"Lake Mungo"

Lake Mungo is one of many people's favourite "horror" films of the twenty first century, including me, but I've noticed that a lot of online commenters on it have missed the point. In this 2008 mockumentary, Australian teenager Alice Palmer drowns while swimming in a dam in her hometown of Ararat, Victoria. Later, her surviving family members notice inexplicable goings-on in their home, and son Matthew, Alice's brother, sets up video cameras around the house to try to find evidence of paranormal happenings. He does, but these turn out to have been faked by him in a misguided attempt to bring comfort to his grieving mother June. June, examining the doctored footage, discovers that the recordings had in truth observed an intruder having broken into their home, leading to the revelation that Alice had a secret life, being engaged in a hidden relationship with the couple next door. This leads to the recovery of a diary indicating that something strange happened when Alice went on a school trip to Lake Mungo in outback New South Wales. The Palmers find Alice's buried phone out on the dry lakebed, on which a video records an uncanny and disturbing encounter Alice had in the months before she died: an encounter with her own doppelganger, an apparition resembling her own drowned corpse from her forthcoming death. Upon returning to Ararat, the family feels that Alice's presence is now gone from the house, and they decide to get a fresh start by selling up and moving away. In the end, however, we see that while the Palmers have gone, Alice is still there, standing in the front window, watching her family leave her behind.

I've seen many commenters on this film online interpret the film as having an ultimately positive, if sad, ending, perhaps a bittersweet one. The Palmers go through the ups and downs of grief, such as denial and bargaining, but in the end they get closure and let Alice go so that they themselves can move on. But Lake Mungo isn't about that at all; in fact, that's almost the opposite of what it's about. The film doesn't have a remotely positive ending. The Palmers don't resolve their grief through healthy acceptance, but rather through projection and blame. Alice's greatest fear in the months before her death was the feeling that there was nothing her parents could do for her, that they didn't understand her and couldn't help, and so when they leave she's abandoned, stuck haunting her old house, perhaps forever.

Much of this seems a commentary on repression. The Palmers are a classic Anglo-Australian suburban family: mum, dad and two kids. We don't really see it on screen, but we learn that June and Alice had an uneasy relationship; it was hard for them to open up to one another. The same was true for June and her mother Iris, and Iris tells us that it was much the same between herself and her mother. But it's not just the women of the family who seem to struggle with sharing their feelings with others; Russell, the father, throws himself into his work, and Matthew, the son, uses music, photography, wearing his sister's jacket, faking her ghost, all sorts of things to try to cope with her death. One of the things we virtually never see is any of them talking to each other about her. It's true of Alice herself; she had family, friends and a boyfriend, but pursued a secret relationship with a married couple presumably because she couldn't find much in the way of intimacy in her own life. This isn't to say that what the neighbours, the Tooheys, did wasn't wrong, because ethically it probably was (if not legally), but the fact was that Alice was trying to find something she wasn't getting in her "normal" life.

Throughout the film, the characters often seem either unwilling or unable to wholly express their grief, relying on the Australian tradition, inherited from the British, of keeping a stiff upper lip; Russell is particularly indicative of this, the constant small brave smile on his lips suggestive of a man who couldn't possibly express his real feelings. Matthew, who is often wide-eyed and hesitant, seems lost, while June alternates between speaking baldly about behaviour such as entering people's houses, before breaking into demure, restrained tears. One performance that really stood out to be on a recent viewing is that of the actor who plays Jason, Alice's boyfriend, who always has a sardonic smile on his face; we of course eventually find out that he now knows that she was cheating on him with the neighbours, and it seems that he struggles to contain his bitterness.

The reason these performances are all so effective is because not only do they plausibly recreate what a real interview subject might say and do, but because they represent the discomfort of middle-class Anglo-Australians with their own feelings and emotions. The Palmers need anything they can to deal with the grief of losing Alice because heaven forfend they actually cry or wail or hold each other. There must, they think, be some other way.

Alice isn't haunting her family because she's trying to give them closure. She's not trying to lead them to Lake Mungo so that they can discover the truth and allow her, and themselves, to move on. As we see after the credits, she's still there at Lake Mungo, standing eternal vigil over the place where she came face to face with her own mortality. What she's trying to do is to reach out, to be noticed or heard, the way she never was when she was alive. But her parents and her brother don't notice. When both Alice and June have their final sessions with Ray the psychic, sessions that happen years apart but also at the same time, Alice can see her mother and wants her attention, but June doesn't see her daughter. She may be blind to Alice's presence, but Alice is still there.

The film is constructed so that we see Alice's story the same way her family saw it: with them in the middle and her on the periphery. But Alice was always there; we just didn't notice her, because that was what her life was like: there were things that were happening to her and things she was feeling, but she couldn't tell anyone, at least not the people to whom she was supposedly closest. For perhaps none of us really know each other, for what is it to "know" someone but to create an image of them based on what our own perceptions tell us? We can never really know what is going on inside anyone else's head. You can only ever hope that maybe the words you're reading right now have the same meaning to you as they did when I was writing them. What is it to grieve except to do what your body tells you to do until the pain of another person's permanent absence no longer preoccupies you? And what is it to die but to become a memory of who other people thought you were, that only lasts until anyone who knew you forgets, or is gone themselves?

So that's Lake Mungo. It's not sad because Alice's family struggled with losing her. It's sad because they didn't really known or understand her when she was still alive, and they never really will. Those ghosts we see in the photo are, both literally and figuratively, the projection of her own feelings of helplessness and distance, both from the past and within her own mind. And that is the film, and film in general, itself: a projection of things we can merely perceive and pretend are real until they're over.

"Lost Highway"

It's a common occurrence in discussions of David Lynch films that their bizarre and inexplicable elements are interpreted as dreams or delusions on the part of one of the characters. In Mulholland Drive, Diane Selwyn fantasises that she's Betty Elms; in Inland Empire Nikki Grace gets lost in the fictional world of the film she is preparing to star in; perhaps all of Twin Peaks is a dream of Laura Palmer's, or Dale Cooper's, or someone. While these interpretations are, I would say, entirely valid, I've always found them a bit boring.

The same is true of his 1997 film Lost Highway, which as of time of writing I recently rewatched at a local retro cinema. The film, this interpretation goes, is a delusion or a coping mechanism on the part of death row inmate Fred Madison, who murders his wife out of suspicion that she's being unfaithful, and then reimagines himself as young mechanic Pete Dayton, his wife as a mobster's femme fatale mistress, and his fate not the consequences of his own misdeeds but the result of a criminal conspiracy beyond his control. This narrative is perhaps all being played out during his own demise in the electric chair.

Perhaps the best or at least the most useful analysis of Lynch I've ever encountered was at an academic conference in 2018 at which a speaker opined that Lynch's films are, at least as far as their relationship with their creator goes, all surface. This is to say that what you see is what you get in Lynch films; he isn't hiding something from the viewer and expecting them to decipher it. Rather, what occurs onscreen, no matter how bizarre or inexplicable, is precisely what happens in the story. David Roche argues that Lynch's films "frustrate the spectator’s need for a rational diegesis by playing on the spectator’s mistake that narration is synonymous with diegesis [...] narration prevails over diegesis, the order of events in chronological time". Thus the film's interior world is only ever want the film presents it as being, regardless of whether those things relate to each other in a wholly rational fashion. This is not really surprising even if unconventional; the film's diegetic world does not really exist and what we are shown in the film is all that it really is. There is no particular reason that things in the film are obliged to follow the same logic as the "real" world.

Roche presents the "bliss" of Lynch films then as being that the role of "detective", of mystery-solver, is devolved upon the audience, who can and over the years have derived much from wrestling with the inexplicable elements of his films and trying to make sense of them. Hence the interpretation that most of the film is Fred Madison's delusion, which explains away anything which is otherwise impossible to explain. But the surface reading takes a different approach by proposing, again with reference to this relationship between narration and diegesis, that what we see in the film is exactly what happens, and yet this also closely relates to the concept of dreaming.

