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.

"Coffee Talk 2": First Impressions

It's a clear sign that I'm getting soft in my old age (or, rather, my thirties) that Opinions Can Be Wrong has become a place where I'm not using my increasingly infrequent posts ranting about how my favourite childhood TV shows have been revived badly or how stupid people on the internet are and am instead waxing sentimental about characters in an Indonesian visual novel. Coffee Talk, by Toge Productions, which released in 2020 and which I played in early 2021, is one of my favourite games of the last couple of years. That's probably for two reasons; one was that it was a game about going out and meeting people that I, like lot of people, first played during the isolation periods of the Covid-19 pandemic. The other is probably that a number of the characters were regulars, and one was a writer who came to the titular coffee shop to write fiction, just like I used to when I was a regular at a Sydney bar that closed when the pandemic began. Coffee Talk is a visual novel about making drinks for the customers in an urban fantasy Seattle that come to your late-night café, chatting to them and listening as they chat to each other. You have no control over what your character says: this isn't an adventure game or an RPG. You only have control over what drinks you serve them. Serve the right drinks and you might make their lives a little better and make it easier for them to communicate with each other. Throw in pleasing pixel art, ear-catching lo-fi music and a generally relaxing tone and, while the writing occasionally came across as a little naïve, the atmosphere was practically perfect for what it was trying to be.

 

It felt natural that there should be a sequel to Coffee Talk. It's the kind of premise that could be continued more or less indefinitely, with characters coming and going. I think for a long time there'll be places where people looking for good drinks and good conversation will go to spend a little while. Thus it wasn't too much of a surprise when Toge announced in mid-2021 that the game would have a sequel. Since then I was waiting patiently but with fairly constant anticipation, as the game was delayed from a 2022 release to 2023 and the Indonesian game development scene was shaken by the untimely death of Mohammad Fahmi, the first game's creator. I played the Coffee Talk 2 demo when it came out, searched in vain for whether anyone had uploaded the trailer and demo's lo-fi rendition of a classic Erik Satie piece anywhere, and wishlisted the game when its "Coming Soon" page went up on Steam. When the day finally arrived, after initially thinking "I'm not sure I'm actually excited", I found myself counting down the hours for it to release.

So far I'm four hours into Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly, and I think I'm about halfway through the game. However, I don't want to wait until I've finished the game to get some thoughts down, and I don't want to rush through it. One thing I noticed fairly early on is that while the visuals are still of the same style, and the music is by the same artist, and still excellent, something felt a little different. Coffee Talk 2 doesn't have the same writing team as the first game; this is, apparently, unrelated to the passing of the original creator, who from what I've read had not been closely involved in the sequel's development. While many of the characters' voices are brought over very well, and largely feel like an evolution of who they were before, it does feel different. The barista player character, in particular, feels a lot more bubbly and a lot less uptight than in the first game, and there's a rather more frequent use of exclamation marks in the dialogue which, for a game without voice acting, rather affects the tone.

This, as it turns out, isn't a bad thing. I have to admit that there was a point on one of the game's early days, the third I think, in which the game came close to losing me, when it was focused on the new character Amanda, the extraterrestrial sibling of the fan-favourite alien character Neil from the first game, who now calls himself Silver. This almost seemed too much like fan fiction of the first game to me, too much of a "wouldn't it be funny if this happened next." However, the game quickly won me back when on the next day it drew a little attention to the slight change in the characters' voices, intentionally or otherwise, and generally I think it feels as if the characters' continuation makes sense from where they were at the end of the first game, and that the new writers cared about the first game's characters (if, sometimes, a little too much, throwing in a few too many nods to continuity).

 

The one thing that really stands out is the absence of Freya, the main regular from the first game, who is said at the start of this sequel to be out of town. Freya was by far my favourite character in the first game, probably because she reminded me a bit of myself. I know from the trailers that she shows up at some point (I'm guessing she'll come back from her trip on the final day), and she's still the first character to appear when you start up "Endless Mode" to experiment with making drinks, so I recognise her absence, as conspicuous as it is, to be an intentional device, and one that was probably necessary to give this game a bit of a different feeling. As such, ultimately I think this was an effective choice on the part of the writers. Freya was such a major presence in the first game that she almost had to be moved to the peripheries here in order to create space for some new stories. In this regard, however, it's worth noting that the game will probably make a lot more sense to people who have played the first game, as almost every character from the original shows up in the sequel and there are actually only a few new faces.

So far I think Coffee Talk 2 is a decent sequel. By its nature it can't be as fresh as the first, and at times the writing isn't always entirely a natural continuation of the original game, but it's doing a pretty good job so far. Back in 2021 I tried to write a review of the first game that I never published because I felt like I was unable to say anything that other reviews hadn't already said. Perhaps after this I'll see if it's worth doing any kind of holistic retrospective on the two games and the general idea of a sequel written by new authors. In the meantime, I think I have a good few hours of Coffee Talk 2 to go, and I have to say if anything it's just nice where I don't feel like I have to force myself to pace myself but nor do I feel unmotivated to play a little more each day. So far it's all pouring out quite smoothly.