Waffling Around Games Ep. 5: Life is Strange Episode 1 and 2
Trigger Warning: Discussion of Suicide and Date Rape
After taking a short break from all our Waffle Bites, the Waffling Around Games crew is back! The fifth WAG episodes tackles Life is Strange Episodes 1 and 2, which was created by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix. In case you hadn’t noticed, Seth already wrote an article on Life is Strange and the “Perfect Victim” but we have plenty more to talk about. This is, after all, a game where teenage Max learns she can rewind time and the game throws many events at us that we desperately wished to undo.
Life is Strange and the "Perfect Victim"
By: Seth Brodbeck TW: Discussion of date rape and rape culture. Brief references to suicide.(Also: Spoilers for the first two episodes of Life is Strange, but I thought the above information was more important)
Here’s what we know as of Episode 2 of Dontnod Entertainment’s game, Life is Strange: Girls who go to Vortex Club parties are getting drugged, probably by Nathan Prescott, who has a demonstrated ability to get away with a lot around Blackwell Academy thanks to his parents’ patronage of the school. It’s definitely happened twice, to Chloe and Kate, it is quite possibly what happened to Rachel Adams, and is implied to have happened to many more girls by the binders shown briefly at the end of each episode so far. It is not explicitly stated that any of these girls were raped–it’s possible that something else happened to them which is connected to the other strangeness in Arcadia Bay–but the sequence of events bears a strong resemblance to accounts of date rape. Even if the game may be setting us up for a revelation that criminal behavior of a different stripe is occurring, the stories are still evocative of the experiences of rape victims.