At least one neuroscientific explanation for dreaming, as far as I'm aware, holds that during sleep the often unrelated or at least unrealistic images that emerge in our minds are given the illusion of narrative logic by the hippocampus, the part of the brain which allows us to interpret our experiences in a cause-and-effect manner. This explains the phenomenon that dreams so often make perfect sense to our sleeping minds but are quickly identified as absurd once we wake. Lynch is a master of conveying this experience through the art of cinema, by having enough connections between things that on one level we interpret them as making sense, but also enough inconsistencies that on another we perceive them as incoherent and illogical. The tension between these two opposed elements is why Lynch films are so effective at simulating the experience of having a dream, as they create the feeling that things make sense when they actually don't, at least not fully. And just as so much of dreaming seems to be made up of semi-random combinations of emotion, memory and imagination given the illusion of narrative, without the kinds of hidden meanings that mysticist dream analysis likes to assert, the bizarre and inexplicable events in Lynch's films are not necessarily as rife with hidden mystery as many viewers might wish them to be, but rather semi-random inclusions that Lynch thought were powerful, interesting or amusing without needing to have some obscured significance that he has deliberately hidden from his audience. The title itself is that: a phrase Lynch read in one of co-writer Barry Gifford's novels and simply liked the sound of.

Both times I have watched Lost Highway I found myself much more inclined towards this what-you-see-is-what-you-get reading of the film. I interpreted it quite straightforwardly as a film about a man who turns into another man while in a prison cell, lives that man's life for a time while having a relationship with a doppelgänger of the first man's wife, and then transforms back into the first man at the end. Why do any of these things happen? Not for any particular reason; they simply do. None of this is to say that the film isn't about jealousy, or violence, or the cruelty, futility and self-destructiveness of possessive and insecure men's efforts to control or dominate women, or about the seedy goings-on behind closed doors among the rich and powerful of Los Angeles, or how guilty people rationalise their crimes and construct false identities, because of course it's still about any and all of these things. It just doesn't have to be Fred Madison's dream. Again, that doesn't mean that it isn't like a dream, because I would argue that a consistent theme of many of Lynch's films is that waking life and having a dream aren't always that different.

This comes with a host of other impressions I have received both times I've watched the film that differ a bit from a conventional reading. For instance, in both of my viewings I got the feeling that Renee's murder never actually happened: that it was staged, or took place in some other "reality", or whatever, and the fact that we cut from Fred viewing the tape of the murder (who was filming it?) to his interrogation to his incarceration suggests him being swallowed up into whatever story the maker of the video tapes was trying to impose upon him or, more generally, the narrative trajectory the film had decided to take him on. Note that we only see a few frames of footage depicting the crime scene outside of the tape. Fred sees a video of himself having murdered his wife and then, suddenly, he's in jail for his wife's murder. It is very difficult to draw a line between Fred's life, his memories, the story being created by the video tapes, and the story of the film itself.

Similarly, it always seemed that Pete Dayton had a bizarre kind of binary existence, namely that he himself and his world (his house, his job, his parents, his friends, Sheila, and so on) all already existed and that yet somehow they were dreamed into existence the instant he swapped places with Fred, or Fred became him, or whatever, at the same time. Where does Fred go when he either becomes Pete or Pete takes his place? The police very much seem to view them as distinct people; we can boringly explain this as Fred's delusion, or accept that there are things going on that do not follow the rules of reason, logic or causality and thus cannot be explained. Note that this does not mean that they are "supernatural" in the traditional sense. They are simply inexplicable; fiction allows that. We never find out what happened the night Pete took Fred's place in the prison; whatever it was, Pete's father refuses to say. Seemingly it was too horrible or insane to tell. Does Pete not remember what happened that night, or does he not remember his life at all because he didn't exist until the moment he took Fred's place, or both? Where does Pete go when he turns back into Fred, or Fred takes his place, or whatever happens? And was Pete just some poor unfortunate whose fate became tied to Fred's by sheer random bad luck, or because of his and Fred's respective connections to Mr Eddy and Dick Laurent, who may or may not be the same person? Or is he just the person Fred wishes he was, until his insecurities about his wife reassert themselves? I find myself preferring an explanation in which he is all of these things at once.

Finally, there's the Mystery Man, who obviously occupies a similar space in Lynch's oeuvre to the various Lodge entities from Twin Peaks, the Man Behind Winkies and the Cowboy from Mulholland Drive and the Phantom from Inland Empire. I can accept that he's a manifestation of Fred's insecurities while also being prepared to believe that he's some kind of teleporting bilocating enforcer for Eddy/Laurent who later betrays him, and maybe he's also Alice, who is sort of also Renee while sort of also not. Eddy/Laurent may also be two different people, or one man going by two names, or a person who Fred only knows as a name for whom he concocts a character in his delusion. I think I always sort of thought that the Pete part of the story took part in a different "world" to the Fred part, divided by age and class and the structure of the story itself, and that "Mr Eddy" was the Pete version of Laurent, while also known as Laurent to the detectives, who seem to exist in both Fred's world and Pete's. More accurately, Fred's world and Pete's world are two different worlds which are also the same world at the same time, and the Mystery Man is in both of them.

Maybe it all comes down to Renee and Alice, who, as I said above, are sort of the same person while also sort of not. We can interpret Alice as the manifestation of Fred's insecurities about his wife, but she's also the figure whose power lies in the fact that Fred can't control her, as much as he wants to; he may kill her (or just fantasise about doing it; who knows) but he can never "have" her. She is her own person and no amount of jealousy, suspicion, insecurity or abuse will ever change that. Because Fred's problems lie within himself, nothing he does to or with Renee can ever change them or make them go away. As Pete becomes infected with Fred's insecurities in the course of his relationship with Alice, Alice changes. She may have been performing the whole time, or she may have become distant and mocking because that is what she becomes in intermixing with Fred's/Pete's insecurities. All Fred can do is take out his anger on Eddy/Laurent; Alice vanishes and/or is subsumed back into the character of Renee, who is in fact still alive and leaves the movie after being with Laurent. I see Pete almost as a victim of Fred's failings as time passes and he falls more and more under Fred's shadow until Fred returns to take his place.

As such I would argue that interpretations of Lost Highway that see it just as Fred's dream have missed the point a bit. It's not that it is a dream, it's that it's like a dream. Reality itself does not follow the kind of diegesis that a piece of fiction does, and much of Lynch's work has brought this into focus. It's the experience that matters, the sense of things that have significance regardless of whether they follow the cause-and-effect logic of a traditional narrative. For our minds interpret these things as connected regardless of whether they are in a manner which makes sense in waking life. A film does not need to present things in this manner to have impact; indeed not doing so may be more powerful, with the right approach.

Thoughts on "Life is Strange: Double Exposure" Chapter 5 — "Decoherence"

Spoilers for Life is Strange: Double Exposure and the original Life is Strange

The opening of this chapter seems to suggest that there's a time loop: Safi was shot, Max did her investigation in the two different worlds, Safi's powers created the storm in the "living" timeline, and Max used the owl photo she took on the first night to jump both herself and Safi into the past, at which point she shot Safi and then the timeline split, past Max did her investigation, wound up back with Safi in the past again, but this time chooses to take herself and Safi into the storm rather than shooting Safi. For some reason the storm comes with them, as does Lucas's gun, even though all previous uses of this ability have shown that the user quantum-leaps into their own body in the past but doesn't bring anything with them, in complete contrast to how rewind normally worked. Try as I might, I just don't see how this works. I'm fine with there being an ontological paradox, but where did the first Max who shot Safi, and the gun, go? Why is the storm there in this "new" version of the past when it wasn't there originally? Maybe I'm overthinking it, but the original Life is Strange was pretty internally consistent when it came to its own rules, with a few exceptions admittedly. There's no explanation for how the gun gets into the past or why Max acted differently in this loop (i.e. not shooting Safi) than in the previous loop, unless it's meant to be a result of jumping into the photo in Chapter 3, but does that mean Max didn't jump into the photo in Chapter 3 on the previous loop? I must just be overthinking it.

