Brendan Caldwell
You can feel two ways about something at the same time. The feuding academics of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure might call this “emotional superposition”. But the word “ambivalent” already exists. So let’s say I’m ambivalent about this new adventure featuring Max Caulfield, the returning hero of Life Is Strange, and time-travelling photographer whose powers have resurfaced after years of off-screen atrophy. I’ve been deeply moved by individual scenes in this sequel. By the end I was sorry to leave its characters behind. At the same time (please now imagine my face is splitting into a second, colour-washed expression with wobbly VFX) I am relieved it’s over, so I don’t have to deal with the inconsistent behaviour of those characters, the flimsy plot, and a convoluted approach to murder mystery.
If you’re allergic to spoilers, take off. To discuss a Life Is Strange game requires spoiling, even a little. For everyone else, let’s recap. The first Life Is Strange followed Max as a high school senior who sees a childhood friend, Chloe, shot dead in the school bathroom. Her mind snaps and she develops time travel powers, leading to all sorts of wibbly rewinding in an effort to save this friend (and possible romantic interest). In the end, you have a choice: sacrifice your hometown to save gal pal Chloe, or let her die back in that bathroom to spare the town.
Double Exposure picks up the pieces many years later. Max is an award-winning photographer and visiting artist at a prestigious university in snowy Vermont. She keeps a photo of Chloe in her wallet, a reminder of the love she lost (to gun violence or a post-disaster break-up, pick your poison). That relationship is over. This game is not out to explore it. Instead, it wants to put Max into a new place, with new friends, new romantic interests, and a new death to rattle her old traumas.
That decision has proven contentious with some fans, but I’m on board. I prefer studios to move on from old stories. A huge theme of Life Is Strange is acceptance, learning to accept that those you love may be ripped from you unfairly. To see fans get uproarious about Chloe’s vanishing act is like watching Max herself flail against the stormwinds of time. Yes it hurts, but let’s move on.
Yet even this reopening of wounds is appropriate. Early in this sequel, a major character is killed in mysterious circumstances. Her name is Safi, the outgoing daughter of the university president and new best friend to Max. There is a gunshot, Safi is found bleeding, dead in the snow. Max finds her too late, and the shock of seeing another friend gunned down sees her powers come catapulting back. This time she can move between two distinct timelines – a cheerier world in which her friend still lives, and the downbeat universe in which the friend is dead.
What follows is a five episode jaunt of dimension-hopping detective work (who is the killer?) and much investigating of suspicious professors. At its gameiest you’re snooping through the offices of literature professors for clues, and hopping timelines via twinkling doorways that exist in specific spots (always neatly hidden to avoid pop-in). If you’ve played other Life Is Strange games, you’ll know what to expect – a lot of examining objects and listening to inner monologue.
There’s also a handy little colour circle on every dialogue option that will consistently inform you if you’re in the orange world of the living Safi, or the blue world of the murdered one. You can bring items from one timeline into another (objects as large as stepladders disappear into Max’s magic handbag). This results in exactly the kind of simple “puzzles” you expect from dimension-dippin’. One world has a guard blocking the way, the other does not. A friend in one world requires a spanner – you can grab one from the other world.
But it’d be hard to find someone who plays these games for the adventure game mechanics. Writing and storytelling is the focus. I found it wildly inconsistent, with many touching moments of bottled empathy surrounded by plot-driven wackiness and insensible behaviour. Characters show inconsistencies from the start. Plot holes are plastered over with papier mache reasoning. Many of your own actions as Max will defy common sense.
Then there is the cascade of references. Life Is Strange games have historically filled out their characters by making sure you know that they know the works of Ray Bradbury or Thomas Wolfe, that they listen to Bloc Party or Kings Of Leon. Double Exposure takes reverence for reference to obnoxious new heights. “Life finds a way!” quips Max, evoking Jurassic Park. “Don’t ever talk to me or my sons again” she jests, summoning a meme from 2016. It is not the only allusion to Twitter that makes it into the game.
Other characters are weirdly homogenous in their mannerisms and habits of speech. Almost everyone is deeply literate in therapyspeak (some have their reasons, others don’t). Half the cast are Gilmore Girls-level quipsters. Max especially has a real case of jokebrain. She can’t sweep up some broken glass without remarking: “Come here, my sharp little friends!” It can become exhausting.
