While the original "Life is Strange" was an awesome time travel story that punched the butterfly effect right in your face and flooded you with surprises (the more interesting, unsuspected kind), great characters, a lot of character development and a really exiting story, this prequel is just a boo-hoo soap-opera style show. There is only very little development, the two main characters are extremely bland and as it is a prequel focusing on one of the main characters of the original game and her - already known - past, you already know the outcome of it.
Honestly speaking: Just change the soundtrack and ad more character zoom ins on their faces and you got yourself the classic, run of the mill, soap opera.
The "backtalks" are quite fun in the game but everything else is extremely straight forward.
Spoiler Alert:
While there was a lot of character development in the original "Life is Strange" and a lot of interesting twists (which to most parts could be even forseen by noting tiny details very carefully (e.g. like the teacher's photography exhibition flyers, already showing that this guy might be not as kind and warmhearted as expected)), there is nothing like that in "Before the Storm".
Cloe is a one dimensional Character: Everything sucks, life sucks, oh hey the cool girl in the class seems to like me, let's be her lapdog and do everything she wants;
Of course Rachel is pretty much the same kind of person. Their only difference is more or less the money their families got. Rich spoiled unhappy rebel girl and poor less-spoiled unhappy rebel EMO girl.
Oh yeah, and there is nothing supernatural, no time traveling, no world changing stuff happening. Also no surreal dream scenes, no prophecies, no real actual meaningful stuff happening. Just two one dimensional girls being unhappy about their life (getting a full funded college for the subject and high school they wished for paid by their parents......)
Shame on Deck 9 for ruining the great original game that DontNod once created......