Having played through "Decoherence" a couple of times now, I get what it was trying to do, namely have Max confront and overcome the trauma of the first game and her past generally: Chloe's murder (whether it actually happened or not), her kidnapping by Jefferson (which by the end of the first game never actually happened regardless of whether she saved Chloe or the town), and the exhausting drudgery of her life afterwards. This is coupled with her saving Safi's victims: Moses, Lucas, Gwen and, ultimately, herself. Why Moses is one of the people possessed by Safi, and Yasmin her mother isn't, I don't understand.

My biggest problem, however, with this is that even if I take this ending on its own terms, in good faith, with the benefit of the doubt that someone at Deck Nine created it in a well-intentioned way, it just comes across as so shamelessly derivative of the ending of the original game that I can't afford it much respect. I'm not against the idea of Double Exposure saying that Max has to stop running from her problems and hiding them from people, but even if I accept that as a logical continuation of the events of the first game the way it's presented here simply lacks the originality necessary to come across as sufficiently impactful. I feel like I keep saying that things in this game lack impact, but that's because they do. Elements that are supposed to be important either aren't given enough time and development, like Safi, or feel like they're just riding the coattails of better and more original ones had by Dontnod way back in 2015. At worst, Double Exposure feels like it is presumptuously implying that Life is Strange the original ended the wrong way, and that they're giving it a do-over as a result, which seems to miss the point of the original and suggest that the final dilemma of the first game was not an inevitable choice for Max but rather a shortcoming with the way the game was written. Most of all it seems to have the writing problem of modern Doctor Who in which the power of belief is more important than character or even plot driven causality: things seem to happen just because the game wants to string superficially cod-profound moments together, rather than because there's anything to actually say.

Now I'm perfectly prepared to accept that the nightmare sequence at the end of the original Life is Strange was something Dontnod did to extend the final episode's run time without having to come up with very many (if any) additional new assets for the episode, but what it achieved was threefold: firstly, it represents Max's feelings about the pushy and in some cases outright abusive men in her life who have, at times, made her feel pressured, weak and helpless. Secondly, it reminds her of what the cost is of Arcadia Bay being destroyed: her other friends, her classmates, Chloe's family, and countless strangers besides. Finally, it reminds her of her relationship with Chloe, and what the two of them mean to each other. This sets the player up for the final choice, the one Max will have to live with for the rest of her life: does she let Chloe die, but spare the lives of innumerable other people, or let most of the town perish but let Chloe live?

It's an impossible choice, no matter what anyone says. Chloe doesn't deserve to die. She may be selfish and at times manipulative, but by the end of the game she herself has recognised that and is in a place to either grow beyond that or sacrifice herself for the sake of others. It's got nothing to do with whether Max gets to "keep" her. It's not about Max being selfish. At the same time, it's not fair on the residents of Arcadia Bay and Blackwell either. None of them asked for any of this to happen. Neither did Max. Are the lives of Joyce, Kate, Warren and everyone else worth less? Of course not. On what basis can Max decide? There's no universally acceptable metric; it's up to the individual player to decide what they can live with more.

The emphasis of "Decoherence" is Max "taking a third option": rather than either killing Safi or letting the storm destroy Caledon, she (somehow) enters the Storm with Safi and works through both her own and Safi's problems. Following this, she reveals the truth to her friends and allies from the game: Moses, Diamond, Amanda, Vinh, and optionally Reggie and Gwen. The idea notionally is that after the events of the first game she ran from her problems and trauma, and here she's facing them head on. For this to work we have to accept that that's what actually happened after the first game: that Max never really dealt with what happened. I suppose that's arguably valid because in one course of events the only person she could have spoken to about it was Chloe and in the other version she wouldn't have anyone at all. No one else would have believed her, although the texts from her parents in this game suggest that they on some level realise that she's traumatised.

In concept the idea of Max dealing with this stuff is fine. In execution, however, it leaves something to be desired. The two events from the first game dealt with via the nightmare/storm sequence here, namely Chloe's murder (whether it actually happened) and Max's kidnapping by Jefferson, are only raised very cursorily earlier in the game, through Max's diary and a couple of lines of dialogue. If Max had had persistent nightmares or flashbacks throughout the game to these events, they would have felt much less out of place. It's not helped by the fact the game has to fudge these events via some re recorded dialogue and characters from this game standing in for those from the first, probably to save time and money on motion capture work, and possibly to avoid some issues with union agreements and/or royalties; Nathan and Chloe in the bathroom are replaced by Max and Safi, and Jefferson only appears via a highly distorted voiceover which is (I think) re recorded by Lucas's actor.

Naturally, Double Exposure was marketed as a standalone title that you wouldn't have needed to have played the original Life is Strange in order to understand, because there was no way that Deck Nine and Square Enix were going to say otherwise and risk people not buying it because they hadn't played the first. Yet I can only imagine that a player coming to the series here would be utterly baffled by these sequences, which come practically out of nowhere beyond the very limited references I mentioned above. I have to imagine that the reason these things aren't set up more is because the game was originally designed to be much more standalone, and that as development progressed towards the ending of the game these elements were squeezed in via text and so on because the first few chapters were already pretty much in the can and they couldn't go back and do more to set them up. As such these sequences don't feel like a satisfying payoff for people who have played the first game either; they just seem half-arsed.

Probably the only really interesting bit is the motel sequence in which Max explores a series of repeating, nondescript motel rooms to represent her time on the road between the first game and this, either with Chloe or alone. It is, admittedly, nice to get this tiny glimpse into Max's life between these events: how exhausted she felt, how lonely she was (in the "Sacrifice Chloe" version of events at the very least), how much she was weighed down by guilt, and how her and Chloe's relationship (in the "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" version of events) eventually became awkward and distant because neither of them had properly dealt with their feelings about what had happened.

This sequence is also refreshing because, however limited it may be, we're finally in a new environment, the motel room, which isn't just an existing space or a reused asset like the Blackwell bathroom. However, I feel that there are a couple of shortcomings nonetheless. The first is the whole idea of "Max on the road" as what happened in both versions of events. In a "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" timeline I feel that this makes sense, at least as long as Max and Chloe were a couple; if they were just friends I find it hard to believe, no matter how close the two of them were, that they would road trip around the country for years and years. Nonetheless, there's an obvious missed opportunity here for Chloe to appear, but she probably doesn't because it would have required too much additional writing, recording and motion capture work, as well as creating a unique character model for a one-off character, something the Deck Nine games in particular have really skimped on over the years. On the other hand, I just don't believe Max going on the road in the aftermath of "Sacrifice Chloe"; maybe she would have quit Blackwell and moved back to Seattle or something, but I just don't see her life going in such a similar direction in this version of events. Especially given that this game shows people's lives going in radically different directions due to one change (whether Safi is alive or not), I just can't believe that Max's life would have been so similar regardless of the outcome of the first game. Further, as irksome as this game's handling of Max and Chloe's breakup (as a couple or as friends) is, I honestly find the idea of Max touring around the country for ten years completely on her own even more pathetic than the handling of her relationship with Chloe. We get no evidence whatsoever that Max made any friends or had any relationships between leaving Arcadia Bay and arriving at Caledon in this version of events, and as much as I can understand that her losing Chloe would have been absolutely heartbreaking, it stretches plausibility past its breaking point that she spent ten years alone on the road. She had other friends at Blackwell and even in Seattle; she isn't in touch with any of them? She never went to college? Maybe I'm being too harsh but it just seems like too much, and to be honest as much as this game feels like it was designed to initially only fit with "Sacrifice Chloe", this motel sequence feels like it was ported over from a story that only makes sense for "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay". I don't think it would have been impossible to have given Max two different sequences here depending on your choice, but as always I assume that would have required too much time, energy and money relative to what Deck Nine was prepared to do or Square Enix was prepared to pay for.

