Life is Strange: Double Exposure review
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a sequel to the original Life is Strange. Life is Strange: Double Exposure was developed by Deck Nine and produced by Square Enix.
Double Exposure is the first Life is Strange sequel to follow Max Caufield from the first game. Max is now an adult working at gorgeous snowy Caledon University in Vermont as their “artist-in-residence”, still a photographer, still the same weird Max.
Life is Strange 1 Mini Review
Before I start, this kind of exists next to Life is Strange: Before the Storm being a prequel to the first game, where you play as Chloe Price meeting her best friend Rachel Amber and learning some shit about her mom and family. Before the Storm isn’t especially good in my opinion solely because it feels like it’s meant to justify Chloe being a bad person in the first game, but even then still fails to account for just how awful she is in that one, but anyway.
I did not play the first Life is Strange when it came out and only watched a playthrough from the honorable Joseph Anderson during his 2022 Strangemas streams so I don’t have nostalgia nor a particular attachment to the first game. My opinion of Life is Strange was that it was flawed but I understood what it was going for.
All the dialogue in Life is Strange is kind of… cringe? It’s cringe? Max will look at her perfectly good photo she took and go “It’s so awful, it’s awful, I hate it, I’m ripping it up”. She looks at a tampon dispenser and goes “I’m good to flow, thanks”. She operates a vending machine and says “release the kraken!” Chloe’s first lines on screen are “I hope you checked the perimeter, as my step-ass would say. Now, let’s talk bidness … Wrong. You got hella cash.” She then dies. I’m not going to say it’s good but I’m going to make a case for it, being no, this isn’t how teenagers talk, but it is how it feels to listen to teenagers talk. The teens are going “sigma ohio mewing” or whatever and it does also hurt to listen to, just like playing Life is Strange.
The environment is beautiful Pacific north-west Arcadia Bay, the light is perpetually golden, it’s a coastal town, Max is going to a prestigious art high school, she has a charming photography teacher, she has a comfy dorm, it’s all great. Each episode ends with beautiful sun-dappled vistas and sweeping soulful music.
I don’t like how some of the characters are so loudly designed, David Madsen or Chloe’s stepdad is like… yep, that’s an evil military man, Max’s cool (but evil) photography teacher is sexy. The Mean Girl looks like The Mean Girl and is also I guess a slutwhore because she stays after class to talk to the evil photography teacher.
The game follows Max and her childhood best friend Chloe, Max using her newly discovered time rewind power to help Chloe solve the mystery of where her friend Rachel Amber wound up. Max is able to use her rewind power in the bathroom to save Chloe from being shot and off adventuring they go. While this adventuring happens, Chloe does things like:
- Gets super upset at you and threatens to leave if Max answers a phone call from someone who is actively suicidal, has been a recent victim of revenge porn, disowned by her family, and her schooling being put at risk. Said character can take her own life, too
- Gets mad at you for not shooting to kill her drug dealer
- Steals thousands of dollars from a fund for disabled students at the high school Max attends
You have to enable Chloe’s worst behaviours in order to get the ending where you kiss her at the very end. There are only two real endings, and you get both choices regardless of your actions (this is fine imo, I mind). Your choices are to go back to the moment where Chloe was shot in the bathroom and not intervene, or to just let the causality hurricane sweep through Arcadia Bay, killing everyone but allowing Chloe to live. It’s a trolley problem, yeah, I don’t mind, whatever. The trolley problem is something debated frequently for a reason even if it’s dead simple.
In my mind the overall message of the game is that Chloe is just not worth it for Max. Chloe is a toxic person and she will only get close with Max if you enable her worst behaviours, and then allowing the storm to level Arcadia Bay destroys everything and kills everyone Max has ever known just to keep her. It’s not fair for Chloe to die in that bathroom, it’s not, she doesn’t deserve it, but it isn’t on Max to rescue her from herself over and over again when it hurts herself. Life is Strange is about letting go of a person who you care about deeply but can’t be helped, and to be clear I don’t think that’s the intended read, because…
Life is Strange is a game that feels like it was created specifically for alt teenagers and it loses a lot of luster if you are not a teenager. The game is rich with imagery but much of its meaning is “that imagery looks cool”. Sure you’re putting anarchy symbols everywhere but like are you anarchists? Max’s insecurities probably make a lot more sense if you’re 15, because when you’re an adult you look at that and you’re either annoyed or you want to pat the poor kid on the shoulder and tell them they’re good actually and they don’t need to worry so much. Chloe is also probably cool when you’re 15 and not a really, really irresponsible person who needs to stop blaming her step-dad who is… trying to work with her, to a degree. (I have a problem here being David Madsen is not a perfect step-dad and needs to switch his methods, but he cares and Chloe kind of needs to try and meet him at his level. My defense of David Madsen goes out the window though if you get the optional scene where he hits Chloe, in which case he needs to get out immediately, which makes discussing him annoying, because the dealbreaker is not in every playthrough.)
