Life Is Strange: Double Exposure Review: A Worthwhile Sequel
2015’s Life Is Strange was about a high-schooler, the supernaturally gifted Max Caulfield, but its power resided in something deeper than its protagonist’s youth and the setting of Blackwell Academy. I think that, for many of the millions of players it resonated with, Life Is Strange spoke to those parts of us that are still as young as Max was, those parts of us that still remember the incredible intensity of teenage longing, and still know that the right wistful indie pop song in the golden hour of the evening can just about break your heart. Now, Max is back, a little older, a little different from the person she once was, in Life Is Strange: Double Exposure. While some fans of the original may be disappointed to see the way the intervening years have shaped Max, it’s a worthy sequel that gives her, and us, a thoughtful reckoning with the toll life takes on us and the pain that often goes hand-in-hand with growth.
We catch up with Max, now in her mid or late 20s, teaching photography as the artist-in-residence at Caledon University, a prestigious liberal arts school in Vermont. Players of the first game will immediately note that, no matter what choices you may have made in the original game, Max is not here with Chloe Price, her close friend (and, potentially, romantic partner) in that game. As someone who was ride-or-die for Chloe myself and who chose, in that game’s climactic moment, to save her, and ride off with her together in the hopes of starting a new life someplace else, I understand being a bit sad to find the two of them, for the time being, apart. But I’ve also seen some players express outright anger over this, as if it represents some kind of betrayal of fans to not allow their Max to still be together with Chloe, and if that’s the viewpoint you bring into this game, well, I doubt it can change your mind.
Reflections on the past
However, I think this is a fundamentally bad view to have of art, and again, I say this as someone who found Max’s connection with Chloe in the first game profoundly meaningful. Art is not a restaurant where we get to just order things off of a menu to comfort and satisfy us, to have our own wishes fulfilled and see things go the way we want them to. Art must sometimes deal with life as it actually is–the hardships, the heartbreaks, the dissatisfactions, the losses–and Double Exposure does that. It doesn’t act as if Chloe doesn’t exist. She’s still a part of Max’s life, albeit (in my playthrough, at least) a distant one, at the moment. Things don’t always work out, no matter how badly we might want them to, and the explanation Double Exposure offers for just why the two of them are no longer together is a believable one. Part of me likes to think that perhaps they’ll be together again someday, if fate deems it so and it’s what they both want. Double Exposure certainly allows for this hope to be sustained. But for now, their lives have taken them on separate paths. So it goes, sometimes, in life and in art.
Still, that connection with Chloe gave the first Life Is Strange its beating heart. Whether the plot was flagging or firing on all cylinders, the spark between those two kept things compelling. Lacking such an immediate, powerful dynamic, Double Exposure takes a bit longer to find its footing. It’s not that Max is alone in this game, but rather, that there is no one all-important connection that’s cracking her heart wide open and having a colossal impact on her life. Where Life Is Strange was all about Max defining herself in connection with another person, Double Exposure is more about Max defining herself for and by herself, carrying the scars of her past and the lessons they’ve taught her.
Your two closest connections here are with Safi and Moses. Safi is a grad student focusing on poetry, and Moses, her closest confidant, studies astrophysics. As the game begins, Safi and Max are already close, and the game establishes this in their knowing banter with each other. However, because we’re thrust into this connection that’s already formed, rather than participating in its development the way we do with Max’s connection to Chloe in the original game, we don’t feel this relationship as deeply as we did that one, at least not right away.
And, maybe, not ever. Another crucial difference between Double Exposure and the original Life Is Strange is that we experienced that game episodically over a period of months, while this one, we get all at once, like a Netflix show we can just immediately binge. This shift benefits Double Exposure in some ways, and diminishes it in others. Delays of weeks between episodes would have highlighted the relative weakness of Double Exposure’s start, as we’d be left with ample time to focus on how the game was taking its time to really pull us in, and to simmer in doubt over whether it could make our investment worth it down the road. Here, we can just rush on to the next episode if we choose, and find out in the course of a game-binging weekend just how everything plays out. On the other hand, having to carry Max’s story with me over the better part of a year definitely made me feel it more deeply, and I suspect Double Exposure, too, would have felt more impactful in the end if it had been released in a similar way.
Living in the moment
Max is mostly doing fine at Caledon, though she still has her signature, relatable awkwardness and insecurity, and we find her at a time when things seem to have stalled in her personal life. Early on, Safi encourages Max to strike up a conversation (and maybe a romance) with Amanda, the likable, endearing manager of the Snapping Turtle, a bar near campus. (You can also pursue romance with Vinh Lang, the rakish head of a secret society. I didn’t pursue this path myself, but I suspect that neither option sees romance becoming as central a part of Max’s arc here as it can be in the original game, and that’s fine.) Max is finding more fulfillment at the moment in her ongoing photography project, and the game starts with her and Safi breaking into an old, long-abandoned bowling alley to snap some pics. Here and throughout the game, you’re given ample opportunity to take snapshots of objects (and sometimes people) in the environment that take Max’s fancy, though I found the handling of this frustratingly limiting. You can zoom in and out of an image and shift the angle at which Max is holding the camera, but you can’t reposition Max to get a more interesting perspective, so while I like the concept of involving you directly in Max’s creative pursuits, I found the implementation of the idea lacking.