Eventually, after dealing with Max's trauma through these truncated sequences, and freeing people from Safi's influence, including Max herself, we're back to where Chapter 4 ended, on the overlook, with Yasmin having been shot, although the game never makes too much of this, bizarrely. Safi tells us that she wants a "clean break" from her life at Caledon and that she's going to go and find other people with "powers" like herself and Max. She then asks if Max will wait for her, and our final decision is to either accept or refuse this request. I initially refused and was surprised that so many people accepted, but having read online it seems like a lot of people, myself included, didn't really understand what Safi was even asking; if you refuse, Moses applauds you for standing up to her, but Safi feels betrayed. If you accept, Safi appreciates your support, but Moses accuses you of giving her tacit permission to do whatever she wants. Safi asks if what Max tells her about how important she is to her and so on is true or not, but it comes across as extremely manipulative; it's possible for Max to want Safi to be happy and safe without agreeing that she should use her powers without regard for any considerations but her own. The game seems to be setting Safi up for a future encounter, either as an antagonist or an ally, but as with so much else in the game it's all very hazy and underwritten, like someone on the Deck Nine writing team thought that the audience would be mind readers.

Obviously numerous comparisons have been made at this point to this ending seeming to be like something from a Marvel movie or X-Men, the implication being that Square Enix seemingly wants to turn the series into some kind of crossover-driven "superhero franchise" rather than, as Dontnod used to put it, "relatable characters facing real world issues, but always with 'a twist of the strange'". Who knows if that will actually be the case, but for me the idea of making the series about the powers is an obvious mistake and seems to come almost out of nowhere. Further, by having Max save both Safi and Caledon, the game seems designed to subtly condone the idea, for the sake of sequels, that actually using the powers, i.e. the "fun" fantasy part of the games, is okay and can be relatively consequence-free, thus opening the door for a big dumb sequel in which Max can use her powers however she likes.

Returning to Safi, however, what does she even think she's going to achieve? I have no idea. I understand that she feels betrayed by everyone, but I don't understand how this would lead to things like shooting her own mother. She seems to express remorse for what happened to the people she affected during the storm, but doesn't seem to learn. I think she's meant to be set up as some sort of counterpoint to Max, feeling that the suffering she causes is unavoidable and that she should use her powers regardless, but after her and Max's conversation shortly before they end the storm it feels jarring. Further, I don't understand how Moses fits into all of this: Safi will tell you that she would never shapeshift into Moses, but she still infected him during the storm, and she doesn't seem to care that she's abandoning him at the end, even though he's her best friend and he never did anything to betray her, unlike her mother, Gwen or Lucas.

Ultimately I think Safi is the game's biggest weakness. Before they escape the storm, Max tells Safi "you're so important to me", but this is just another case of outright telling rather than showing. We never see enough of Max and Safi's relationship. We never get to know Safi enough to care about her or how she feels, or at least I didn't. Further, the way she treated Lucas and Gwen, while perhaps understandable, is extremely cruel and vindictive, particularly given how hard we hear Gwen had to fight to be accepted and how much Safi makes Lucas's son Robbie, an innocent child, suffer for Lucas's crimes. What happens to Maya is awful, Yasmin is an overprotective control freak, Lucas is a scumbag and Gwen is a hypocrite, but I don't feel much greater sympathy for Safi because her quest for vengeance, or justice as she puts it, to me makes her seem equally unlikeable, and I don't know why Max would want to have anything to do with her. Chloe's selfish and manipulative actions are incomparable in how mild they are, and she expresses remorse for them in the end. Safi just doesn't land for me as a character, and I have to wonder whether this is all because the story and script was stitched together from discordant elements as a result of a troubled production.

That being said, I will say this about "Decoherence": on a certain level, mostly on the surface, if I'm extremely generous to it, I think it technically holds together as a finale, putting aside certain plot points that I don't think really make sense, although I'm open to an explanation for these. As a character drama with any power behind it, however, I found it to be entirely too underwritten to leave me with anything more than a feeling of bemusement. Like so much modern media, it feels like it was written by people who didn't have the time, inclination, opportunity or skill, or some combination of these, to make it actually work on an emotional or dramatic level. Its biggest failing is that it didn't make me care about any of the new characters, only Max. I kind of like Moses and Amanda, but we just don't get enough time with either of them. The only way I can see the series continuing successfully at this point, at least from an artistic standpoint, is for Deck Nine to sort their shit out on the management side of things and actually let a creative team with clear direction and a solid vision come up with a coherent, well-paced and emotionally resonant story. From a business perspective, they'll probably bring Max back again, as this game's silly "Max Caulfield will return" teaser suggests, and they really ought to bring Chloe back too if they want to convince people to stay with the series, or perhaps trick them into doing it. And as I've said over and over again, Hannah Telle got to play Max again, which is the most worthwhile outcome from this entire project. What I wouldn't give at this point to have a game about Max and Chloe (preferably played by Ashly Burch) reconciling their differences and moving through their issues together, but honestly I doubt that's going to happen. What I suspect we'll get is another clunky stitched-together mess with Max solving a poorly-written mystery and the series turning more and more into a hybrid of the Avengers and Scooby Doo. The first game never needed a sequel. But it's frustrating to think that, if there really are infinite parallel universes, somewhere out there there are infinite worlds where we actually got a good one, and to not get to live in that world is still pretty frustrating.

Thoughts on "Life is Strange: Double Exposure" Chapter 4 — "Diptych"

Chapter 4 is when the comparisons to True Colors seem most apt because the chapter is so short. You have a conversation with Safi, go back to the Snapping Turtle for the millionth time to attend the Krampus party and expose Lucas as a fraud, briefly run around the North Quad in a blizzard and then confront Safi at the Overlook. That's it. I have to admit that my heart sank when Max and Safi concluded their conversation in the opening, during the early hours of the morning, and then the game immediately cut to the party in the evening. I was dearly hoping that we were going to get a bit of time to breathe, maybe just to spend some time with Safi and Moses, perhaps a chance to help Safi put her presentation together, or something, but no, straight back to the Turtle for another cycle of jumping back and forth between timelines via the bathroom vestibule. Even one or two scenes in between, say one back at Moses's lab and even just one in the quad or something would have made all the difference for the game's pacing.

I'm getting ahead of myself a little because the game's first scene is the point at which the game finally has a lengthy conversation between Max and Safi in the living world. Max and Safi discuss each others' powers; as we know, Max can shift between timelines, eavesdrop on parallel timelines, rewind time and even jump back into moments captured in photographs. Safi can "shapeshift" by altering the way people perceive her; she doesn't really transform, just interfere with what they see and hear. This started after her parents broke up, the only time this is really addressed in the game, You very occasionally see messages in the phone on the social media app, Crosstalk, from a character who is implied to be Safi's dad, but we never meet him or hear much about him. We just know that after he left Safi felt pressured by her mother and started wishing she was someone else, from which she gained this ability to affect how other people perceive her.

This is nice and all, but it feels like it is coming so late in the story after we've already spent so little time with Safi. I barely knew who she was before I discovered she had this ability, so learning this new revelation about her lacks impact. She asks Max if she can trust her, and I honestly didn't know what to say, because I just haven't seen enough of their relationship. It absolutely blows my mind that Chapters 2 and 3 didn't have a couple of scenes with Max socialising with Safi in the "living" timeline so that we could get to know her better. I really don't know what the team at Deck Nine were thinking; I almost feel as if we were supposed to like and care about Safi as a result of the game's marketing rather than anything that actually happens on screen. Both visually and in terms of performances the scene is great, and both Hannah Telle and Safi's actor, Olivia AbiAssi, really shine in the conversation, which just makes it all the more frustrating that we get so little of it.

After this, as I said above, we're off to the Snapping Turtle to expose Lucas. We have to sabotage the projector so that Max can swap slideshows and convince a flustered Lucas not to pull out of the night's entertainment, which is meant to be a good-natured "roast" at which he intends to announce the forthcoming film adaptation of his plagiarised novel. As many people online have argued already, however, the best part of this is the optional task in which you, Moses in the "Dead" timeline and Safi in the "Living" timeline make a gingerbread house together, which has nothing to do with the plot and is just a nice character moment. There's also a fun bit in which Safi, shapeshifted into Loretta, works with you to convince Lucas into going ahead with the roast, but I think there was a missed opportunity here to involve using Shift in some way if the point was meant to give an example of how Max and Safi could be a very influential team if they used their powers together.

