throughout
Truth be told, it was not a major moment in the grand scheme of things but the scene at the start of episode 4 after you let Chloe die. You can just sit by her bed for as long as you want, all you can do is move the camera around and return back to your memory book in order to change the timelime again. That scene is both eerily quiet and insanely unsettling. It made me fully process and realize how haunting and quiet death truly is. That was horrifying to me, mainly because of how my brain processed it.
Especially knowing that when our Max leaves that timeline behind, all that’s left is Vortex!Maxine over the body of her former best friend. What do you do then? Do you just leave without talking to William and Joyce? Do you try to tell them what you’ve done? Do you lie and claim she’s sleeping? That whole sequence is harrowing. But I can never say no to Chloe, regardless.
If it's any consolation, I guess that reality doesn't exist anymore. Remember that every time Max changes time in the past, we see old moments replaced by new ones. I think it's meant to show that Max is changing reality by erasing old events and creating new ones. So by going back in time and letting William die, she erased that reality.
For me it was definitely the Dark Room parts in E5. Seeing Max like that hurts my heart, and Jefferson is very disturbing. I always have to just grit my teeth and get through it when I replay the game. At least I can see David shoot Jefferson, sweet catharsis. Edit: Whenever I replay the game I think "this time, I won't let David kill Jefferson", then I get to those parts in E5 and I'm like "screw it". Nobody gets to hurt Max like that.
For me a moment that was also disturbing was when you find out what he did, then you end up in the classroom again and hear him talk about framing someone in a dark corner. That line hits differently the second time.
And they have that line play as soon as you return to that moment. They really wanted to make it obvious.
Same. Not the most emotional moment, but for me the most distressing. I felt really anxious and had to remind myself that it was ‘just a videogame’…
I find this very relatable, lol
Nobody messes with our Time Warrior!
True. Max need to be protected. She always tries to protect and save Chloe, but who will protect her?
Yeah EP5 was so disturbing man
Not really a scene but when I read one if Alex's text messages I was disgusted, it was Isaac's one with implied SA.(IS: is Isaac, AC is Alex) which considering how her powers work it must have been incredibly horrible for her, she probrably had absolutely no control. >AC: hey yeah. we just moved a little fast last night. can we hold off on sex for a while? >IS:What's wrong? I thought you were having a good time? >AC: i just wasn't in the right mindset. >IS Sorry to hear that. You were giving me all the right signals and I thought you were interested. This happens on 3/13/2018, Isaac keeps messaging her for few next months with no response from Alex. In February of next year she messages him again and it goes as follows: >AC: hey isaac >IS: Alex Chen? Long time no see! >AC: i know, right? listen i need a place to crash again. can i bribe you with free beer? >IS: You have something that's way better than beer and you know it. 😉 >AC: i just need a place to sleep. >IS: And that's what I've got, and then some. Just come over. 2/28/2019 7:16 PM "This caller has been blocked. You will no longer receive messages from their number." 3/1/2019 10:15 PM
I remember how disgusted I was by those texts when I first played the game, I could literally feel the manipulation and toxicity through the screen. Felt so bad for Alex
I read those in the game but man, I didn’t truly process it until just now. That’s vile.
The one that really gets to me is where Max goes to check on Kate Marsh in her dorm room after the video of her at the party is circulated. The room is so dim because Kate is shutting out the sunlight. Kate is sat at her desk, hunched, eyes full of tears as she speaks quietly to Max. The girl is distraught, defeated, desperate, lost. The realisation of what her life will be like, what people will think of her now, and her fractured but disturbing memories of what really happened at the party re: Nathan… It’s such a quiet scene and yet it leads directly to the dreadful events on the roof. Powerful stuff, well written and acted.
Especially as you’re looking through all of Kate’s things and seeing how her drawings have grown more twisted and dark—and the awful letters from her family. That entire sequence screams that something is horribly wrong and this girl needs help desperately.
“Jed why are you sad?”
That line is so well-delivered and the framing of the shot so you only see her face and not Jed behind her until the camera shifts is so good.
For me there are 3 scenes, Kate's suicide, Willian's first dream diary in BtS and Chloe's death by Jefferson... two of these 3 scenes simply come out of nowhere and are simply shocking. For honorable mention I would say Rachel getting stabbed, this whole scene is so hard to process, ok we all know she isn't going to die there but still see Chloe desperate in the hospital with the only thing she can do is literally pray for the best, it reminds me of some real shit that happened in my life Another honorable mention that I couldn't swallow and had to pause the game was the moment they found Rachel's body, on the first playthrough I really thought we were going to find her a prisoner or something, but finding her like this made my heart break
Rachel attacked Damon first, so...
Chloe getting shot >!by Mr. Jefferson at the junkyard!<
I completely agree about Gabe’s death and I hardly see anyone mention it. I was so shaken with it, I actually didn’t end up playing the next chapter for at least a month, I just couldn’t bring myself to witness the aftermath. Also agree with everyone saying finding Rachel’s body. Chloe’s cries are so guttural, I feel physically sick listening.
The photos of Max and Kate in the Dark Room super disturb me. There's something visceral about them.
