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.

Hindsight: A 2022 Cinematic Retrospective

Everything Everywhere All At Once

This is one of those ones where I recognise why people liked it without fully connecting with it myself. I didn't quite engage with the film's message, for whatever reason, as much as I enjoyed the jumping between different realities and the general engagement with the idea of hopelessness. Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan are all great in it, though.

Glass Onion

I recommended Knives Out back in 2019, and it's reasonable to say that Glass Onion also gets a review of "It was good and I enjoyed it." It's not as good as the previous, and at times it feels a bit like Rian Johnson was on autopilot making a Rian Johnson film, but the performances, especially Daniel Craig's, carry it. It's just at the point now where Johnson would be more subversive by not subverting our expectations — but maybe that would in itself be too predictable.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Perhaps the most amusing idea behind this film is that while it's essentially a film about Nicolas Cage's memelike status in modern internet discourse, Cage himself apparently doesn't really get it and had to be persuaded to do the film. His presentation as a partly absent father is a bit lazy, and I think the ending in which he turns the experience into a film of its own is also a bit lazy, but the chemistry between Cage and Pedro Pascal is consistently entertaining to watch and the film is always at its best when the two of them are simply getting up to mischief. It probably needed less actual plot to drive it than it had.

The Menu

Probably my favourite film of 2022, this was an interesting take on "classy horror" or psychological thriller supported by some strong performances. Anya Taylor-Joy is effortlessly sympathetic and Ralph Fiennes is chilling and tragic. Perhaps its message is a little overblown, but it's one I would easily recommend.

The Banshees of Inisherin

A highlight of 2022, this dark comedy drama about two 1920s Irish friends who have a meaningless and increasingly bleak falling out over nothing significant (one arbitrarily decides one day that the other is too boring and stupid to be his friend) is a memorable reflection of the harm of feuding and pride. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson both give simultaneously amusing and tense performances, and the cinematography of the idyllic landscape against the madness of the feud is striking. It's hard to say anything beyond recommending it, even divorced from any subtext about Irish civil conflict and the extent to which it comments on it.

Halloween Ends

While still not great, this is arguably the best of David Gordon Greene's questionable trilogy of Halloween legacy sequels, perhaps suffering most from the fact that it barely needs to be a Halloween film. Laurie Strode and Michael Myers himself don't really need to be in it; on the other hand, I think it would have been more effective if Corey had been set up earlier in the trilogy. This would have been an ideal role for, say, the character of Allyson's boyfriend or one of her other friends. It does something mildly interesting with Halloween Kills' heavy-handed message about how communities create their own monsters by having Corey channel Michael's murderousness, but it's undermined somewhat by still insisting on a final confrontation between Laurie and Michael at the end. By the low standards of the Halloween sequels, and with some amusing nods to Halloween III being "the one without Michael Myers", it's possibly one of the better instalments.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

As a big fan of Weird Al and a reasonable enthusiast for Daniel Radcliffe I was looking forward to this, and it's funny and at times clever if not as uproarious as it might be. By parodying the spate of rock biopics of the preceding years and twisting the facts so that, for example, Al dates Madonna and Beat it is a parody of Eat It, the film is essentially the film equivalent of a Weird Al song. It obviously suffers from being produced during the pandemic, with a small cast and some awkward editing, but I still found it reasonably entertaining. It's not as good as UHF, but making a Zucker Brothers-esque comedy like that these days is probably practically impossible.

Im Westen nicht Neues

All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my favourite novels, and I also hold the 1930 Hollywood-produced Best Picture winning adaptation in high regard. This new adaptation is perhaps too heightened for my taste, with a flair for the over-dramatic. The majority of the action plays out in the last four days of the war for enhanced tension, rather than over four years, and culminates in a pointless pre-Armistice attack not found in the novel. Nonetheless it is vivid and harrowing, and the friendship between Paul and Kat still grounds a great deal of it. While not, in my opinion, the best adaptation of the novel, being perhaps too concerned with the politics of the Armistice (something entirely absent from the novel), and arguably missing the novel's point, it's still probably one of the best First World War films of recent years, being certainly superior to Sam Mendes' 1917.

