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.