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.

Thoughts before "Life is Strange: Double Exposure"

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.