"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"

It's going to be my lifelong curse that whenever I talk to people about Indiana Jones I have to say "but I actually like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's not a good movie, but..." And it's hard, perhaps even impossible, not to talk about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny without talking about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, especially because, to my surprise, it's perhaps more of a sequel to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull than it is to any of the other films in the series. But Dial of Destiny, as the first (perhaps only) Indiana Jones film to be made after Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm, feels very much like "the fourth sequel" much as Crystal Skull was "the fourth prequel", i.e. Lucasfilm's return to their secondary property after making a bunch of controversial Star Wars films, with all the associated expectations. And the utter loathing people apparently feel towards the, in my opinion, at times meek but never especially objectionable Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was similarly reflected in the leadup towards Dial of Destiny and all the baggage that Lucasfilm has newly acquired with its 2015-2019 Star Wars project. There's even a similar time gap between the release of Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) as there is between those of Rise of Skywalker (2019) and Dial of Destiny (2023), pandemic-related delays notwithstanding. I'm not a fan of the Star Wars prequels, nor of the sequels, despite, controversially, having a soft spot for about half of The Last Jedi. Yet in 2008 I was excited for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and I enjoyed it, and I still do. On the other hand, I was pretty nonplussed about Dial of Destiny. Despite the fact that I think he lost it a long time ago, not having Spielberg directing was one cause for concern, and I have to admit that the casting of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who I see as a bit flavour-of-the-month the same way Shia LeBoeuf was in 2008, made me apprehensive. It was hard to get excited when I felt like I was just getting Indiana Jones fan fiction.

This is normally the point at which, unexpectedly, I might announce that, having gone to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny with m'colleague, I loved it. But I didn't. I thought Dial of Destiny was too long and often boring, with sloppy editing, low-energy direction in a number of moments, and a reluctance to get into its character work until the second half suggestive of Disney lacking confidence in the project and having either done reshoots or filmed additional material to increase the running time.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny isn't bad, per se. But it's not good. There are the ideas and the potential for a good film here, but it's all too slow and lacking in energy to be anything more than mediocre. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, whatever its faults, in my opinion doesn't drag. You might find it stupid and annoying, but I never find myself thinking "how long is this going to take?" There are multiple parts in Dial of Destiny when I found myself thinking "I'm bored", "this is taking too long" and "when's Marion going to show up?" (the first two  being much like I felt the first time I saw The Last Jedi, as it happens). If thirty minutes were edited out of this film and a number of shots tightened up to improve their pacing it would make a big difference, but I suspect that the problem is at a production level. At its heart the film should be driven by the relationship between Indy and Helena, but probably because of studio executive insistence on this, that and the other being inserted into the story, it struggles to do this clearly until probably an hour into the film. That doesn't mean they don't have early scenes together, because they do, but in those scenes she's presenting a false face to Indy to try to trick him into giving her what she wants, and thus the real relationship isn't established until significantly later.

This is the first point at which I've mentioned Indy himself, which is possibly because on this point I really don't have anything to complain about. Harrison Ford is (unsurprisingly) the best part of the film. He's obviously always enjoyed playing Indiana Jones - I suspect he brings a good deal of himself to the part, and feels comfortable in the role - and his age is no impediment to the strength of his performance; the screen lights up whenever he appears, which fortunately is most of the time despite what people feared about Helena stealing the show (which she doesn't). Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gave Indy a happy ending, perhaps a schmaltzy one, depending on your perspective. Indy found a son he never knew he had, reunited with Marion, and got married. Now it's 12 years later, Mutt's dead, he and Marion have separated again, and despite clearly not having lost his passion for archaeology Indy's been clearly nudged into retirement. Gone is the cozy post-middle-aged Indy of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, who lived in the same comfy house upstate as he did in Last Crusade and still worked on an old fashioned sandstone campus. Now he lives in a small apartment, puts whisky in his morning coffee, works at a dreary postmodern 60s Manhattan college and grouses at kids listening to the Beatles early in the morning. How did Indy end up here? It's explicable, of course, but feels very much like Dial of Destiny saying "this is what old man Indy should really have been like": not the leafy tenured existence of Crystal Skull but a man out of time clinging to the past. Crystal Skull certainly made some attempts to address this, particlarly with Indy juxtaposed to a mushroom cloud and being accused by paranoid FBI agents of being a Soviet turncoat, but this is more personal.