Safi and Max's plan to expose Lucas at the roast just seems so amateurish and ill-conceived, and so rushed in its execution, that it all feels weightless and arbitrary. Our attention is only drawn to the fact that Lucas is being roasted at the party in Chapter 3, as I've mentioned before Safi puts together her incriminating presentation completely offscreen, and just the general sense of trapping Lucas in a "gotcha" moment at a small student party rather than going to his publisher or something feels so juvenile that I can't take it very seriously and it feels like the developers desperately casting around with existing assets because they didn't have the means to do anything more believable. The worst offender amidst all this, however, is the actual depiction of the roast itself. There are only about five anonymous students watching the show, the background noise of people reacting is so subdued that it feels like a bug, Lucas's own reaction is so understated and oddly paced, and the actual writing of Vinh and Safi's takedown of him is so half-baked that it feels like this was a proof of concept for the scene that accidentally made it into the final product or something. It's put to shame by, say, the scene of all the students watching Kate on the roof, or Jefferson's speech at the Vortex Club party, in the original game, and just seems like more evidence that the game was made in a rush, especially towards the end.

After this, Lucas reveals to Safi that it was Yasmin, her mother, that was the true architect of all the cover ups and even the cancellation of Safi's book. Safi, seemingly, loses control of her powers and runs off to confront her mother. Not only does Lucas's conversation with Safi happen offscreen, but the way her powers start affecting everyone is abrupt and confusing;  everyone starts feeling her pain towards her mother, and is writhing around, with the exception of Max for some reason. Further, a storm begins, just like it did in the original, with the game's explanation being that this is what happens when someone misuses their powers.

I don't know if it's even worth wasting time explaining how completely this misrepresents and misinterprets what happened in the original game. The point of the storm in Life is Strange was to demonstrate catastrophically that Max's actions had consequences, and that ultimately she couldn't hedge her bets anymore; she had to make a decision between Chloe or Arcadia Bay, the person she cared about the most or everyone else. The point of the storm wasn't just "using powers irresponsibly will cause a disaster", although that was itself explored in the game; the point of the storm was that Max had to make a decision and live with the consequences: either Chloe dies or the town is destroyed. She can't have it both ways. Further, on a purely symbolic level, the storm was meant to represent the old adage about the "butterfly effect": "Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" It represented the idea that what seemed like tiny, insignificant changes in events could have major, far-reaching consequences. It didn't literally mean "someone in the Life is Strange world using powers makes a storm happen". If the latter were the case, surely Daniel and Alex in Life is Strange 2 and True Colors respectively would have encountered the same thing. It would have made far more sense if Safi losing control of her powers had purely caused some kind of psychic disaster (minus the storm) from which Max had to save her by extending the trust that she felt she'd never received throughout her life, but that's not what happens. Max gets out the owl photo from the first chapter and jumps back with Safi.

I'll go into this more when I write on the final chapter, but one last thing I wanted to note before moving onto the final chapter is something about the setting: this game is set at a university and we hear about the characters grading papers and stuff, but we never see a single person (including Max) teach a class and apart from a few rooms we can't enter in Chapter Two we never even go into a classroom. The Caledon environment is not only suffocating; it lacks verisimilitude. It really feels like no one with any decision making power ever put any serious thought into this.

Thoughts on "Life is Strange: Double Exposure" Chapter 3 — "Spin"

Spoilers for Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Chapter Three, "Spin", is arguably the last "good" chapter of Double Exposure. In this one, Max finally reveals to someone else, namely Moses, that she has powers. Further, she completes her investigation, more or less, into the conspiracy that happened at the university in years gone by: Lucas plagiarised his novel from one of his students, Safi's old friend Maya Okada. Maya killed herself out of despair after the novel brought Lucas fame and success, Vinh issued a statement to help cover it up in return for a cushy admin job from Yasmin, and when Safi years later tried to bring the situation to light through a collection of poetry, Gwen had the publishing deal cancelled to avoid a scandal. Oh, and Safi is a shapeshifter.

Having Max reveal her powers to Moses is probably the most important thing as it gives Max someone to actually talk to. She now has an ally and doesn't just have to rely on her inner monologue. I like how Max and Moses's relationship develops at the start of this part. As usual I wish there'd been more, like an opportunity for the two of them to decompress at the end of the day but, from a writing perspective, this seems like a logical development that should have happened sooner.

This speaks to a broader issue with the pacing in the game, obviously. The second chapter introduced a sinister detective, Vince Alderman, who at the start of the third chapter swiftly deduces that (in my play through) Safi's death and the destruction of Arcadia Bay are connected. However, one scene later, Alderman has a bizarre encounter with his own past self at the overlook, seemingly experiences the dreaded Blinovitch Limitation Effect from classic Doctor Who, and is erased from existence. Moses later figures out that he never existed at all as a result of this encounter. The consequences of this are never addressed; surely if Alderman never existed there'd simply be another cop that the Vermont state police would send to investigate the murder, but instead it seems that the investigation is simply dropped. Alderman is set up as an important character, with journal entries about him and his own entry in Max's notes, but is simply out of the story at that point and seems to only exist to set up the red herring that what has been happening to Gwen and Lucas is a result of overlapping timelines rather than a shapeshifter. I honestly thought that Alderman was going to turn out to be an ally or something, so I tried to save him, but no, he's just a character who is set up and then eliminated in the space of about four scenes.

This chapter also is quite hurried in its revelation about Lucas, which is to say that he plagiarised Maya's novel. We go from Gwen to Yasmin to Vinh to Lucas and immediately find that Lucas moronically stored Maya's original manuscript in his own office, rather than having it destroyed or something. The idea that Lucas plagiarised Maya is not in itself bad, as I believe this kind of thing does happen in the world of publishing and academia, but there's no subtlety or ambiguity to it. Lucas is depicted as having taken Maya's draft word for word and simply having replaced references to Japan with ones to Chile. Ultimately I found this all too obvious; Lucas is a bit of a caricature, a self-aggrandising blowhard whose only redeeming feature is that he seems to genuinely care about his son. I suppose you could compare him to Jefferson in that regard, which is to say an artist and teacher with a somewhat ridiculous secret, but I don't think anyone ever thought that Jefferson was the strongest part of the first game either.

Probably the best part of the chapter is the scene at the Snapping Turtle towards the end, which is used to fulfil the romance options in the game. For my first play through I romanced Amanda, and the scene in which she and Max imagine going to a concert together is cute if a little cheap. Some naive part of me honestly thought that we would get to see Max and Amanda go to the Revenge Horse show, but instead they have to play it out in their heads because that's beyond the game's budget, another classic bit of Deck Nine telling because showing would be too difficult or expensive. Amanda is a sweetie and her scenes with Max are fun, but she's no Chloe and honestly feels more of a redo of Steph as she appeared in True Colors, namely an attractive and fun person with some inner turmoil to wrestle with who doesn't get that much development.

Then there's Vinh. The rumour is that Vinh wasn't originally planned as a romantic option and was only changed to be one because Square Enix or someone wanted the game to have a hetero romance option so that Double Exposure wouldn't be pigeonholed as an LGBTQIA+ game, which is pretty ugly if true. I actually don't mind Vinh, as in I think he's a decently written character, but I don't really see him as a plausible romantic option for Max. Of course, he himself is pretty open about mostly being interested in casual stuff, so the game ultimately still steers in the direction of the romance between Max and Amanda as more wholesome even if there is a hetero option in the game. Regardless, I thought the scene with the two of them worked as an entertaining conversation between two colleagues even if I find the romantic possibility a bit forced. Vinh just seems like too much of a player to be someone Max would be interested in.

Overall, however, the sequence at the Turtle is a really nice bit of the "slice of life" stuff which Deck Nine has always been better at than they ever have been at either mystery storytelling or character development. I really enjoyed this section and I honestly wish more of the game was like it. The only element that grates is just, as becomes even more of a problem in Chapter 4, how much time we spend at the Turtle. This, again, feels reminiscent of how much time we feel stuck in the Black Lantern bar in True Colors. The game continually cycles through six major environments, namely Max's house, the Snapping Turtle, the North Quad, the Admin Building, the Fine Arts Building and the Overlook, and I found myself increasingly desperate to go somewhere different, like Lakeport proper, or even somewhere like the bowling alley from Chapter 1 or the Astronomy Building from Chapter 2. We kind of get this with the path to the lake at the end of the chapter, but it feels so similar to the Overlook path that it doesn't have much of an impact.

