Foreshadowing / Life Is Strange

• If you look closely at Kate's notes in Mr. Jefferson's class at the start of the game, you can see that she's drawn a noose hanging from a tree with a pool of blood below it. An early sign that Kate is suicidal.
• In the parking lot Max visits in Episode 1, there is a graffiti at the bicycle stands saying "cars = death". Later it is revealed that the main source of Chloe's angst is that her father had died in a car accident. At the end of episode 3, Max uses her powers to save him, which results in a timeline where Chloe ends up in a car accident instead.
• "Santa Monica Dream" by Angus and Julia Stone plays late in Episode 1. The song's chorus, which begins with "goodbye to my Santa Monica dream" foreshadows that Chloe will never make it to California to live out her dream with Rachel, or even find her alive.
• A short-term one in Episode 1 when Max is in Chloe's room. If you look at the closet and the window, Max mentions her childhood memories of using the closet as a hiding place and daring each other to climb down from the window. At the end of the same scene, David enters the room and Max has the option hide in the closet. After the confrontation, they leave by climbing down the window.
• While sitting in the diner in Episode 2, Max mentions that she wishes the moment would last forever and that though she could technically keep rewinding, it wouldn't really be a "moment". In the climax of the episode, she manages to completely freeze time by essentially doing a slow, constant rewind.
• In Episode 2, there is an optional photo at the Two Whales Diner. The hint in the journal shows the Diner Sign next to the sun. However, when taking the picture, the sun is blocked by the sign. The sign foreshadows three of the upcoming anomalies:
  • The sun is blocked: the solar eclipse of Episode 2.
  • "Two Whales Diner" Sign: the whales stranding of Episode 3.
  • "Two Whales Diner" Sign: the twin moon of Episode 4.
• In Episode 1, Max first sees Chloe's truck double parked in a handicapped spot, and in Episode 3, they can choose to steal money from the handicapped fund in the principal's office. By the end of the episode, after Max has altered the timeline so Chloe's father lives, the alternate Chloe is paralyzed from the neck down and in a wheelchair.
• In Episode 2, the spirit doe appears in the junkyard despite nothing supernatural going on in that area. In Episode 4, Max and Chloe learn that Rachel was buried in the junkyard. The spot where the doe appears is exactly where she was buried.
• In that same junkyard, there are some syringes that look like they were just used recently. This place is likely where Rachel was overdosed and killed.
• There are some hints to who has been the Big Bad all along:
  • In Episode 1, Mr. Jefferson dismisses a particular philosophy of photography by saying he could easily frame any of the students in a dark room and capture their moment of desperation.
  • Another hint comes from his artwork, which almost exclusively focuses on younger women in vulnerable positions.
  • Jefferson victim blaming Kate in Episode 2, just before her suicide attempt. In the same scene, Jefferson looks surprised when Max mentioned Rachel Amber.
  • In Episode 3, you find the duct tape needed to make the pipe bomb in Mr. Jefferson's classroom.
  • In Episode 4, you find a note addressed to Nathan telling him to "stop calling (the writer's) name in public". Max guesses that this must be from Nathan's father, but why would Nathan call his father by name?
  • The mere fact that you could blame Mr. Jefferson for Kate's suicide attempt in Episode 2 indicates that that character plays a larger role than the player might think.
  • While the Dark Room functions as a sinister sounding name for what amounts to a torture dungeon, it is also a photography reference, where a darkroom is a workshop for processing light sensitive photographic film.
• Max first discovers her power in Episode 1, when Nathan shoots Chloe in the stomach. Chloe is wearing a shirt with a skull on it at the time. In Episode 4, Chloe receives a bullet to the skull.
• When Max is talking to Mr. Jefferson in Episode 2, she tells him that she doesn't want Kate to become "the next Rachel Amber". In Episode 4, it's revealed that Kate and Rachel were both drugged and nonconsensually photographed in humiliating and sexually suggestive positions.
• If you look closely at Max's character model during the opening cutscene of Episode 1, when she wakes up during the storm, you can see a tiny little mark on her neck, right where Mr. Jefferson sticks her with a needle in Episode 4, set the night before the vision takes place.
• In Episode 4, Max mentions Star Trek in her journal. She refers to a moment where having saved a doomed person messed up time in the series - the thing she has to painfully understand in Episode 5.