The problem with all this is that it all just takes far too long for this stuff to be addressed properly. It isn't until the sequence on the boat before the dive, probably well over an hour into the film, that Indy talks to Helena about Mutt and Marion, Marion herself doesn't show up until the very end, and a subplot about Indy's friendship with Helena's father gets somewhat dropped after a flashback about halfway through the film. Sallah comes back but this mostly feels like a nostalgic nod because he didn't get to appear in Crystal Skull. It all feels messy and competitive with different screenwriters bringing different ideas, or perhaps Disney executives mandating certain things be added. It feels doubly strange because the Mutt and Marion stuff wouldn't exist without Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and yet this almost feels, as I said above, like it's trying to respond to or even provide an alternative to Crystal Skull, to say "this is old man Indy done right". This film wouldn't exist without Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and yet it almost feels, perhaps fittingly given the plot, like it's intended to replace it.

The plot, like everything else, is a decent idea not fully realised by the screenplay, editing, action choreography, or some combination of these things. German physicist Jurgen Voller, played well but with wearying typecasting by the ever-reliable Mads Mikkelsen, wants to find the lost "Archimedes Dial" to identify a time fissure that will allow him to travel from 1969 to 1939 in order to kill Hitler such that a more competent leader might bring Germany to victory in the Second World War. It was very predictable that in an effort to appeal to the nostalgic that Indiana Jones would fight Nazis again, and by having a Werner von Braun type in that role the Moon Landing backdrop makes sense. My one issue with this is that all of the Moon Landing, Operation Paperclip and general Space Race, Cold War and Vietnam War stuff feels so perfunctory that it's almost not worth it being included, almost like the filmmakers wanted to do something with it but were scared of evoking the very overt 1950s dressing of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; as such, once the film extricates itself from Manhattan, it doesn't particularly feel like it's set in 1969 at all, instead being just another Indiana Jones adventure in which he fights Nazis for a good chunk of it, with Indy just happening to be old. That is, until it isn't, and it again becomes about Indy feeling old and like he screwed up his life, and Helena having to prove to him that he shouldn't just let himself die in 212 BC.

I will admit that the bizarre ending, in which the overconfident Voller brings himself, Indy, Helena and his men not to the eve of the Second World War but the middle of the Second Punic War, and in which Indy meets Archimedes himself, is refreshing for the sheer novelty value of getting to see a period of history very rarely realised in modern blockbuster cinema, even if there's a lot of uninteresting CGI. Voller's plan going disastrously awry and his realisation that he's made a terrible mistake are true to the series and satisfying to watch, and Mikkelsen plays the whole thing very well. I also like that (contrary to how a lot of people seem to be interpreting it online) the Archimedes Dial isn't itself a time machine and doesn't open up time portals or something, it just detects them, with an appealing element of predestination. I similarly appreciated that it wasn't another Biblical artefact, with this being playfully nodded to in the opening when both Indy and the Nazis are initially more concerned with the Spear of Longinus, which turns out to be fake.

But it all just takes so long, becomes so repetitive, especially with Indy and Helena twice having to steal a comically small vehicle to pursue or outrun Voller, and at times feels like it is taking place in indistinct CGI world, that I found myself never being effortlessly entertained. The opening de-aged sequence, which is about twenty minutes too long, seems to very much take place in the same video-game state as the much-disliked Jungle Cutter sequence from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Waller-Bridge is perfectly fine as Helena but it just takes too long for us to really get to know her and for her relationship with Indy to properly develop, and that's what it all comes back to. For a film that's all about moving forward, not getting lost in the past, not giving up and letting obsession or regret consume your life, it takes a hell of a long time to get there. And that's frustrating because, a bit like (some of) the Star Wars sequels, it feels like it could have so easily been better but that Disney, somewhat paradoxically, didn't have the confidence to make a good film and opted to make a mediocre one instead.