This leads to the chapter's big revelation, namely that Safi is a shapeshifter. This had been leaked by the time the first two chapters were out and had been guessed at by fans months in advance, so it wasn't exactly a big surprise. I don't hate this idea, of Max finding someone else with powers, but it's undermined by how the game handles Safi generally, namely in the sense that we don't get to spend that much time with her in Chapter 1 and, despite finding her alive in the other timeline, we barely see her in Chapters 2 and 3. I just don't feel the attachment to Safi that the game wants me to and that Max is meant to feel. It'd be a bit like if the first game expected us to care about Chloe after she died in the bathroom in the first episode but that Max didn't rewind and save her until the third. The chase with the other Max, later revealed to be Safi, isn't terribly exciting, and the way she escapes from Max's darkroom feels really badly choreographed and executed, with her basically just running straight past Max who stands there like a lemon. I felt curious about the environment at the lake's edge, but it's hardly given any focus.

The last thing to talk about would be the connections in this chapter to the first game. At the bar, Max can consider calling Chloe if she's alive, but decides not to bother her. This feels like a real tease and I wonder if it was every planned for this to be an option that was scrapped when the decision was made to not have Chloe appear at all. Further, Max goes back in time using the photograph from the end of Chapter 2, a plot device from the first game which is given no introduction here. I found this to be very abrupt and clumsy, and it really made Max seem like she'd learned nothing from the first game, in which doing that almost always led to disaster. I wonder whether these overt connections to the first game were originally present in the game's design and were trimmed down later to make it more accessible to new players, but not enough to remove clunky elements like this, or if the game was originally written to be much further removed until the developers started shoving in elements from the first game because they were running out of ideas and didn't know what to do. If the allegations about the toxic workplace culture and fractious development of the game are true, I suspect it may be the latter. It really feels like no one in charge at Deck Nine knew what they were doing, or perhaps didn't care, and unfortunately it only gets worse from here.

More pointless thoughts on "Life is Strange: Double Exposure"

Spoilers for Life is Strange: Double Exposure and probably the rest of the series somewhere

As an oddball with too much free time and a fantasy-prone personality, I've been keeping a close eye on the world of Life is Strange since the release of the first two chapters of Double Exposure: the fan outrage at Deck Nine breaking up Max and Chloe in the "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" version of events, the extent to which players have engaged with the new characters, and the fact that no one at D9 or Square thought to encrypt the game files for the subsequent chapters, such that dataminers were able to extract much (if not all) of the game's audio files to potentially reveal where the story was going. Then the game broke street date, so people out there now have played the whole game to the end while everyone else waits for the 29th/30th.

I've gone back and replayed the first two chapters, trying to make every choice the opposite of what I did in the first play through: Chloe's dead, Max is pursuing Vinh rather than Amanda, I collaborated with Loretta, sold out Lucas and fished Gwen's thumb drive out of a burning trash can. In Save File 1, Max is cautious, collegial and compassionate; in Save File 2 she's an interfering busybody with (possibly) very poor judgement. It's been fun.

Doing a second play through with different choices has addressed some of what I criticised in my previous posts, namely the under- writing, as I perceive it, of the game. There are several moments, say, with Vinh, or at a couple of introspective spots, where we get to hear some of the things I thought were otherwise missing. However, it's telling how much of the game's interesting dialogue and Max's inner monologue is stuck in these optional conversations and missable moments of reflection, rather than being a core part of the game's narrative. These choice based games have always struggled to have difficult choices which don't end up having one choice more right and the other more wrong, and it feels unsatisfying that it's possible to have a less engaging experience of the story simply by virtue of making the "wrong" choices, wrong in the sense of giving you less characterisation or narrative.

My main critiques continue to be the following:

• we don't get to know Safi and Moses enough before Safi is killed
• Max doesn't spend enough time reflecting on whether using new powers is a good idea; she seems to know that it isn't but uses them anyway because the game has to happen
• Chapter 2 doesn't spend nearly enough time dealing with what Max's feelings might be about Safi still being alive in the other timeline after spending days grieving for her

It all just feels so rushed and disconnected, evocative of the notorious time skip between chapters 2 and 3 of True Colors in which Alex, Ryan and Steph all become best friends offscreen. Given that there was supposedly some overlap in the development of the two games I have to assume that this is the result of the same behind the scenes issues at the developer. I think this is something Dontnod's games, regardless of their other faults, avoided by focusing primarily on the relationships between Max and Chloe and Sean and Daniel respectively. Deck Nine's games seem to be more about the "mystery".

It's not helped by the fact that, as of the first two chapters, Max has no one to talk to about the situation. She's constantly having to ruminate because she can't tell anyone what's happening. This is probably plausible, but it doesn't exactly make for terribly compelling writing. I kind of assumed in the lead up to the game's release that this role would be taken by Moses, but that hasn't happened yet. It'd be really interesting to have two versions of the same character in two different timelines working with Max and, via her, each other, but, again, that hasn't yet happened. It all just seems like missed opportunities.

Speaking of, what about the Chloe situation? It's been very diverting from a writing standpoint to speculate on how she could have been handled without breaking her and Max up. The only method I can think of would have been to have had the two of them long distance, maybe because they'd both gotten jobs in different parts of the country, but as I said previously this would oblige the story to come up with some very contrived reasons for why Chloe wouldn't be coming to Max's aid in this time of crisis; you would have to either make it that Chloe can't for some reason get away from where she is, or that Max stops her. Or, alternatively, you write Chloe in as a full blown main character who nonetheless only appears if you choose for her to be alive, which would be a huge hassle and most realistically completely alter the game's story in that course of events. I think it just demonstrates that either they shouldn't have made the game about Max or they should have only followed one ending, probably "Sacrifice Chloe". You would practically have to end up making a whole other game in the "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" timeline to avoid this dilemma; as I said in my first post on the game, it's pretty implausible that both endings of the original game would ultimately lead Max back to the same place. Given that this game sets up Chloe as a roadie, the only way I can think you would make the "long distance" thing work would have been if Chloe was in a radically different time zone, on tour with the band, in Eastern Europe or something, such that getting back to the States was impractical, and maybe that Max downplayed the seriousness of the situation to avoid worrying her, which could be used for added drama later.

The speculation floating around is that the reason Chloe's not in the game is because Square Enix think audiences won't accept the character without Ashly Burch in the role and that they won't work with her for some reason, but I suspect it's probably quite simply because she's a SAG-AFTRA member whereas the voice work for every Life is Strange game apart from the first one (and "Farewell") has been a non-union production. Chloe's other voice actor, Rihanna DeVries, is very good, and reprised the role (briefly) in "Wavelengths" as well as this, so I think it's more likely that they couldn't figure out how to have her in the game meaningfully or didn't want to include her substantially because they weren't as attached to her as many of the fans are. I'm not really sure. I think it's unlikely that we'll never see Chloe again. The situation reminds me of what happened with the comic books, with which some fans were disappointed because they weren't just about Max and Chloe living their lives together. I understand why people would feel this way, and maybe the story that they went with in those wasn't the best source of drama, but I get that you have to do something with the relationship to make it worth telling a story about. Nonetheless I can't help but feel that the approach taken in Double Exposure is, at best, clueless, and at worst mean-spirited. Of course fans shouldn't just be given what they want, but there was probably a way to keep everyone somewhat happy if the people in charge of this project had handled the game more thoughtfully. Even if there were one or two optional scenes in which Max and Chloe did a video call or something and you had the choice to be honest with Chloe about what was going on and how you were feeling about it, or hid the truth to avoid worrying her, would have probably been enough for a lot of people, I think. You don't even have to lock off the optional romances here as this could still work with the "just friends" choice. I'm imagining something similar to the optional/determinant scene with Kate in Episode Four of the original game. Then I guess you run into the problem of Max having to tell Chloe what's going on (optionally) in both timelines, but you could use the entangle power or something as a way around that. It's not insurmountable, but I can see why it would be difficult and many developers would think it wasn't worth the effort.

