Chloe Price

Chloe Price
First appearance	"Chrysalis" (2015)
Created by	Dontnod Entertainment
Voiced by	English Ashly Burch Japanese Lynn

Chloe Elizabeth Price, better known as Chloe, is a fictional deuteragonist character of Life Is Strange and playable protagonist on the prequel Before the Storm. She is played by actor Ashly Burch and Rhianna DeVries, who provided the voice and motion capture for the character. She was Max Caulfield's best friend before she moved to Seattle, leaving Chloe in their hometown of Arcadia Bay, Oregon. They stir up their friendship during the events of the game. After Max left, Chloe became best friends with Rachel Amber before Rachel went missing. She is the daughter of William Price and Joyce Price, and the step-daughter of David Madsen. Chloe’s death on Life Is Strange may be the catalyst to unlocking Max's powers and their emotional journey together is the main thrust of the story right through to its conclusion.

Character Development

Rhianna DeVries, who initially did the game's motion capture for Chloe Price, voiced the character, while the original voice actress Ashly Burch served as writing consultant. Instrumentation was employed to represent different sides of the lead character: piano for isolation, electric guitar for rebelliousness, and layered vocals for friendship. Daughter took the script and concept artwork as inspiration. The writers researched memoirs and psychology to understand Chloe's grieving process. figures of Chloe have content found in the Deluxe Edition, but add episode 1 of Life Is Strange.

In Life Is Strange

Max met up Chloe on restroom where Nathan Prescott killed a woman in a fit of rage. In a sudden effort Max develops the ability to rewind time and saved Chloe and later revealed to be her best friend. The two reunite and go for a walk at the lighthouse, where Max reveals to Chloe her capacity to travel back in time. It is established that the vision is rather the reckoning of a future event: a storm approaching the town.

Meeting Max with Chloe's mother Joyce works, they decide to experiment with Max's power at Chloe's secret scrapyard hideout. However, strain causes Max to have a nosebleed and faint. Chloe takes her back to Blackwell, but class is halted when everyone is called out to the courtyard. Kate commits suicide by jumping off the roof of the girls' dorm. Max manages to rewind and time stops unexpectedly as she reaches Kate, giving Max the opportunity to convince her to come down. Max ultimately resolves to uncover what happened to Kate and Chloe's missing friend Rachel Amber. Max and Chloe break into the principal's office that night to investigate and enter the pool for a swim before evading David Madsen , head of security at Blackwell and Chloe's stepfather, and fleeing back to Chloe's place. The next morning, they sneak into the motorhome of Frank Bowers, drug dealer and friend of Rachel, and learn that Rachel was in a relationship with Frank and lied to Chloe about it, causing Chloe to storm off feeling betrayed. Max returns to her dormitory and examines a childhood photo of her and Chloe, but is suddenly transported to the day the picture was taken. Max prevents Chloe's father William from dying in a traffic collision, which inadvertently creates an alternative reality where William is alive but Chloe has been paralysed from the neck down as a result of a collision in her own car.

Max uses the photo to undo her decision and return to the present day, restoring Chloe's health. Continuing their investigation, Max and Chloe obtain clues leading them to an abandoned barn owned by the influential Prescott family. They discover a hidden bunker containing pictures of Kate and Rachel tied up and intoxicated, with Rachel being buried at Chloe's secret hideout. They hurry back to the scrapyard and find Rachel's grave, much to Chloe's despair. Max follows Chloe at the school party to confront Nathan, believing he will target fellow student Victoria Chase. They receive a text from Nathan threatening to destroy the evidence, returning them to the scrapyard. All of a sudden, the two are ambushed by Jefferson, who anaesthetises Max and kills Chloe with a shot to the head. Max is kidnapped and held captive in the "Dark Room", a place Jefferson has been drugging and photographing young girls to capture their innocence. Jefferson also reveals that he took Nathan on as a personal student, but killed him before abducting Max due to him giving Rachel an overdose when he tried to mimic Jefferson's work, and intends to do the same to Max after he has the photos he wants. Max escapes into a photograph and emerges back at the beginning in Jefferson's class. She alerts David, getting Jefferson (and Nathan) arrested.

Max is given the opportunity to go to San Francisco and have one of her photos displayed in an art gallery. She calls Chloe from the event, realizing that, for all her effort, the storm has reached Arcadia Bay. Max travels back to the time at which she took the gallery photo, which eventually leads her to sojourn alternative realities as they devolve into a dreamscape nightmare. Max and Chloe finally return to the lighthouse and confront the fact that Max brought the storm into existence by saving Chloe from being shot by Nathan earlier in the week. The only way to prevent it is for Max to go back to that moment via a photo she took and allow Chloe to be killed by Nathan. Max must make a choice: sacrifice Chloe's life to save Arcadia Bay, or sacrifice Arcadia Bay to spare Chloe.

Before the Storm

In her Oregon hometown of Arcadia Bay, sixteen-year-old Chloe Price sneaks into a house concert at an old mill. Conflict arises with two men inside, but she evades them when schoolmate Rachel Amber causes a distraction. The next day, Chloe and Rachel reunite at Blackwell Academy and decide to ditch class, stowing away on a cargo train and ending up at a lookout point. They people-watch through a viewfinder and see a man and woman kiss in the park, which upsets Rachel. They steal wine from local campers and take a walk to a scrapyard. Chloe confronts Rachel about her change in mood, but she refuses to answer. When Chloe meets Rachel later, she discloses that she witnessed her father, James, through the viewfinder, cheating on her mother. Rachel destroys a family photo in a burning trash bin, and in a fit of rage kicks it over, igniting a wildfire.