So that’s Life is Strange 1. Life is Strange: Before the Storm as already mentioned follows Chloe as she meets Rachel Amber, it’s shorter than every other Life is Strange, it’s meant to justify her becoming who she is, and they do this by making Chloe almost as shy and quiet as Max, making her step-dad much worse, and actually everything Chloe does that’s maybe bad was someone else’s idea first, and also despite all this it doesn’t come close to justifying or explaining Chloe in the first game wanting you to shoot to kill her drug dealer and stealing thousands of dollars from a fund for disabled children. There’s also a consistent plot thread of how both Chloe and Rachel (teenagers in early to middle high school) really, really, really hate living in Arcadia Bay and don’t think there’s anything keeping them there, like the fact they’re teenagers. Also the first game is carried like 50% on how beautiful it makes Arcadia Bay, I only feel annoyance when Chloe and Rachel complain about how much they hate it there.
There’s also Life is Strange 2 where you play as teenager Sean and his little brother Daniel fleeing to Mexico after an explosion happens near them with a cop nearby and because they’re brown it’s I guess better that they’re on the run for almost a whole year, losing an eye,and committingactual crimes as opposed to “I know the justice system is really inherently racist but it would be a worst case scenario for these two kids to receive especially long prison sentences because a cop died near them from an explosion they won’t be able to find any bomb debris for, or a weapon”. The game is really really really really boring, you don’t have powers, your little brother does and you need to teach him how to use them and how to be moral with them, also in the middle of the game you just get groomed by this 25-something which is realistic for a homeless teenager but weird because the game doesn’t seem to recognise it’s statutory rape and grooming? It’s also, again, really really boring.
Also Life is Strange: True Colours which exists and I know nothing about but was produced by Deck Nine like Double Exposure is too, and Double Exposure runs on Unreal like True Colours does. Okay. Double Exposure.
Double Exposure
Double Exposure to me, nailed a lot of what made the first game. The game really seems to understand that one of the appeals for the original Life is Strange was that it’s just set in a beautiful area that you’d want to go to. Double Exposure is set in beautiful neo-gothic Caledon University while it’s all covered in snow, and it’s an excellent choice. The soundtrack is still atmospheric and even plays during the walkabout scenes.
Max is now an adult in this game (she was ‘18’ in the original, I refuse, she’s 15. No 18 year old behaves the way she does it makes so much more sense if you say she was 15 instead) and we enter to her breaking into an abandoned building with her friend Safi so she can take photos. She’s gotten really into urban exploration in the last few years apparently and also I guess got used to the idea of digital cameras. Max’s job is as ‘artist-in-residence’ at the university she works at, giving seminars and work for students. They also pay her to live in this enormous house which isn’t remotely realistic but at the same time, they understood the assignment, Life is Strange is in part about wishing you were the protagonist, so.
Immediately, most of the painful dialogue isn’t there anymore. I only cringed at a handful of lines throughout the game. I appreciate that Max is still the same weird hipster with better written dialogue. It makes her actually likeable. I like that she’s obviously grown since the first game too, she doesn’t feel like a kid anymore. She’s confident and self-actualized. It’s great. New Max is great.
Safi is also a good friend, I was genuinely happy to see Max having a supportive friend in her life. You take a look around this bowling alley, take some photos, get out of there.
Afterwards, Max and Safi visit a hipster college bar called the Snapping Turtle and hang out and drink. Here you get to make the decision as to how Life is Strange 1 ended. Were you friends with Chloe or were you in a relationship with her, did she die or was Arcadia Bay levelled? This… kind of seems to be the most important choice in the game which listen I don’t mind.
I selected Chloe to still be alive, and that they were in a relationship because I think that’s the option that leaves Max at a worse place when the story begins.
So yeah, Max and Chloe will have broken up by this point of the story if she’s alive. If they were only friends, they’ll have grown apart. The game will also let you open Max’s phone to read over her text messages, and you’ll be able to read over her last exchange with Chloe. Chloe has moved to St. Louis and there was no invitation for Max to follow, and they’ve stopped talking since. The reason Chloe left was Max’s rewind ability concerned her because she’s not sure Max can’t just rewind to make her say yes to things she doesn’t want to do, and even if Max says she’s stopped using her rewind, it’s not possible for Chloe to prove if she’s being constantly rewound.
It shows interesting growth for Chloe that she’s able to recognise she doesn’t want that and even leave. She kind of makes me think vaguely of Zane from Hypnospace Outlaw in terms of her character, starts out as a shitty awful kid, can die young and tragically, grows up to be fairly average but hanging onto the love of the things they enjoyed as a teenager and is happy.
