Grief isn’t an unfamiliar plot thread for any entry of Life is Strange. In the series first, Chloe struggled with the death of her best friend while brothers Sean and Daniel mourned their father in Life is Strange 2. Neither game portrayed loss as something expected—Chloe, Sean, and Daniel were all left reeling from their pain through each chapter. Both tales are also strangely comforting, painting a picture of the hole loved ones leave when taken too early, but True Colors lamented on the shock. In the seconds, hours, nights, and days after you suddenly lose a loved one, grief consumes everything. True Colors shows Alex and her friends confronting those immediate moments when death is too raw, acknowledging the tiniest ways overwhelming anguish eats away at them.
It’s the very end of chapter one and early scenes into chapter two that linger with me almost a week after playing. Alex losing her brother Gabe was a detail revealed early in the marketing cycle, but you aren’t told the how, and I certainly did not expect the when. Gabe’s death hits fast, a shock with so much force I had a physical reaction to the scene and threw my hands over my face. Yet it was Alex and her scream—and then complete silence—that struck me with a crushing familiarity.
Death, no matter the circumstances, is never easy to cope with, but when a loved one feels unfairly ripped away too soon—especially in ways that seem exceedingly cruel—the immediate feels unreal. The transition from Alex watching her brother fall into chapter two’s opening sequence doesn’t throw the story into a convenient time skip months ahead. Instead, True Colors sits with Alex and her grief, even extending into how Gabe’s passing affects an intimate circle of friends. It reaffirms grief isn’t a cheap trick or afterthought, letting the shock of grief resonate.
Alex, her new friends Steph and Ryan, Gabe’s partner, and the people who knew him best come together for an opening scene of mourning. Everyone awkwardly stumbles through articulating that loss, some of them eloquent, others angry or meandering, but everyone shares a sense of shock. There’s silence amongst them, too, and True Colors doesn’t rush its grieving cast to fill those uncomfortable moments. During Gabe’s memorial, Alex is obviously bothered by her powers of empathy to some extent, but her inability to speak while the world moves around her is part of her process.
It’s an experience you hope someone only knows through fiction, but True Colors offers honesty when trying to ruminate on the motions we go through after an unexpected loss. My own familiarity with that type of grief—the kind that makes the air feel too thick to breathe—came roaring back to life as True Colors gave me control of Alex again. In early 2021, I lost a best friend, and five months later, I lost a cousin who was more like a sister. Both were my age, far too young, and both passed in ways that left me in a state of shock that’s impossible to describe.
When it happens, the urge to break down and the will to keep living pull in different directions, and controlling Alex offers its best portrayal of that. Instead of forcing me into more conversations, True Colors offers smaller choices. I didn’t run to Steph or Ryan; I wanted to know how Alex felt, so I chose to thumb through her phone. You can read two types of texts—the conversations she had before ‘it’ happened or the messages that offer condolences. They’re messy, and a lot of those conversations go unanswered. Alex seems torn somewhere between falling apart and carrying on, but that’s the purpose in these moments.
Moving upstairs to Gabe’s old room sees that experience shared with a tearful Steph, who is now clinging to objects of seemingly little importance. Steph’s grief drives her to look for Gabe in everything when he’s gone, focusing on the fragments of his life around her to preserve him the best she can. You can experience that with her, walking around Gabe’s place to pause and reflect on things ordinary people would easily mistake for trash. Navigating this room as Alex without Gabe sent me into my own desperate search for ways to bring him back—I flipped through her phone, I cried with Steph, I dug through his belongings, but there was no amount of remembering that could change what happened.
Alex leaves that room later, venturing into a town full of people who somehow carry on in Gabe’s absence. In those moments, True Colors shows us an Alex who is compelled by her brother’s memory. It captures how disorienting the hours close to grief are as she interacts with strangers and visits local shops. For some reason, even when someone you love dies, the world goes on in ways that don’t make sense to the bereaved. There’s a lot of that here as Alex operates on auto-pilot while trying to find purpose again.
That entire sequence moves in slow motion, from Gabe’s death and Alex’s initial scream, through Steph’s tears, and into the confusion that follows. I do not want to detract from True Colors’ overwhelming hope in the face of intense grief—it tells an incredible journey about Alex, her own growth, and how she copes with that anguish. Yet, in this little window of the story, True Colors shares a moment that felt like a sincere acknowledgment of the ways we’re stunned by loss. Despite feeling aimless, disoriented, and heavy, there’s still comfort in knowing True Colors is willing to explore the most personal, devastating ways grief hurts.