Chloe and Max grew up together in Arcadia Bay with their families, where they were close childhood friends who used to always hang around each other and used to play pirates at their homes or in the woods, dreaming of their future and the adventures they would experience together, but in 2008 when her father tragically died in a car crash. Although Max was supportive at the time, her family moved away to Seattle, leaving Chloe to deal with her grief alone. Chloe always used to smile and laugh, but gradually became more resentful of her life without her father and Max. Later in the same year, Chloe's mother Joyce and David Madsen became lovers. David Madsen is a military veteran and Head of Security at Blackwell Academy whom Chloe immediately despised. From there, Chloe started getting more rebellious, hanging around with bad boys, taking drugs and running away from home, making the junkyard her secondary home. She grew more and more frustrated with Arcadia Bay and conceived the desire to escape from her home town. Her emotional temperament took physical form, as she gradually changed her outward appearance to the punk-rockish style of today. She often got into varying degrees of mischief and thus earned a bad reputation with the local police over the years.

The next day, Chloe and Rachel are reprimanded by Principal Wells for ditching school. Chloe hides out at the scrapyard where she finds an old truck in need of repair. She then receives a call from local drug dealer Frank Bowers, who arranges a meeting to discuss settling her debt with him. Chloe agrees to repay him by helping him steal money from her classmate Drew, who owes Frank a large sum. However, Chloe learns that Drew is being violently extorted by another drug dealer, Damon Merrick, and she must decide whether to pay off the dealer with the stolen money to protect Drew or keep it. Later, when a student is unable to participate in the school's theater production of The Tempest due to road closures caused by the wildfire, Chloe reluctantly takes on the role opposite Rachel. After the play, they decide to leave Arcadia Bay with the truck from the scrapyard, and return to Rachel's house to pack. Following a confrontation there, James reveals that the woman they saw him kissing was Rachel's biological mother.

Rachel is told that her biological mother, Sera, is a drug addict, and that on the day her father kissed her, he had rejected Sera's plea to reunite with Rachel, after she adopted her away years before. Chloe vows to find Sera, against James' wishes. Chloe contacts Frank, who agrees to meet her at the scrapyard. She repairs the truck there before Rachel arrives. They are ambushed by Frank and Damon, who stabs Rachel after he realises she is the district attorney's daughter. Surviving the wound, Rachel recovers at the hospital. Chloe continues the search by investigating James' office for clues about Sera, instead revealing that James has been in contact with Damon; Chloe uses James' phone to convince Damon to disclose where Sera is located, and finds out that Damon has kidnapped her for ransom. She races to Damon to pay him off, but learns, when she reaches him, that James wanted him to kill Sera. Frank appears and fights Damon, after which Sera entreats Chloe to never tell Rachel about James' actions. Back at the hospital, Chloe is faced with a choice: tell Rachel everything or protect her from the truth.

Farewell

In Bonus Episode, Chloe and Max grew up together in Arcadia Bay with their families, where they were close childhood friends who used to always hang around each other and used to play pirates at their homes or in the woods, dreaming of their future and the adventures they would experience together, but in 2008 when her father tragically died in a car crash. Although Max was supportive at the time, her family moved away to Seattle, leaving Chloe to deal with her grief alone. Chloe always used to smile and laugh, but gradually became more resentful of her life without her father and Max. Later in the same year, Chloe's mother Joyce and David Madsen became lovers. David Madsen is a military veteran and Head of Security at Blackwell Academy whom Chloe immediately despised. From there, Chloe started getting more rebellious, hanging around with bad boys, taking drugs and running away from home, making the junkyard her secondary home. She grew more and more frustrated with Arcadia Bay and conceived the desire to escape from her home town. Her emotional temperament took physical form, as she gradually changed her outward appearance to the punk-rockish style of today. She often got into varying degrees of mischief and thus earned a bad reputation with the local police over the years.

Reception

The character development such as Chloe, has been lauded Also Critics praised the character on Before the Storm but the main relationship. Although critics said there were tonal problems, caused by the game's "cheap ways" of progressing the plot, such as character inconsistency and superfluous shock value. Peter Paras of Game Revolution complimented the character beats, particularly the development of Chloe Price, who he said "really comes into her own as [a] fully-formed character". Reviewers stated that the final episode, Polarized, had a "fitting conclusion" to the coming of age story of Chloe Price and the relationship between the two leads was carried out successfully.

Jeremy Peeples of Hardcore Gamer found Chloe's behaviour "endearing" and noted that her personality was portrayed with multiple layers. Sam Loveridge at GamesRadar wrote that Rachel was the more authentic character because of her more "grounded" dialogue. Despite disparaging Chloe for being "her same tiresomely combative self" early on, Metro saw the relationship between Rachel and Chloe as "the least compelling" aspect, Wallace thought their "tender moments" were the best parts of the episode, and Makedonski said "their struggles, their mutual escapism, and their sacrifices" provided more than enough investment. Ozzie Mejia of Shacknews relished in Chloe's "genuine growth" contrasting her "fiery spirit". Game Informer's Joe Juba declared the continued comprehension of the character "its biggest strength". Brett Makedonski, writing for Destructoid, thought the character exposition was done "to great effect". However, Juba's biggest complaint echoed Wallace's derision of the "forced" manner with which Chloe and Rachel become friends.

Metro also saw her fleshed out by enduring the loss of her father. Game Informer's Kimberley Wallace thought the younger version of Chloe brought a "naivety and vulnerability" worthy of sympathy. Conversely, the relationship between the leads was said to have formed "at unnatural speed."