More successful, unsurprisingly, are the game’s efforts to pull you in through Max’s connections to others, and though these take some time to take root, Safi, Moses, and the other characters who Max interacts with throughout Double Exposure are a pretty strong bunch. The writing remains very “young adult”—Max is still prone to reactions like “I…wow. Just. Wow.” when I would have liked to see the tone mature a bit along with Max herself–but it nonetheless gives us sharply defined characters we may come to like, or loathe. Characters like the aforementioned Vinh Lang and a writing professor named Gwen Hunter, a trans woman who finds herself targeted by the school’s administration for things she may or may not have done, reveal new layers as you progress, and you may find that your first impressions of them give way to new appreciation and deeper understanding before all is said and done.
And while the writing does its fair share of the work, not enough can be said about just how remarkable the facial expressions are in Double Exposure. I wrote about the remarkable impact of faces in this game’s direct predecessor, Life Is Strange: True Colors, back in 2021, and it’s every bit as true here. Interactions in Double Exposure contain so much more than just what’s being said. The faces here are remarkably lifelike, capturing those subtle nuances that play across our faces as we reveal and withhold, and the skill and effort put into them elevates the entire game. It also helps that such a strong voice cast has been assembled here, with Hannah Telle reprising her role as Max from the original.
Crossing the streams
I’ve spent all this time talking about everything but the game’s central plot, because I feel like what matters most in a Life Is Strange game are the things around the plot–the relationships, the little environmental interactions, the moments you can spend just sitting somewhere and reflecting while a song plays and the camera highlights picturesque details around you. (These moments are back, and I still love them. In games so concerned with the passage of time, they’re a wonderful opportunity to, for a little while, simply exist, to slow down and take it all in.) But this is a plot-heavy game, so let’s talk about it. (If you want to go into Double Exposure not knowing anything about where its story is going, not even what trailers have revealed, stop reading here. However, I won’t be going into spoilers beyond the details that have been made public by the game’s own marketing.)
After a night of hanging out and stargazing, Max and Moses find Safi dead, the victim of a gunshot. In her grief and her desire to find who’s responsible, Max discovers a new wrinkle to the powers that she’s long left dormant after their catastrophic cost in the first game: she can now swap between two timelines. In one, Safi is dead, and she and Moses are grieving the loss, and also find themselves hounded by a cop who may just be a dogged investigator, or may be genuinely unhinged. In the other, Safi is alive, though strange, surreal things are happening, with people seeing doubles of themselves and being accused of things they insist they haven’t done.
As a mechanic, this ability to swap between timelines is a good deal of fun. It’s interesting exploring the Snapping Turtle, the campus’ fine arts building, and other locales and spotting all the differences between the timeline in which people are reeling from Safi’s death and the one in which folks are gearing up for Krampus on Kampus during the Christmas break. And a few of the game’s puzzles, none of which are very involved or difficult, see you taking an item from one timeline to use it in another, giving it all a hint of Day of the Tentacle-esque whimsy.
However, two timelines can also be a lot to keep track of, not just for you but, it seems, for the game itself. I repeatedly encountered visual oddities and discrepancies that clearly weren’t intentional timey-wimey anomalies but just bugs and errors. At one point, for instance, Max needed to break into a locked briefcase in one timeline, but somehow, my jumping back and forth between continuities resulted in the supposedly locked briefcase–which I still needed to unlock and open–being displayed as wide open. I don’t doubt the developers will be doing their damnedest in the days ahead to smooth out all this strangeness, but just be prepared to accept a little oddity in your adventure. You may also find that the events of the game result in some odd tonal shifts. For instance, you might be in a scene that has Max still reeling from the death of her friend, but then look at a movie poster on the wall or some other environmental detail and get a chipper quip from her, the game clearly not taking into account the fact that Max is grieving. I don’t really mind things like this–games are complex and hard to make, and things like this just reveal how much they’re all held together by duct tape and dreams–but just be aware that those seams are a bit more apparent here than they are in some other games.
Far more important to me than any little technical oddities is the story itself, and as I said earlier, it does take some time to get going. Once the big twists and reveals start happening, though, they’re plentiful, and Double Exposure builds up a good deal of narrative momentum before the end, arriving at a conclusion that is both satisfying in its own right and sets up something that could be fertile narrative territory for a future game. I hope this one is successful enough that we get to see such a sequel.
Still, while the central arc of Safi’s murder is handled well, there’s a fair amount of narrative haziness around it. One character, for instance, gets a well-deserved comeuppance but it doesn’t land with the impact it should, feeling like something the writers quickly usher off-stage to highlight new narrative developments. It’s not all as strong as it could be, but Double Exposure does really work where it matters most: in Max’s ongoing development as a character. She very much carries the past with her, still wrestling with what happened back in Arcadia Bay, and over the course of this game, she grows in some fascinating ways. At one pivotal point late in the game, for instance, she even makes a massive choice entirely on her own, regardless of what you might want her to do in that moment, and I think that’s exactly as it should be. What happened to her before was so monumental that there are some things, this time around, we shouldn’t have a say in, things that show the lessons that pain and experience have taught her.
And that’s really what it comes down to for me, what makes Double Exposure a strong and worthy sequel to the original. It’s genuinely interested in Max as a person, in exploring her, in developing her further. It respects her enough to let her grow and change in ways that feel consistent with her experience and who she’s always been. Fans who just wanted more of what they got in the original Life Is Strange may be frustrated by the fact that Max’s life has entered a new chapter of ambiguity and growth, but, then, things rarely go precisely the way we want them to. Much of getting older and growing as a person is about carrying the pain of the past with some measure of grace and still maintaining the capacity for hope, joy, and love. If you ask me, Max is doing just fine.
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