 

I'm prepared to change my mind upon rewatch, and rewatch I will, because this is, after all, an Indiana Jones film starring Harrison Ford, even if it is glorified fan fiction. But I'm almost inclined to say that "mediocre" is in some respects too high in terms of praise and that the film's editing and pacing issues are so egregious as to quite possibly ruin what could have otherwise been a perfectly good sequel. I was fine with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being the last one. If you weren't, maybe this will be a more satisfying conclusion. If only it could have concluded about half an hour earlier.

"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.

Hindsight: A 2021 Cinematic Retrospective

Due to a combination of lockdowns and apathy I barely watched any new films in 2021, so perhaps for the first time ever for that year the list of films I didn't see vastly outnumbers the list of films I did.

Didn't see:

Willy's Wonderland

I think I wanted to see this initially because the premise (despite being based on the ongoing popularity of Five Nights at Freddy's with kids) isn't terrible and Nic Cage has done some good weird films in the last few years like Mandy and Color Out of Space but apparently this isn't much cop.

I Care A Lot (technically 2020)

This is technically a 2020 film but I don't think it got a release out here until 2021. Rosamund Pike is usually good value so I wouldn't mind giving it a go.

Zack Snyder's Justice League

I don't care if it's better than the theatrical release of Justice League; I still don't care.

A Quiet Place Part II

I also didn't love the original A Quiet Place enough to bother seeing this one.

Black Widow

If this had been released before Avengers Endgame I might have cared but I'm only going to watch this if I feel some desperate need to catch up on Marvel films before, I don't know, the Fantastic Four film they say they're gonna make.

The Suicide Squad

I actually do want to see this since I've heard it's quite decent.

Don't Breathe 2

Same with A Quiet Place Part II, I didn't need to see a sequel to this film about being silent either.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

I should really watch this because a friend of mine did stuntwork in it. I'll get around to it eventually.

No Time to Die

More like "no time to waste on another James Bond film I already know I won't enjoy."

Eternals

What's this Marvel instalment even about? I once considered myself reasonably knowledgeable about superhero comic books but these characters are too obscure even for me.

Ghostbusters Afterlife

I don't want to watch a serious tribute to an Eighties comedy film. Why has Ghostbusters become so sacrosanct?

Spider-Man: No Way Home

I've heard this is good but seriously, didn't the previous Spider-Man film only come out about a year before? Too much Spider-Man for me. I don't care enough about the Raimi films to be excited about Maguire and his enemies coming back either.

The Matrix Resurrections

There's only one good Matrix film and it came out in 1999. Not remotely interested.

Films I actually saw:

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

I knew this was going to be bad. James Wan didn't direct it and, like so many of the awful "Conjuring Universe" spinoff films, it was directed by a nobody whose only other noteworthy work was on another shitty Conjuring spinoff. I think the bits where Ed and Lorraine are in the woods investigating the case are the only decent bit in this piece of garbage that completely fails to have any of the tension or dread of the first two films. It's an absolute farce.

The French Dispatch

Wes Anderson does his Wes Anderson routine. Visually engaging, stylish and at times amusing, but sexist and oddly repugnant in its advocacy of the prescriptive and the doctrinaire, the celebratory nature of the concept at times strikes rather as fearful and conformist.

Munich — The Path to War

Based on one of Robert Harris's (in my head) endless stream of World War Two thrillers, this is a relatively well-made period piece with a decent bit of tension for the fictional protagonists, but I thought the pacing was weak; it goes for two hours but felt to me like it went for about four. The highlight is Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain and the film probably would have been a good deal more interesting if it was just about the 1938 Munich conference, Chamberlain's rationale, Hitler's psychology and the betrayal of Czechoslovakia without the go-nowhere spy thriller stuff added on. I didn't actually watch this until late 2022.

