Chapter 4 is when the comparisons to True Colors seem most apt because the chapter is so short. You have a conversation with Safi, go back to the Snapping Turtle for the millionth time to attend the Krampus party and expose Lucas as a fraud, briefly run around the North Quad in a blizzard and then confront Safi at the Overlook. That's it. I have to admit that my heart sank when Max and Safi concluded their conversation in the opening, during the early hours of the morning, and then the game immediately cut to the party in the evening. I was dearly hoping that we were going to get a bit of time to breathe, maybe just to spend some time with Safi and Moses, perhaps a chance to help Safi put her presentation together, or something, but no, straight back to the Turtle for another cycle of jumping back and forth between timelines via the bathroom vestibule. Even one or two scenes in between, say one back at Moses's lab and even just one in the quad or something would have made all the difference for the game's pacing.
I'm getting ahead of myself a little because the game's first scene is the point at which the game finally has a lengthy conversation between Max and Safi in the living world. Max and Safi discuss each others' powers; as we know, Max can shift between timelines, eavesdrop on parallel timelines, rewind time and even jump back into moments captured in photographs. Safi can "shapeshift" by altering the way people perceive her; she doesn't really transform, just interfere with what they see and hear. This started after her parents broke up, the only time this is really addressed in the game, You very occasionally see messages in the phone on the social media app, Crosstalk, from a character who is implied to be Safi's dad, but we never meet him or hear much about him. We just know that after he left Safi felt pressured by her mother and started wishing she was someone else, from which she gained this ability to affect how other people perceive her.
This is nice and all, but it feels like it is coming so late in the story after we've already spent so little time with Safi. I barely knew who she was before I discovered she had this ability, so learning this new revelation about her lacks impact. She asks Max if she can trust her, and I honestly didn't know what to say, because I just haven't seen enough of their relationship. It absolutely blows my mind that Chapters 2 and 3 didn't have a couple of scenes with Max socialising with Safi in the "living" timeline so that we could get to know her better. I really don't know what the team at Deck Nine were thinking; I almost feel as if we were supposed to like and care about Safi as a result of the game's marketing rather than anything that actually happens on screen. Both visually and in terms of performances the scene is great, and both Hannah Telle and Safi's actor, Olivia AbiAssi, really shine in the conversation, which just makes it all the more frustrating that we get so little of it.
After this, as I said above, we're off to the Snapping Turtle to expose Lucas. We have to sabotage the projector so that Max can swap slideshows and convince a flustered Lucas not to pull out of the night's entertainment, which is meant to be a good-natured "roast" at which he intends to announce the forthcoming film adaptation of his plagiarised novel. As many people online have argued already, however, the best part of this is the optional task in which you, Moses in the "Dead" timeline and Safi in the "Living" timeline make a gingerbread house together, which has nothing to do with the plot and is just a nice character moment. There's also a fun bit in which Safi, shapeshifted into Loretta, works with you to convince Lucas into going ahead with the roast, but I think there was a missed opportunity here to involve using Shift in some way if the point was meant to give an example of how Max and Safi could be a very influential team if they used their powers together.
Safi and Max's plan to expose Lucas at the roast just seems so amateurish and ill-conceived, and so rushed in its execution, that it all feels weightless and arbitrary. Our attention is only drawn to the fact that Lucas is being roasted at the party in Chapter 3, as I've mentioned before Safi puts together her incriminating presentation completely offscreen, and just the general sense of trapping Lucas in a "gotcha" moment at a small student party rather than going to his publisher or something feels so juvenile that I can't take it very seriously and it feels like the developers desperately casting around with existing assets because they didn't have the means to do anything more believable. The worst offender amidst all this, however, is the actual depiction of the roast itself. There are only about five anonymous students watching the show, the background noise of people reacting is so subdued that it feels like a bug, Lucas's own reaction is so understated and oddly paced, and the actual writing of Vinh and Safi's takedown of him is so half-baked that it feels like this was a proof of concept for the scene that accidentally made it into the final product or something. It's put to shame by, say, the scene of all the students watching Kate on the roof, or Jefferson's speech at the Vortex Club party, in the original game, and just seems like more evidence that the game was made in a rush, especially towards the end.
After this, Lucas reveals to Safi that it was Yasmin, her mother, that was the true architect of all the cover ups and even the cancellation of Safi's book. Safi, seemingly, loses control of her powers and runs off to confront her mother. Not only does Lucas's conversation with Safi happen offscreen, but the way her powers start affecting everyone is abrupt and confusing; everyone starts feeling her pain towards her mother, and is writhing around, with the exception of Max for some reason. Further, a storm begins, just like it did in the original, with the game's explanation being that this is what happens when someone misuses their powers.
I don't know if it's even worth wasting time explaining how completely this misrepresents and misinterprets what happened in the original game. The point of the storm in Life is Strange was to demonstrate catastrophically that Max's actions had consequences, and that ultimately she couldn't hedge her bets anymore; she had to make a decision between Chloe or Arcadia Bay, the person she cared about the most or everyone else. The point of the storm wasn't just "using powers irresponsibly will cause a disaster", although that was itself explored in the game; the point of the storm was that Max had to make a decision and live with the consequences: either Chloe dies or the town is destroyed. She can't have it both ways. Further, on a purely symbolic level, the storm was meant to represent the old adage about the "butterfly effect": "Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" It represented the idea that what seemed like tiny, insignificant changes in events could have major, far-reaching consequences. It didn't literally mean "someone in the Life is Strange world using powers makes a storm happen". If the latter were the case, surely Daniel and Alex in Life is Strange 2 and True Colors respectively would have encountered the same thing. It would have made far more sense if Safi losing control of her powers had purely caused some kind of psychic disaster (minus the storm) from which Max had to save her by extending the trust that she felt she'd never received throughout her life, but that's not what happens. Max gets out the owl photo from the first chapter and jumps back with Safi.
I'll go into this more when I write on the final chapter, but one last thing I wanted to note before moving onto the final chapter is something about the setting: this game is set at a university and we hear about the characters grading papers and stuff, but we never see a single person (including Max) teach a class and apart from a few rooms we can't enter in Chapter Two we never even go into a classroom. The Caledon environment is not only suffocating; it lacks verisimilitude. It really feels like no one with any decision making power ever put any serious thought into this.
