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.