Halloween Kills

After the mildly decent 2018 continuity reset, the Halloween franchise immediately reverts back to being about Michael Myers killing stupid people in ridiculous ways. Full review here.

Titane

By default my "best film of 2021", this Palme d'Or winner about a disturbed young woman who has sex with cars, murders people and impersonates a desperate man's missing-presumed-dead son was a visually engaging if at times slightly obvious portrayal of frustration, alienation and grief. Not for everyone, but I liked it.

"The Excavation of Hob's Barrow"

Full spoilers for The Excavation of Hob's Barrow within.

 

For some reason it's taken me a while to warm up to the idea of playing adventure games made in Adventure Game Studio (AGS). I don't really have a good justification for that beyond perhaps having played Yahtzee Croshaw's Chzo Mythos games too many times as a kid and not being terribly interested in the urban fantasy or cyberpunk genres, which seem to be a recurrent setting for a lot of commercially released AGS games such as those developed and/or published by Wadjet Eye Games. Regardless, the itch to play some more point and click adventures struck me this year and on recommendation I initially played Clifftop Games' Kathy Rain, followed by Wadjet Eye's Shardlight and, most recently, Cloak and Dagger Games' The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (published by Wadjet Eye), and while none of these games are quite the sprawling puzzle-driven experience of, say, a classic LucasArts title, they've all shared strong atmosphere and decent if not always massively original approaches to story and characters.

I was actually reminded of the approach of The Excavation of Hob's Barrow when some promotional material for it was shared by Airdorf Games, developer of FAITH, on Twitter, and given that Return to Monkey Island had put me in the point-and-click mood it was more or less an instant purchase. I like stories set in Victorian England and I also enjoy weird fiction and folk horror, so everything I saw made me think that Hob's Barrow would probably appeal to my sensibilities.

And indeed I spent a good part of a recent long weekend playing Hob's Barrow and I found myself coming back to it each day wanting more, which I think is about the strongest recommendation I can give. It's far from perfect, but given that it was apparently developed in the developer's spare time I think it's an admirable achievement. It took me about eight hours to play through, and that was with a fair bit of wandering around following the game's various objectives, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took less time for an experienced player. Regardless, I think it was worth the twenty-ish bucks Australian that I paid for it.

In Hob's Barrow you play as Thomasina Bateman, a "barrow digger" or, to put it in more contemporary parlance, a Victorian-era paleontologist-archaeologist who has come to the small town of Bewlay in northern England at the invitation of one of the locals to excavate an ancient grave site. As usual with this kind of folk mystery experience she faces a good deal of obfuscation, superstition and reservation from the locals while getting to know the town and countryside. Over the course of the game her own backstory is revealed, and the mystery of the titular barrow, and her own involvement with it, is uncovered.

The strongest element of Hob's Barrow is the atmosphere. The game is set in a small rural town in the north of England, amid sweeping moorland and beneath overcast skies. Rain and foggy evenings add to the feeling of both quietude and sublimity of such a landscape. The music contributes to this significantly as well, with a strong ambience pervading many of the scenes. The game is also rendered in the kind of engaging pixel art that I personally really love and which has become a convention of these kinds of games. It's only let down on a few occasions when elements are scaled at different resolutions, which creates a visual clash; old LucasArts games would compress sprites when they were intended to appear at a more distant perspective, which looked crunchy, but at least they still fit within the image because a pixel was still a pixel. When you have low-resolution pixel art blown up to a higher scale to fit modern screens, it doesn't work so well when some sprites in the "distance" seem to be at a higher level of detail than the rest of their environment. Nonetheless, the game has a decent amount of sprite animation, and isn't too reliant on the fade-in fade-out technique that a lot of lower-budget adventure games use to avoid having to animate complex actions.