With all that said, Chloe’s messages on the phone are perpetually pinned high up in Max’s text messages but Chloe will not send another text to Max until the very end of the game… and Max has no choice to reply, she just kind of acknowledges it to herself. Chloe is mentioned throughout the game, and the fact she never turns up at any point is really disappointing. The game goes a fair bit out of its way to give Max trauma specific to losing her hometown, and the fact she did it, so the fact Chloe can’t turn up briefly if she’s alive really sucks. Max considers calling Chloe at one of her lowest points in the game, knowing she’ll pick up for her, and then doesn’t? I honestly expected her to turn up at the eleventh hour, like, car screeches into the parking lot, hair Chloe leaps out with “listen Max I know we aren’t dating anymore but I want to help you with this” and we get to see how much she’s grown as a person. The fact that doesn’t happen is a disappointment.
The inciting incident for the game is Max’s best friend Safi being found dead just minutes after having gone for a walk in the snow. Max discovers her body, has a two-day meltdown (she honestly copes with it better than I think she should), and shortly discovers that her power has reawakened and evolved. This time, instead of rewinding time, she can step between two parallel timelines, the split point being Safi did not die in the other timeline. Max now has to try and prevent her murder and solve it.
Double Exposure is, for better or worse, kind of a retread of a lot of Life is Strange 1’s plot points. The Vortex Club from the first game has an equivalent in this game, Abraxis. There isn’t a mean girl like Victoria exactly but there’s an annoying true crime girlie Loretta who will rat you out to another professor if you decline to comment on Safi’s recent murder. There’s an egotistical teacher who is only kind of a red-herring and is intentionally meant to evoke Jefferson from the first game. Safi shares a fair bit with Chloe, except she isn’t a potential love interest and the murder you’re trying to solve is her own as opposed to another person’s.
I’m also reminded of the alternate timeline in the first Life is Strange where Max hears Chloe say she has to blame everything on her step-dad, or it’s all her fault (i have bad news chloe), and Max jumps back into a Polaroid to make sure Chloe’s birth father doesn’t die in an accident. Max then returns to the present and finds Chloe was in an accident several years ago which didn’t kill her but has left her mobility disabled and in persistent pain requiring constant painkillers. It was a good part of the game, but when you return to the regular timeline it all suddenly feels kind of pointless to talk to all the side characters because damn you’ve seen some shit, why are we bothering with these people again? Having two very similar timelines with equal importance you shift between is an interesting take on this, and I like it. At the end of the game, both timelines are merged with a fair few pains so there wasn’t an important and unimportant one, both were equally real.
You have two potential love interests, Vinh and Amanda. I appreciate weirdly that Max has a male love interest still (who is bisexual himself). I don’t like him and didn’t choose him but I’m glad that Max’s bisexuality is being preserved even when, let’s be real, her main love interest Chloe is a woman. I saw one person on the Life is Strange subreddit (will get back to that later) claim that Max having a male love interest was mandated by Square Enix (source????) and like look, she has a male love interest in the first game. He’s extremely overshadowed because obviously Chloe is the other main character but bisexual erasure is a thing and I would be disappointed if a game quietly decided Max ‘picked a side’ to became a monosexual lesbian by not allowing her to pursue a male character. I am just going to call complaints about that biphobia.
I appreciate the emphasis on making no character fully good or evil, which, at the end of the game the not-Jefferson asshole is still the villain, yeah, he does a bad, but what he did isn’t so awful as to be perpetually unforgivable and that he needs to go to jail forever or something, more that he just kind of needs to take a step back and get outta there. I appreciate that all the characters have socmed pages where they’ll post regularly, including Chloe and Victoria Chase. Potential love interest Amanda has two accounts, a personal account and a comedy account, and she feels like a person that could exist in this place, yeah. I like it.
I will concede the ending doesn’t hit remotely as hard as the first game but they kind of write themselves into a corner of having a storm show up again and not wanting to have the lose your friend/save the town vs save your friend/lose the town ending. It’s kind of a misplaced response to the first game that I don’t think entirely works. Max goes into the storm with Safi and goes through a nightmare sequence where she receives texts from beyond the dead (at least in my playthrough, lotta those people are dead) and has to manually separate out Safi’s essence from the people she encounters, as Safi’s shapeshifting ability has left pieces of her in everyone and this is not good for them, obviously.
The game’s reuse of assets also really starts to wear thin here, you basically glance by every location you’ve been in the game so far but it starts to feel quite repetitive and a few of the scenes feel like they could’ve had a higher budget. There’s a part where Max is triggered to being back in the Darkroom and has to escape the chair, and you can hear Jefferson’s voice but you’re… in the same area. It feels like if they had more money to throw at it it’d look much better.
