10 Tiny Video Game Decisions With HUGE Consequences

10. Life Is Strange - Warning The Homeless Lady About The Storm

When it comes to emotionally wrought narratives that are heavily influenced by the player's choices, this is the big one. Max Caulfield's story is powerful, poignant, joyful, and tragic. The thing that truly lends the game its weight is this: regardless of how things turn out, the player made it all happen.

Max's extraordinary ability to manipulate time is explored in various intriguing ways, as the plot shifts and reverts to account for it. Along the way, decisions that seem natural or trivial have consequences that the player may never have foreseen. One example is the opportunity to develop a friendship with an unnamed homeless woman who lives in Arcadia Bay.

Max can encounter her a maximum of three times, in Episodes 2, 3 and 5. If she takes the time to speak with the woman and learn more about her, in Episode 3, the player has a chance to warn her about the approaching storm.

This may not seem to be a major decision, but the she will believe Max and, in Episode 5, she will have disappeared from her usual spot near the diner. Otherwise, she will instead discover the woman's body there.

In a sense, the homeless woman makes clear the human cost of some of Max's decisions more clearly than any cataclysmic event could.