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.