Spoilers for Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Double Exposure throughout
In retrospect, I understand what Deck Nine was going for with Double Exposure. It's intended to parallel and respond to the first game in a number of ways to give Max character growth and to open the series up to some new directions. How successful it was doing that, however, is a different matter, and largely comes down to what I said throughout my articles on the game's individual chapters. The game's main issue in fulfilling its goal as a story is that it's underwritten, suggestive of the idea that the narrative team at Deck Nine didn't have enough time or resources to put together a fully coherent and impactful story.
In my "pointless thoughts" post I speculated on how Chloe could have been incorporated into the game, but with the benefit of hindsight I can see how Chloe can't be in the game for the story Deck Nine were going for to work. This doesn't mean that the story they chose to go with was the right one or that breaking her and Max up was the best decision; it's just that I can recognise that with the story they wanted to tell, rightly or wrongly, Max has to be alone. She needs to feel isolated and to have to overcome her trauma by herself, without Chloe's support. Chloe would actually, by the same logic, have to do the same thing, but whether we'll ever see any representation of that in a game or other media is as yet unknowable. It's for these same reasons, notionally, that despite my complaints about Max having no one to talk to until Chapter 3, this may have also been intentional, because Max is supposed to feel alone: no one can save her but herself. She has to deal with her own problems.
Double Exposure is basically grounded in the idea that in the first game Max underwent a barrage of traumatic experiences: witnessing the murder of someone who turned out to be her former best friend, soon to once again be her best friend or even girlfriend; discovering she had incomprehensible abilities; accidentally rendering her friend paralysed; investigating a murder and uncovering the victim's body; being kidnapped and abused by a trusted and admired mentor figure; and finally having to choose whether to let her best friend die, or let almost everyone else she knew die instead. After all these awful experiences she ran, either with Chloe or alone, and spent years afflicted by everything she had undergone and endured.
It's unsurprising, then, that at Caledon she would so readily attach herself to Safi, an exciting woman with a big personality, much like Chloe. Then, after she finally has someone she feels close to and is starting to trust and open up to, she loses her too. With her powers restored it seems like she's going down a similar path, stuck in a loop in which she has to either give up the person she cares about the most or everyone else, but instead of running away she confronts her fears and trauma, overcomes them, and saves everybody. That, in principle, is what Double Exposure is trying to have Max do: find herself in a similar situation to what happened before, but this time to grow and deal with it in a healthier way.
The problem with all this, as I said over and over again in my individual posts, is that it's underwritten and depends on you agreeing with Deck Nine's interpretation of the first game, i.e. that Max made the wrong choice and could have saved everybody if she'd been more courageous and hadn't run away. However the first game implied that making that choice was Max facing reality; otherwise she would have just kept jumping back again and again into more and more photos trying to create the perfect life. As such, Double Exposure comes across as if either the writers at Deck Nine didn't understand the story and themes of the first game or deliberately misrepresented them in an effort to make their own story seem like it was offering some original commentary rather than rehashing what had been done before.
And in terms of under writing, the game doesn't focus on Max's trauma enough and doesn't spend nearly enough time on Safi for us to care about her or see her in any depth as an alternative take on what could happen to someone with powers. I've seen a couple of people (or maybe the one person in different guises) argue online that the game's story is good and that either players were too distracted by things like the Max and Chloe situation to appreciate it properly, or less charitably were simply too stupid to understand it. I can empathise with the feeling that something you like isn't getting the appreciation it deserves, but I think the fact that this game just didn't land with a lot of its audience ultimately comes down to how it was written and presented and not how that writing was received. If a writer intends to convey something to their audience and they fail to do so, the problem tends to more be that the writing didn't achieve its purpose than that the audience didn't understand it. Of course people misinterpret things in art all the time, and that is frustrating, but if something is received like Double Exposure was it seems like the writing needed to do more work than it did to tell a story that would actually resonate with people.