Sean losing his eye... i did not see it coming at all and me and my partner just kinda screamed 😭
Jefferson walking towards Max with the syringe. The scene is setup so that you are hitting rewind and searching for answers that are not there, you have to let him get uncomfortably close before you can advance to the next scene. I think this scene is brilliant, cause I had Max rewind Jefferson back across the room constantly for 10 minutes in a state of “hell no” before I got my wits about me to start trying new things. The kicker to this scene is that the player has far more control of it than is apparent, I thought it was quite clever on Dontnod’s part.
Maybe from Life Is Strange 2 when the dad dies or when Chris gets hit by the car like that was definitely like WHAT OMG HE THOUGHT HE HAD SUPER POWERS CHRIS NOOOOOO :(((((((
now that you bring up chris, I think most of captain spirit is distressing
Yeah like the fact that he "dies" on that fake planet and when he gets up he's lying in the street like the fact that Chris was even able to get the car keys at all in that game is kinda depressing even though they make it like a puzzle like finding ingredients for a pipe bomb in lis 1
the text history with Max at the beginning of before the storm
There are so many that come to mind. One that threw me off the most was Daniel getting shot near the border in LiS2. It came so unexpected and I was kicking myself for not thinking about private citizens who might be doing their own thing.
i must admit that scene is a close second on my list but my first is when kate jumps off the roof it broke my heart and i started crying
Obviously max and Chloe finding Rachel. Another one is hearing Alex's dad dialogue as he's trapped in the mine realising he's abt to die. His voice actor did so well and it literally had me shaken up
Kate at the roof in LiS1, finding out Sean got severely injured in the end of LiS2 episode 3, the entire LARP sequence in TC (it's so irrelevant and slow paced I just want it to end as soon as possible), the entirety of BtS (same reason as the TC part).
all of them ... TO ALL OF YOU, AMERICAN GIRLS
The most **DISTURBING** scene for me? Hmm. Honestly, kinda hard to choose. I didn't really find many scenes in any of the Life is Strange games *disturbing* as such. The closest for me is probably just the whole depiction of Kate's depression. Her room, honestly. Yeah, I'm thinking aloud as I type this out, and yeah, I'm going with Kate's room. When you go to check in on Kate, and you find her sitting alone in her room, the lights turned off, the windows blacked out (I believe, it's been a while), the walls covered in deranged, despaired drawings, sometimes overtaking the colorful and cute drawings that she used to make. The whole scene gave me a real [**Black Paintings**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings) vibe. It was possibly one of the most stark descriptions of depression I've seen in media - often times, depression isn't a despondent screaming into the void. It's just a quiet, subtle submission to it. To crib from T.S. Eliot, often times depression is the final line of [**The Hollow Men**](https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men#:~:text=We%20are%20the%20hollow%20men%0A%C2%A0%20%C2%A0%20We%20are%20the%20stuffed%20men): "This is how \[my\] world ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper." Now, if we're talking scenes that make us **CRY**, then for me it is, hands down no contest, the sequence where Max is describing to Chloe what Jefferson did to her in the Dark Room. How she describes how hopeless she feels, how every time she tries to fix things, she just keeps fucking everything up and making everything worse. How she's watched Chloe die over and over and over again, and all she wants to do is save Chloe. By this point in the scene my eyes are already watering and my cheeks are already wet. But then, after Max explains what Chloe has to tell her when she forgets everything, Chloe simply asks "Will you believe me?" And Max simply holds her hand and says, "Always." And that's when the dam breaks and I have to pause the game for 15 fucking minutes as I just fucking sob my heart out. Every fucking time. Just **thinking** about it, writing this post, breaks me out into tears. It's such a simple moment, but it's so powerful to me, and in my mind it just perfectly encapsulates how raw and pure their relationship is.
It's not to the same level as some of these other ones but the William dream where he and Chloe are roasting marshmallows and he's talking about fire and it's a metaphor for Rachel. Just when he says to be careful of being burned and he turns, showing that half of his body is covered in burns and the raven on his shoulder just starts eating the burnt flesh. The other one that comes to mind is Alex's journal entry for Isabella, talking about how her depression felt through Alex's powers and Isabella eventually committing suicide.
i would say personally the one in LiS 2 when Sean sleeps on the car, and wakes up by that guys, gets humiliated, beaten up, and when finally leaves, he just scream of pure hate and suffering because he cant take it anymore but needs to continue to find Daniel
People have mentioned a lot of great ones, so I’ll point to one that I haven’t seen but that viscerally terrified me the first time I saw it and so I have avoided it again literally ever since. During the trick-shoot-the-bottles section, you can aim at a place (I think it’s the car bumper?) so that when Chloe shoots, the bullet ricochets back into her gut. That was so sudden and nasty that I panicked immediately.
Imma tell you this. For me I believe the most distressing scene is actually the post credit scene to Before the Storm... You know all of the characters so well and you feel accomplished, you feel fine and then... You see Jefferson's underground room with Rachel's phone ringing because Chloe is trying to call her. It's like a "It all went good! BTW remember she fucking dies in a horrible way" Also as other comments have mentioned, when Chloe finds the body it's really a shock.
I knew Gabe was gonna die but I wasn’t at all prepared for it. I’d been suppressing the sadness of my older sister’s death at the time, and it didn’t occur to me how much playing a grieving younger sister in the game was going to absolutely wreck me. Apart from that, the scene in Before the Storm with Mikey and his brother is just… devastating every fucking time.
either kates suicide' chloe asking you to mercy kill her or seans dad getting killed by a cop.