Life is Strange: Double Exposure Review

Released on the 29th of October, Life is Strange: Double Exposure is the newest entry in the Life is Strange franchise and features the protagonist of the original game — Max Caulfield. The return of this fan-favourite character showcases the nature of this title: a direct sequel to the original, unlike the separate self-contained stories that are Life is Strange 2 and Life is Strange: True Colors. Because of this, many people’s expectations for Double Exposure were justifiably very high, so Deck Nine had a lot to deliver.

The first thing you can do is customise Max, and I’m going to be honest: I don’t like that. I feel like it takes away from Max’s personality — in the first game, you were thrust right into what’s going on, basically being forced into becoming Max. Whilst it’s a nitpick, I feel that choosing how Max dresses as the first thing you do takes away some of that — instead of her, it gives you the agency to define how Max starts out. Nevertheless, after that scene, you start the game proper and are shown Max and her new best friend, Safi, breaking into an abandoned pub so Max can take a photograph there. It’s a nice little scene that shows the two’s friendship, but nothing else.

Immediately after, Max is revealed to still have nightmares about the Storm in a coffee shop scene between her and Safi, with the two talking about her past, especially Chloe. The question is prompted when Safi reveals she had looked in Max’s wallet and saw a picture of “a blue-haired girl”, asking who she is. The player can reply whether she was a friend or a romantic partner, and after that, another question is presented: what happened to her? In a genuinely terrible twist of events, you must choose between answering that she died, which is the Bay ending of the original, or that you either broke up or grew apart, which is, according to the story writers, the consequences of the Bae ending. If I wasn’t clear yet, that is a horrible way to write Chloe out of the game and is disrespectful to an entire 50% of the player base, who chose to sacrifice Arcadia Bay for Chloe in the original title. It’s hard to emphasise enough just how bad of an idea this was, but it alone ruined the story for thousands of people, making them immediately request a refund.

And if you thought that’s where the story issues end, you couldn’t have been more wrong. Being almost 30 years old now, you’d expect Max to become more mature than she was, right? Well, she isn’t, she’s actually much less than she ever was. A good example is how irresponsible she is with her powers (which I will touch on in a moment) — she uses them for the most basic things as if she had learnt nothing from what happened in Arcadia Bay. And of course, the change to her powers being timeline travel instead of time rewind makes absolutely no sense — the new ones just came and replaced her old ones for no perceivable reason and without any warning. Then there’s the ending of this game; I usually try to keep my reviews as spoiler-free as possible, but I just can’t not talk about this ending, and not for a good reason, so if you don’t want to know how it ends, skip to the next paragraph; anything in this one is a spoiler from now on. Well, it looks like it was taken straight from an MCU movie’s script: Safi is actually the villain, and she convinced some alternate timeline Max to join her, and now she wants to gather all the other people with superpowers in the world in some kind of Avengers initiative? And of course, the player can choose to join Safi (and therefore become the evil Max, I assume?). Super dumb with dozens of unanswered questions, and how does Double Exposure deal with them? The end screen says “Max Caulfield will return” — yep, I told you, it looks like it was taken from a Marvel movie. I try not to be too brutal, usually, but there are genuinely not enough words in the English language to explain just how much the writers misunderstood what makes Life is Strange actually good.

The gameplay is not the most exciting, or exciting at all, to be honest. It’s the usual choice-based gameplay, with not much to do except listen to dialogue and occasionally solve a few puzzles. A point in favour of Double Exposure is that some of the puzzles are pretty engaging, but there’s really not much to do if you don’t enjoy the story (and if you read the previous paragraph, you should already know that you won’t enjoy the story). The new powers are definitely interesting and impressive mechanically, although the original rewind had the charm of taking save scumming and making it into an actual gameplay system, so I can’t tell you I prefer the new ones in good conscience.

Something in favour of the game is how it looks, though. Deck Nine’s modelling and art direction are as good as ever, and although I did like DON’T NOD’s artistic approach to their textures and models and do prefer it because of its uniqueness, I do think that Deck Nine’s style looks better from an objective point of view. The artworks are just as good, and whilst most of the game isn’t exactly wallpaper material, it’s definitely pleasant to look at. The voice acting is, as always, amazing — Hannah Telle is a really talented voice actor and I’ve never heard a single bad line read from her in absolutely anything she’s in. Of course, the rest of the actors are also great, and not one character sounds bad, but Telle just did such an incredible job I had to single her out. There is some questionable dialogue writing, but none of that is the actors’ fault. The music and other sound design in Life is Strange: Double Exposure is fine, but nothing to get too excited about — I didn’t like anything there enough to listen to it again on Spotify.

Well then, overall, Double Exposure is a pretty bad game. There are definitely some good aspects in it, but for a story-based game with uninteresting gameplay, the story being bad kind of just ruins everything. I can’t see anyone enjoying the gameplay for itself, so it can’t really be a good experience if I’m being honest. If you’re just interested in the lore it brings, watching a playthrough whilst doing anything else or straight-up just reading a recap will be more enjoyable. It’s really hard to find any audience to recommend this to, because fans of the series, or anyone that likes a well-written story in their story-focused game, is definitely not going to enjoy this.