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.