• The graffiti littering the environments in the game foreshadow that saving Chloe's life in Episode 1 causes the storm. This includes phrases like "JUST GOTTA LET GO" (which is positioned right behind Chloe when she dances on her bed in Episode 1), "THIS IS BIGGER THAN YOU" and "PLEASE JUST KILL ME" written all over the place.
• During an early scene in Episode 5, Max tears her Everyday Heroes photograph in two with the words "Sorry San Francisco, but Chloe comes first". Choosing the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending has Max repeat this action on the butterfly photograph, making the same statement non-verbally.
• A relatively minor one: At one point, Mr. Jefferson begins to deliver a lecture on Chiaroscuro. When the Big Bad is finally revealed to be Jefferson himself, it's by way of a Face Framed in Shadow thanks to Max dropping her cellphone.
• One of the few failure screens that shows the immediate consequences of not being fast enough to solve a puzzle is when you prevent Chloe from getting murdered by Nathan in Episode 1, where Nathan tries to get Chloe to get up. As it turns out, this was how that encounter was supposed to go from the beginning.
• Kate being Driven to Suicide at the end the Episode 2 is foreshadowed early on when Max looks at her violin and notes that she stopped playing a week ago. Giving up preferred activities is a warning sign of suicidal ideation.
• When you put together the clues to find the Dark Room, David's coordinates will reveal that he was following four cars: The first, TWNPKS, is Chloe's truck. The second, SXFTNDR, is Nathan's. The third, TWLGHTZN, belongs to an unknown individual who has a car that strongly resembles Nathan's, and the fourth, TPFTHLK, is Mr. Jefferson's, seen at the end of Episode 2. If you pay attention to the coordinates that each car was recorded at, it turns out that Nathan and Jefferson's cars were at the exact same location the night Kate was drugged, the Prescott Farmhouse. This turns out to be the location of the Dark Room, and foreshadows Jefferson's involvement in the whole thing prior to the twist at the end of the episode.
• Max writes in her journal that she'll become a victim of whatever's happening at Blackwell if she keeps playing "amateur detective". Indeed, at the end of Episode 4, she's drugged and kidnapped by Mark Jefferson, and in the subsequent episode, he taunts her about how she should've focused on her schoolwork instead of "private detecting" with Chloe.
• Episode 2 sees Max having to manipulate a lever in order to switch a train onto another track in order to prevent Chloe from being run over. This could be taken as a visual reference to the trolley problem, which asks whether it's more ethical to allow five people to die or to kill one person to save them. The game presents you with this same choice on a much larger scale at the end of Episode 5.
• Nathan's license plate is "SXFTNDR" (Six Feet Under) which is a clue as to what he did to Rachel, and what Mr. Jefferson will do to him .
• The first thing that the player will actively rewind when Max discovers her powers is accidentally smashing her camera. A short time later, it gets destroyed anyway in a scuffle with Nathan, which Max realizes too late to rewind. In the ensuing scene, she tries to fix it using tools borrowed from David, only to find that it's futile and accepts William's old camera from Chloe. The very next thing you do is save Chloe from being killed in a scuffle with Nathan. You then spend the game saving her from strange accidents, until the beginning of Episode 5, where she's killed in circumstances that make it impossible to rewind. You spend the chapter trying to save her, after being rescued by David, only to realize that the only way to save the town is to let her die or let the town be destroyed.
• In Episode 1, when Max explores Chloe's house and sits on the swing, she thinks back to her childhood memories with Chloe. She says she doesn't believe that she could ever be a photographer, and Chloe says that she's already a photographer and her pictures will some day be in a museum. In Episode 5, in one of the alternate timelines Max wins the Everyday Heroes contest and her photo ends up in an exhibition. Apparently it's also the most popular of all the photos there.
• At the party in Episode 4, Max says in internal monologue: "If that tornado came right now, I would just sit here and watch for a while", foreshadowing the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending.
• Writing about the alternate timeline, Max recalls the classic Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever," in which the only way to avert the major catastrophe of a Nazi victory is to allow the woman he loves to die. The episode's scenario only loosely applies to her current predicament (having to choose between William's life and Chloe's) but ultimately does apply very closely to Max's ultimate predicament, in which the only way to avert the major disaster of the hurricane is to allow Chloe to die.

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