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.