However, once you’re out of the opening episode, with its forced “we’re definitely friends!” banter, a few characters with distinct voices start to poke through. One pantomimingly impatient detective, for all his trope-fulfilling, is a breath of fresh air, because he’s so annoyed at the case he’s working on (I can relate, sir). Moses, an astronomer friend, is another sigh of relief. He’s a literal-minded guy who quips little and calms often. Gwen is a standoffish professor who doesn’t suffer fools. She is “a hugger” yet holds grudges bitterly. She sits on a high horse some moments, and tumbles from it in others.
Other characters who seemed grating at first quickly grew on me. Amanda, the bartender who I dismissed as “default love interest overfond of fingerguns” indulges you in some cute make-believe in an effort to cheer you up. And Vinh, a looksmaxing sleazeball, is so horny it should immediately be reported to HR. I wrote him off as a rich kid with arrogance and ambition. But later he shows himself to be deeper, certainly not the elite he often pretends to be. Both characters are treated to scenes in which Deck Nine are at their most romantically transparent, dangling the potential romance in front of you like Sebastian the crab singing “you know you want to kiss the girl!”
Throughout all this you’ll notice one other thing: the character animation and mo-cap is very good at replicating the bottled micro-expressions of TV actors. The millisecond lip bites of indecision or concentration, the semi-squints of recognition, the mouth tautening of skepticism. Players of Life Is Strange: True Colors will recognise this close attention-to-eyebrows. It’s a little distracting sometimes, in a LA Noire kind of way. And the physical body acting is still sometimes deeply exaggerated. But for a series that long had stiff figures and little boys with ventriloquist dummy faces, the improvements to motion capture continues to impress.
What impresses less are the bugs. Voice lines reactivate long after the characters have left the area. Max’s internal thoughts are sometimes utterly at odds with what is in front of her. Characters sometimes don’t reply, lines get skipped, interactable items are conspicuously absent. One early scene for me included a very funny time shift, where everyone in the “dead” world was T-posing with grief. It’s hard to stay immersed in a fiction when so many things shunt you out of it.
But bugs aren’t the main offender in this regard. That would be the implausibility that flows through the storytelling. We’re asked to believe that Max and Safi are best friends. But it turns out Max knows astoundingly little about her pal, and it is hard to imagine they didn’t talk about much of what later gets revealed. On top of this, people’s sense of urgency and significance is skewed. They will act with severe shock at mild revelations, yet basically shrug at a firearm. I routinely yelled at my screen as characters did the least sensible thing imaginable.
This includes some classic annoyances. Max will climb tall shelves instead of clambering easily over a nearby railing. She will use her nose-bleedingly self-harming timewarping power to get past a police barrier rather than simply duck the fuck under it. If the cardinal sin of level design is erecting a thin red rope and assigning it a vault-thick invisible wall, then Double Exposure should be given ten Hail Marys for erecting barriers with tiny signs, and the ever-irksome 180 about-face (“I better go do that other thing first!”)
The first two episodes make up the bulk of the detective-ing, and housed the majority of my frustrations. The middle acts are my favourite, simply because they put some convoluted mysteries to bed and allow you to indulge in downtime with the people you’ve been poking at.
The final episode, meanwhile, is close to being one extended cutscene with a few moments of door opening and dialogue-choosing thrown in, just to remind you it’s a game. At this point, I laid back and let the extended trauma metaphors rinse over me. It was interesting; a symbolic insight into Max and the years she spent between games. For all the scenes in which characters act like plot-stringed marionettes, there are those that made me well up. It is at its strongest when it stops being a murder mystery and starts being a story about grief.
Even so, it wildly flip flops between the two. I have growled with annoyance at a gun being stuffed into a back pocket and teared up with sympathy over a gingerbread chimney, all in a three-minute window. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, or (to continue the physics parlance) an emotional particle in a cat state. Said cat is stinking dead in a trashcan of quips, yet also alive and often beautiful. That, alongside the lack of Chloe, will make it a challenging story for some fans to accept. But those seeking a new band of merry, beautiful idiots will find moments to savour, even in this truly spaghettified tale.
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