I think a few things could have been done to remedy this:
1. Safi
To me, Safi is is the game's biggest weakness. Max is very attached to Safi and cares about her a great deal; the game needs to show us why Safi is so great and so important to Max rather than just expecting us to draw the conclusion that Max is very lonely and attaches herself to someone (like Chloe) with a strong personality who wants to spend time with her. We also need to get to know her better so that we can better understand her own motivations and her feelings towards other characters, especially her mother, Lucas and Gwen. Olivia AbiAssi is excellent in the role, so it feels like such a waste that she didn't get a chance to properly tell Safi's story on screen. We need to see Safi's hatred of Lucas, not just have Moses tell us about it. We need to see her difficult relationship with Yasmin, not just have Yasmin tell us about it. Finally, we need to see how important she is to Max, not just have Max tell her. Safi's alive in one timeline and this is a big part of the game's hook; there should have been a couple of scenes in Chapters 2 and 3 each to let us get to know Safi better. I'm sure some people could come up with justifications for why she isn't in the game more, but I just can't help but feel that the reason is that it didn't cross the writers' minds because they were more focused on the mystery story and didn't have enough time or talent, or because recording more motion capture would have been too expensive.
The problem so many sequels and follow-ups to beloved properties have is that as much as they may look nice and have the trappings of the beloved thing that came before, the characters fail to connect with people, usually because they were underwritten or felt like substitutes for other, already popular characters. I think Safi is a perfect example of this; we're meant to love her, but the game just doesn't do enough to achieve that. People have not connected with this character; I've read and watched a huge number of responses to this game online and it seems like the new character people like the most isn't Safi; it's Moses. I'm not sure if the reason this game fails to make Safi work is because of inadequate direction on the part of Square Enix and Deck Nine, or if Deck Nine's writing team itself simply isn't good enough to have made it work. I understand that writing is hard, and don't claim to know much about how to write interesting characters, but Double Exposure is most significantly undermined by the fact that it's founded on a desire to make players care about Safi that the game itself doesn't achieve.
2. Max
As I discussed in my Chapter 5 post, the game brings the trauma of Chloe's murder and Max's kidnapping by Jefferson almost out of nowhere in the last part of the game. Max mentions these things a couple of times in dialogue (in Chloe's case) and also in her diary, but that's it. Maybe it would have been labouring the point, but there needed to be more showing how traumatised she is, through nightmares or flashbacks or something else, much earlier and throughout the game. Of course she would be traumatised, but we need to actually see these things properly earlier in the game before they're cursorily dealt with in the ending rather than having them abruptly shoved in front of us. We need to see what this trauma was and how it affects her, not just be told "she's been alone for a long time and hasn't gotten close to anyone in years." Telling us this is fine, but it's not enough on its own. This problem is also compounded by Chapter 2 not dwelling in any detail on how Max feels about using her powers or Safi being alive, and instead focusing on the comparatively banal "who vandalised Safi's car" mystery and only really returning to these two big issues at the end of Chapter 4 and in Chapter 5. In fact the game shows Max's use of her powers as relatively consequence-free apart from weirding Amanda out a bit, which undermines its representation of trauma, especially (as others have said online) if we interpret the powers as typically being metaphors for unhealthy coping mechanisms.
3. Chloe
Some people may hate her, but Chloe's a popular character and much of the game's existing audience was attached to her relationship with Max. It's pretty obvious that the glimpse we saw of the game's opening choice in the early marketing was an effort to create anxiety in the minds of potential customers to generate discourse about the game. People were teased in with the hope that she would appear. They were then outraged when the two were revealed to have broken up or to have gone their separate ways, with Chloe confusingly telling Max that she wants to move forward while Max is stuck in the past while Max is the one (in the romantic route) who wanted to progress their relationship by moving in together. The marketing was also extremely cagey in terms of almost never mentioning Chloe by name. As I've said above, I understand that the story they wanted to tell doesn't work if Chloe's in the game, but they needed to handle this differently if they didn't want to just annoy people and have them fixate on this rather than the rest of the story. I'm not sure how this could have been done off the top of my head, but I daresay there were ways to do it that wouldn't have pissed so many people off.