Between the leaks and early release, the fan reaction, the dubious "ultimate edition", and the damaging IGN article about the behind the scenes troubles at Deck Nine, the whole thing seems like a bit of a debacle, but I get the impression that that's not terribly unusual in the video game industry in its current state. I don't want to see this series die, because I think even the weaker instalments are generally decent, but I also don't want it to become an embarrassment. Only the hardcore fans are probably even following what's going on at the moment, and the majority of the audience won't get on board until the official release date, so it may all prove inconsequential. It remains to be seen what official sales numbers say, as I think given the game's visuals, voice work and sound the reviews are probably going to be decent regardless of whether or not the story ends up actually being as bonkers as the leaks are hinting at. And I'm still glad that Hannah Telle got to play Max once more; the whole thing was worth it for that if nothing else. Ultimately, this has got me obsessing over Life is Strange again, so I guess it's done its job. At least it gives me the motivation to write.

Thoughts on "Life is Strange: Double Exposure" Chapter 2 — "Penumbra"

Spoilers for Life is Strange: Double Exposure

I don't think I have as much to say about the second chapter of Life is Strange: Double Exposure largely because I thought that mostly it just reinforced what had already been established by the first chapter, namely that the game's visuals, voice performances and music are substantially undermined by weak writing. Stories abound online about mismanagement at Square Enix and Deck Nine, of a lack of clear vision for the game and an absence of consistent direction, and even if these aren't true it still feels like they could be.

The game's second chapter, "Penumbra", is focused on Max discovering that she can move between two different timelines: one in which her friend Safi was killed two days before, and one in which Safi is still alive. Similarly to the use of the rewind power in the original Life is Strange, this "shifting" power allows Max to go to places she couldn't otherwise access, to purloin items from one timeline that are unavailable in another and use them there, and to discern information undetected. This plays out in some pretty mundane ways, like getting a stepladder from one timeline to access a high place in another, entering a colleague's locked office, and eavesdropping on some conversations: pretty humdrum Life is Strange stuff reminiscent of the Blackwell break-in in the original game. It's at its most effective in a reasonably tense scene in which Max has to use the ability to navigate Moses's astronomy lab undetected by an intimidating cop.

What's somewhat more interesting is that, apparently, unlike the original game in which Max's time travel was seemingly completely indiscernible by everyone around her (despite the fact that logically to their eyes she would appear to be teleporting all over the place), here Max seems to not be the only one aware of the timeline shifts with, it would appear, people's alternative timeline counterparts appearing in each other's realities and, supposedly, making their other selves' lives a mess. It appears, in fact, that there is a third, hidden timeline that we can't see except via the collectible polaroids, in which Max, Safi and Moses are all closer, but, supposedly, Caledon professor Lucas is verbally abusing his son and professor Gwen is dealing drugs. Of course there could be some other, more sinister, explanation for all of this, but that's what seems to be happening at face value. This leads to the chapter's big twist in which Moses and Max discover from the last photograph on the dead Safi's camera that the person who killed her was, in fact, Max herself.

Now this is all somewhat intriguing, raising the possibility, as I say, that there's another timeline, or Max time travels, or that there's some kind of impersonator, or something. But it doesn't change the fact that the game doesn't do enough to make us care about the new characters. Perhaps the most baffling thing about this second chapter is that, despite the fact that Max discovers an alternate reality in which Safi, her supposed new best friend, is still alive, after the first scene of the chapter we spend absolutely no time with her and don't communicate with her beyond a single text message. I was honestly expecting Max to at least try to discuss the situation with her or wrangle with some complex feelings about finding her friend alive after grieving for her, weighing up the seriousness of moving between parallel timelines after all the tragedy caused by changing time in the first game, or something, but absolutely nothing like that happens whatsoever, and while it could all just be because they're holding something back for a later chapter I can't see why that would be the case when they already didn't give us much in the first one. Rather, it seems much more likely that due to the aforementioned behind the scenes managerial toxicity and incompetence at Deck Nine, the story ended up getting pulled in different directions and stitched together with telling rather than showing to get around the fact that no coherent script had been completed by the time the game started development. As such we're left feeling like we should know these characters and know what's going on because Max tells us that she has established relationships with all of them rather than us actually seeing them play out on screen.

In this chapter we spend more time with Moses; it's only at the very end of the chapter that Max reveals that the two of them actually aren't that close and don't spend that much time together without Safi around. It feels like all of this needed to be established within the first couple of scenes of the first chapter, and yet we're only getting glimpses of it by the time we're two fifths through. Again, I could be missing the bigger picture here by virtue of the fact that I've only played the first two chapters. There could be some unbelievably crazy things that happen later in the game. But that doesn't change the fact that having a story get nearly half way done with so little time spent on developing the characters just doesn't work for crafting an engaging piece of fiction, and just makes it seem like the developers, or at the very least their leadership, didn't know what they were doing and half-arsed things to meet a deadline.

Oh and my theory is that Safi's book deal was cancelled because she plagiarised (or appeared to plagiarise) her dead undergrad friend. That is all.

Thoughts on "Life is Strange: Double Exposure" Chapter 1 — "Still Life"

Spoilers for Life is Strange: Double Exposure and the original Life is Strange below

The relentless doom and gloom online about Life is Strange: Double Exposure in the leadup to its release, that it was a shameless cash grab on the part of Square Enix, that Chloe wasn't going to be in it and/or she and Max wouldn't be together anymore, etc., etc. had soured me on things quite a bit in the "third quarter" of 2024, to the extent that I stopped following news and hype about the game completely. When I realised that the "ultimate edition" with its early access to the first two chapters had come into effect, however, like a good little consumer slave I bought it and fired up the first chapter, which I just finished playing moments ago and decided that now was the time to get fresh thoughts out.

The first thing I will say about the first chapter, "Still Life", is that it feels long. I don't know how long it actually took me, but it felt substantial. It has at least five, arguably six, sequences of decent size, and it was good to have a lot of time to spend in Max's snow-covered shoes. The writers at Deck Nine seem to have done a really good job of capturing Max's mannerisms from the first game, especially in her internal monologue, and Hannah Telle is once again great as Max, bring across both her dorky personality and her inner strife. I do feel, more or less, like I'm playing as Max, and given how far removed this sequel is from the original game in terms of both time and production, that's a fair achievement.

Much of "Still Life" is, from a story perspective, setup. We have a sequence introducing Max and her new friend Safi on a photography shoot at an old abandoned bowling alley. Following this we're given our choice about Max's past, whether Chloe lived or died and whether she and Max were friends or a couple. This also introduces a number of the game's supporting characters. Following this we have our complication put forward, as Safi is shot and killed while wandering off to take a mysterious phone call. The game then shows us the aftermath to a certain degree and we learn more about Max's life at Caledon University, before the game's big gimmick is revealed as she discovers that she can move between two parallel timelines, in one of which Safi is still alive.

A big chunk of this first chapter was completely and intentionally spoiled in Deck Nine's gameplay preview around the time of the original announcement, namely the third sequence in which Max, Safi and Safi's friend Moses are stargazing, after which Safi dies. Having seen this already lessened the impact a little, but its placement in the story is more indicative of a problem "Still Life" has in terms of both its character writing and its structure, in that it doesn't give us that much to go on. Safi's death is clearly a terrible thing, but as players we don't get to spend that much time with her in the lead up to it, and it's hard for us to feel the grief that Max evidently does. This isn't helped by the fact that we flash forward to two days after the incident, and while we see the balled up tissues and other evidence of Max's mourning, we don't get to see any of it actually happen. By the time we meet the two other most important people in Safi's life again, Moses and her mother Yasmine, both of them have seemingly also gone through this immediate grieving process, and while everyone's of course still upset, it's not afforded a great deal of weight. We hear that there's a police investigation going on, but at least so far we haven't seen anything, and Max hasn't yet spoken to them. On the morning that Max wakes up two days after the incident, her sad reflections on Safi are mostly outweighed by a mixture of her normal facetious inner monologue and her reminiscences about Chloe and Arcadia Bay from the original Life is Strange.

