Life is Strange: Episode 4 - Dark Room (PlayStation 4) Review

Episode 4 dives right into the emotional, cinematic experience Dontnod has delivered throughout the series so far. Precise camera angles bring lovely sceneries—and mysterious natural (or perhaps supernatural) phenomena—to life. Something is wrong in Arcadia Bay, and it's not just the dead birds or random eclipses. Childhood friends Max and Chloe resume their search for missing teen Rachel Amber, using Max's ability to rewind time to their advantage.

It's not immediately clear why this episode took a little longer than the others to produce. What is immediately clear are random dialogue pauses. Some of the dialogue is stilted, with characters making arbitrary stops or putting emphasis in strange places. Dialogue issues have been a problem from the start, but they're a little more noticeable than in previous entries. The writing itself is at the series' best: sometimes clunky and cheesy, but mostly in order.

The photo op mini-game, where Max must find objects in the world to take pictures of, is easier than it was last time, with a few of the ops being more difficult to find. This episode also brings new environments, one of which players will only see if their Episode 2 playthrough ended a certain way. It's good to see decisions matter, and not just cosmetically. Characters can live or die based on choices, and events can change future episodes, sometimes greatly.

Dark Room features a new mini-game in which the camera enters first-person view, and Max must piece together clues from all of the information gathered across the season so far. It's a fun segment, and ends just as it starts to become tedious, resulting in an overall pleasant experience. The rest of the puzzles are quite clever, and solutions aren't always immediately obvious, though characters will usually chime in if it's taking too long to figure things out.

Music once again plays a pivotal role. The upbeat "In My Mind" by Amanda Palmer marks one of the happier, more relaxing scenes found in the series, while Message to Bears' "Mountains" guides the audience through a tense, quickly escalating moment sure to be a highlight of the season. All of this leads to the oft-mentioned Vortex Club party alluded to throughout the series, after which Dontnod once again utterly outdoes themselves with a cliff-hanger ending, leaving fans on the edge of their seats for another few weeks.