None of this is to say that the original Life is Strange doesn't have its own problems with plot holes or underwriting. But that being true doesn't excuse Double Exposure, and the original, regardless of its issues, was carried by the strength of its atmosphere and character development. People loved that game because of its lighting, music choices, visual direction, voice acting and so on, and the characterisation of Max and Chloe. That kind of thing can compensate for a lot of other issues with story and writing; they won't matter as much if people are attached to the characters and how the game makes them feel. Double Exposure hasn't managed this, and it seems to be a consistent problem with all of the games in the series that Deck Nine has made. Before the Storm, True Colors and Double Exposure all have good bits, but they all suffer from the same problems with pacing and where they focus their attention, namely on mysteries that aren't that interesting rather than fleshing out their characters sufficiently. It's hard to say whether this is a product of the company's management, the capabilities of its writing team, or both, but as much as I have, on some level or other, enjoyed each instalment they've made, they all have these same problems. I have a feeling that even beyond their internal issues, it's likely that Square Enix doesn't give them enough time, money or creative freedom to do everything their stories need. It's noteworthy how many people have been criticising Double Exposure for having too few locations and character interactions, and not enough fleshing out — I'm far from the only person who's said how weird it is that Max never teaches a class in the game, for instance — probably because with their time and money they focused mostly on visuals and particularly motion capture. This is probably also why the Entangle ability is only used twice in the entire game and why there is only one "stealth" section involving swapping timelines, as most likely there wasn't the time or money to figure out how to make them more consistent parts of the story and gameplay.
All in all, Double Exposure is representative of the pervasive issue with modern popular media in that they have become so labour-intensive and expensive to make, and with such restrictive deadlines, that they can never be finessed properly on an artistic level. I feel like this is a story which is trying to do something, but quite feebly and with a revisionist approach to the original game. It feels like it was made by people who were both under a lot of financial, managerial and time pressure, and who also didn't particularly like or didn't really understand the original game, or both, or were instructed to only approach it loosely. It feels like a very superficial and corporate sequel that offers some half-baked commentary on the original's story and characters without the necessary vision, direction or resources to properly realise it. It feels like we could have had a really good sequel about Max (and Chloe) if enough people in decision-making roles at Square Enix and Deck Nine had cared, but not enough did. I find myself in a position where I both think that this game is largely a soulless cash grab and yet also don't think that it's as bad as many of its critics have made it out to be. It's basically the first draft of what could have been a good game that needed much more time and money afforded to it to properly make it a worthy sequel to the original, and a lot more creative vision and direction, and far fewer corners cut in terms of production.
There definitely feels like there was a conflict between a vision of creating a "soft reboot" of the series to make it more about the powers, which also brought in existing players via Max, and a vision of creating a serious sequel to the original game, such that we end up with a muddy hybrid of both. It has great visuals, performance capture and acting, and some good individual moments, but too few environments and characters and an underwritten story. It feels rushed and compromised. This is not, I think, a game made by people who had a clear idea of what they were doing all the way through, and were not given enough time, money, or quality leadership to figure it out. But how likely was that at any point? We can't be surprised that all Square Enix cares about is its bottom line, and that it's prepared to push out a rushed product with the series's name and a popular character in it to make a buck. While the sales success remains to be seen, it would nonetheless seem to have backfired from a marketing and PR perspective. As I've said, and many others online have said as well, the upside to this whole situation has been the fact that Hannah Telle got to play Max again, and that the project was worth it for that reason if nothing else. Nonetheless, the only thing I can think that could possibly salvage Life is Strange at this point would be to bring back Chloe; I just can't see what else would get jaded fans to return to the series at this point.