My biggest critique of Hob's Barrow would largely come down to the story and characters. There's a curious recurrence in all the AGS games I've mentioned in this review of having the protagonist be a young woman with an absent father or father-figure, and for her relationship with her father to in some respect drive her motivation or characterisation, and I find it also noteworthy that all three of these games were written, as far as I'm aware, by men. Thomasina's father William was a barrow-digger before her, but has been a silent invalid for decades as a result of an unexplained accident during her childhood. Thus her motivation begins with trying to carry on her father's legacy; it ultimately ends with her trying to cure her father of his ailment. Perhaps it's just me, but I find this parent-driven characterisation, while realistic, a little tired as a character device.

Similarly, the plot is perhaps too conventional for its own good. Thomasina is invited to excavate the barrow by one of the locals, and it's ultimately revealed that not only had her father excavated the same site previously, but it was the cause of his accident. While the discovery is naturally disturbing in-game for the character, it's a little neater than I like in this kind of strange story. Further, it's ultimately revealed that certain locals have brought Thomasina there for the very purpose of uncovering a powerful force that was previously sealed away by her father, in the hope of releasing it so that it will grant them power and plenty. If you've ever seen the original The Wicker Man from 1973, elements of this conspiracy plot aren't too surprising. Further still, while the game spends a good deal of time introducing the town of Bewlay and its inhabitants, the dénouement with the actual barrow excavation and the uncovering of its secrets is rather hastily done and doesn't give itself too much time to build up a sense of dread and inevitability. When friendly local Arthur Tillett reveals to Thomasina that he overheard her two apparent allies discussing the plot to lure her to the town, it gives away a bit too much too unambiguously (and too soon). Similarly, the game builds up and up to the actual excavation, only for the entire process to occur in a narrated cutaway, when having the excavation take several days and have its own complications would probably have heightened the tension. Further, once she enters the barrow itself and comes across strange ruins and eerie purple lights, unfortunately I found it all rather too much in keeping with a typical pastiche of a story by H.P. Lovecraft or one of his imitators. The game's commentary mentions the ghost stories of M.R. James as an inspiration, but I don't quite see it. A clearer inspiration is the point and click horror adventure game series The Last Door.

I also wanted to add that the use of the period setting feels a little inconsistent. At times the characters speak and interact much as I imagine Victorian-era people would, especially with an outsider. However, I can't help but suspect that in reality an unaccompanied young woman arriving in town, asking lots of questions, frequenting the local pub and getting about in breeches would probably have caused a massive stir at the time. I appreciate that this is partly the point of Thomasina's character but sometimes it makes it difficult to take the setting entirely seriously. One thing I noted in particular is that some of the characters are implausibly familiar with Thomasina and vice-versa, using first names and nicknames; it's also not very realistic, I don't think, that Thomasina, as an upper-class or at least upper-middle-class woman of the time, would need (or even think to use) a maid to introduce her to the local aristocracy. These are just nitpicks of course but they stand out when at times the characters do seem to speak mostly in an appropriate idiom and behave as people of the era would.

As far as gameplay is concerned, Hob's Barrow isn't a particularly difficult puzzle game. The puzzles generally require more exploration than lateral thinking, taking the opportunity to re-explore the environment after certain conditions have changed. The town of Bewlay feels large enough and each day there is a list of goals, which helps with keeping track. A seasoned adventure game player won't be slowed down by any of this but it does given the opportunity to let the environments feel well-used, which, given that the game's atmosphere is its strongest feature, makes them complimentary of the broader picture. I should also add that apart from some children's voices which are clearly just adult women adopting squeaky tones the voice acting is strong overall, as is the use of appropriate regional accents and slang.

Overall, despite my view that it's lacking a certain degree of originality in terms of its story and characters, and has some issues with pacing, I enjoyed playing The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. Folk horror is an interesting concept, preferably when it isn't too needlessly Lovecraftian, and this game certainly kept me invested. Further, as I've said above, I have to give the developers credit for making this game as a side project. The main takeaway, I think, with all of these points is that atmosphere can be a huge factor in the success of an adventure game, and creating a world that players want to stick around in goes a long way, even if other elements are very familiar.