This brings us to the big blue-haired elephant in the room (or green haired as she grew it out, first shown by Life is Strange 2 and reaffirmed here), namely the immense shadow of Chloe that hangs over this game. Being the "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" diehard that I am, I naturally picked that Max and Chloe were "high school sweethearts" (which isn't strictly true, but it was the only choice I had) and that Max and Chloe had broken up (it was that or Chloe was dead). This was disappointing but not very surprising, as there was no way to fit Chloe into this game such that the only choices would be that they'd gone their separate ways or that Chloe had some really contrived reason for being elsewhere. Some people will inevitably hate the game for this and I do wish they'd found some way of keeping Max and Chloe's relationship intact, but if there is I doubt we'll see it in this game. Many people find Chloe in the original Life is Strange to be annoying, but she's supposed to be, and she's written as being, in her worst moments, petulant and emotionally manipulative because that's exactly what a lot of people are like, especially ones who've endured traumatic experiences and not been equipped with the most effective coping mechanisms. Chloe ultimately overcomes that by the end of the game, which in my view is all the more reason why she should live. But what we see in "Still Life" at least is that Chloe, seemingly, wanted to move past what happened in the original game while Max got stuck, and as a result they broke up. It's realistic, but for those of us with a fondness for the classic Max and Chloe team of the first game, however dysfunctional it might be, it is a little sad not to see her here. Max has a new love interest, a local girl named Amanda, but I haven't seen enough of her yet to know if I care enough to see her and Max get together.

Of course, all of my gripes could be because of the game's gimmick, namely that in one timeline Safi is still alive and thus the impact of her death isn't the game's real focus. Nonetheless it still feels tepid. Ultimately what I feel having played this first chapter is that while it's fun to play as Max again, Hannah Telle is great back in the role, the little snippets we get of Max's life between the first game and now are intriguing, and that it looks nice and has a nice soundtrack, the whole thing feels very underwritten. I don't know enough about Safi, Moses, Yasmine, Amanda or any of the other new characters to care about them that much. I don't feel the intense atmosphere that Blackwell Academy possessed in the original, as pleasant as the snow-covered grounds of Caledon are. Max has some sweet accommodation, and there are some nice environments, but I just don't feel much of this world or its characters. Max is meant to be a teacher but we don't see her teach. Safi's a poet but we don't see her perform, just hear about her having done it. Max's new power isn't unlocked until the very end of the first chapter, so there's no opportunity to explore and play around with it. More than anything else the game reminds me of, unsurprisingly, Deck Nine's last Life is Strange endeavour, True Colors, which perhaps due to behind the scenes turmoil at the developer ended up having a very "tell don't show" approach to its storytelling and characterisation. Of course it's only the first chapter, and the original Life is Strange had many of the same problems, especially in terms of how much less impact all the characters have when they're introduced if you haven't taken the time to read Max's diary at the beginning. In that, for example, if you read the diary at the very start of the game and look at the photo of the two of them as kids, which fortunately I did, the blue haired girl turning out to be Chloe has way more impact than if you've been skipping all the flavour text. Regardless, I enjoyed playing the first chapter of Double Exposure, but I'm not expecting to be blown away by anything in the four chapters I have to go.

Thoughts before "Life is Strange: Double Exposure"

It's been rumoured for years now that a fourth main Life is Strange game was in development, and that it would feature as its playable character Max Caulfield, the protagonist of the original. With the announcement of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, we now know that these rumours were true. As is to be expected, Deck Nine Games, who developed the prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm and the sequel Life is Strange: True Colors, are the team behind Double Exposure.

Life is Strange is one of my favourite games of the last ten years. For those who don't know or who have forgotten, is a choice-based adventure game perhaps more accurately described as interactive fiction. Heavily inspired by Twin Peaks and Donny Darko (among other things), it's about a young woman named Max Caulfield who discovers that she can "rewind" time for herself, allowing her to change her decisions if things don't go the way she thinks is best. She reunites with her former best friend Chloe Price after years away from their hometown of Arcadia Bay, Oregon. Probably the thing people remember the most about the original Life is Strange, beyond the companionship, be it platonic or romantic, of Max and Chloe, is the choice at the end: with a catastrophic tornado approaching Arcadia Bay, implicitly caused by Max's time travel, the player has the choice to either go back in time and let Chloe die, preventing the storm from happening, or let Chloe live and allow the town to be destroyed.

I've always been of the view that it makes more sense and provides a more complete character arc to save Chloe and sacrifice the town, because that means Max accepting the consequences of her actions and Chloe finally recognising her own selfishness and her need to grow up and stop blaming other people for her misfortunes. If you sacrifice Chloe then Max certainly completes a traditional bildungsroman narrative, learning to put the good of society ahead of her own needs, but to me this is not the best or most interesting trajectory for her as a person. To me, it's far more interesting to think about how Max and Chloe would live with the consequences of messing with time: instead of using her powers on one final occasion to try to put things right, but lose Chloe, Max had to voluntarily stop using her powers and accept that she'd messed everything up, and Chloe had to accept that she'd been given a second chance and thus an opportunity to make something of her life, but at a terrible cost.

This all raises a problem when it comes to making a sequel. In the wake of the announcement, plenty of people argued that making another game about Max was a cash grab, an effort for Square Enix to try to generate some easy investment in a new instalment after the controversial Life is Strange 2 and the safe but middling True Colors. Deck Nine have stated that the new game will follow from both of the endings of the original and allow the player to choose Max's situation based on an initial conversation with her new friend Safi. Chloe might be dead, or the town might be destroyed. Whether or not, if Chloe is still alive, Max can still be in some kind of close relationship with her is as yet unknown.

The thing that naturally strikes me as rather silly about all this is that the likelihood of Max's life being so similar ten years later on regardless of which of the two massive events had occurred in her life would surely be incredibly slim. If Chloe died then Max presumably stayed at school, the culprits of the first game's crime were caught, and she was on her way to a new career. If the town was destroyed then, as Life is Strange 2 indicates when that choice is made, she and Chloe would have lives that were completely disrupted by the destruction of Max's school and Chloe's home, and the deaths of many people they knew and loved. It's hard to imagine that the massive disaster of the town's destruction would still lead to Max being in the same place she is in the timeline in which her best friend was murdered but her career was open to her. Of course, it doesn't really matter, I suppose; either way, as the game puts it, she's ended up working at this Vermont university. It just all seems a bit implausible, at least in the scenario in which the town was destroyed.

Nonetheless I do want to play Double Exposure. I quite liked parts of True Colors, especially its DLC Wavelengths, and as flawed as it is I have a lot of fondness for Before the Storm, so I don't mind that Deck Nine is making a sequel to Max's story even if the team at that studio have nothing to do with the people who made the first game. I still want to play Double Exposure and, as much as it might be a cheap gimmick, I'm glad that Max is back; she's always been my favourite character of the series. If anything the person for whom I probably feel most glad is Max's voice actor, Hannah Telle, who seems to have always loved the character and wanted to reprise her. This was the main thing I was concerned about as far as reprising the character was concerned, and if she's back I think it's worth it. As for Chloe, well, I've no doubt that she'll make an appearance, if only via text or something. I doubt she'll be a major part of the story even if she's chosen to be alive and close to Max. I would honestly like to see her but I think realistically her role just can't be that significant; I'm mostly curious to see if it's going to be possible for her and Max to still be together if the player chooses it to be so.

Much else has been said about the questionable "Ultimate Edition" which is both expensive and allows players early access to the first two parts of the game seemingly in an effort to drive up sales by people desperate to avoid spoilers. I'm certainly not averse to calling out the scummy tactics of Square Enix but I'm so out of touch with the mainstream video game scene that I have no idea what's normal and what's not anymore. It seems to me that this is probably the kind of thing that you could wait twelve months for and get the full game and all the supposedly "exclusive" downloadable content in one go. With those things in mind it isn't hard to find myself thinking that even with Max back something's been lost along the way, because of course it has. I myself am in a very different place in my life now than I was in 2020 when I played the original. I don't like to consume something just because it has a title or character corresponding to something I enjoyed before despite no other creative similarities, yet I want to play this. I've always said that Life is Strange has a strange effect on people, appropriately enough, that it makes people aspire to some kind of feeling that they're not getting outside of fiction. I guess in that case it's still working its odd power on me.