One of two new locations for this sequence is when you wander through the Oceanview Motel and Casino PT-style and reminisce about being on the road with Chloe. The clock reads ‘exgf’. Earlier on in this sequence you enter the bathroom Chloe is shot in and watch Max and Safi recreate the scene Nathan and Chloe have, bad dialogue included, Max is going to get in a hella lot more trouble than just drugs etc. Interacting with a poster, Max will imagine Chloe getting mad at her for hanging out with someone else like Chloe frequently does.
I sincerely feel like Chloe doesn’t make an appearance in this sequence because they didn’t have the time/budget to make an asset for her. She has a voice credit, though, but when the nightmare sequence consists of Max travelling between the same scenes you’ve already seen with just a black screen cut out cut in between them, it feels really really apparent that these are assets and not places in a persistent world. A higher budget here was necessary.
Anyway, the ending, you separate Safi’s pieces out of everyone and the timelines combine so Safi was never shot and the university is okay. Obviously you can’t have the same gut punch that the first game has with its ending, but I feel like it kind of misses why the endings of the first game are so good. Whatever happens, not everyone is getting out okay, there is some sacrifice.
The university is a bit disheveled from the event but everyone’s alive and Safi is better than ever. Safi has developed some kind of god complex across the course of the game with her shapeshifting power and wants to make a clean break and expects Max to come along to re-find her rewind power, and your answer is to take her deal or to refuse and stay behind with your current life at Caledon.
I don’t feel connected to Safi through the story, especially when she’s dead in half of the timeline and given it’s your starting one, it feels like the real one. Safi in the living world is dealing with her car having been vandalized and losing her book deal as opposed to being dead and it’s hard to attach to her given in Main Timeline, she is dead.
Obviously the correct choice is to not go with her on shapeshifting adventure, but I was in the minority there? Apparently only 25% of people took the choice of not going with her. I was in a greater minority by selecting a minor choice later where Max says she hopes Safi is okay wherever she ends up but she’s not going to chase her anymore, being chosen by 9% of people despite being the objectively correct one.
Despite my complaints with the ending I think the game has a stronger and more focused middle section than the first. I had trouble putting it down and had to make myself go to sleep because I was up too late playing it, and woke up and went back to playing it again first thing. Good game!
Accessibility
Alright so the game had some news cards on PSN which took great pride in highlighting accessibility options. Square Enix also made a press release about it. When you open the game’s setting menu, the accessibility options are there first, before UI, sound options, controls, etc. There are also content warning options which can pause the game before specific things pop up (i.e. discussions of suicide, discussions of sex, violence, drug use).
To be blunt I think the content warning section feels a bit underdeveloped, there are indie developers who have these sorts of things but with greater care. For example, horror games with arachnophobia switches where spiders will be replaced with shattered glass, so it still provides an intended effect of being spooky to people with arachnophobia without causing debilitating anxiety. Life is Strange has a big publisher backing it so I really think they could have gone an extra mile and made slight tweaks to some of the options, like say if you have the drug use trigger on then a character won’t offer you a blunt but will offer you something else instead.
Especially because content warnings are often best used to tell someone “hey, if this could make you upset, maybe sit this one out” as opposed to just telling you that the thing is about to happen. There’s a transphobia mention trigger warning which is approximately one conversation, it would have been so little effort to just record a slightly different conversation.
Max has to go to specific areas to switch timelines, and these areas all have a high-pitched tinnitus sound in a wide radius around them so you can better locate them. You cannot turn this tinnitus sound off without muting sound effects altogether in the sound menu. There are some areas that are so small you will be hearing the tinnitus sound the entire time you are not in conversation. On a bad day for me this could genuinely cause be a migraine and force me to stop playing, and I am astounded a game that wanted to highlight its accessibility options the way it did doesn’t have a “turn off the tinnitus and replace with a quest marker” option. Fortunately I did not play this on bad days, but it was still irritating enough I muted my TV for a long section.
The Life is Strange subreddit really, really hates this game and I think they are wrong
So I had a good time with the game and went oh boy, that’s probably the best Life is Strange besides the first one. I was browsing reddit and found a thread on the PS5 subreddit where people were also talking about how they really enjoyed the game, it surprised them, then someone just made a comment of “yo the life is strange subreddit really hates this game” and I went “huh weird” and they all hate it so much and I just think they’re… wrong?
Obviously they’re entitled to their opinions and I’m going to guess that in a week or longer “I didn’t think Double Exposure was THAT BAD” will start popping up but a major sore point seems to be that Chloe isn’t in the game and that they don’t like that Max and Chloe have broken up. I get it, I’d be annoyed if a sequel to my game came out and I found that my OTP had unceremoniously broken up, but idk maybe they’ll get back together and Chloe will decide to leave her husband she has for some reason to die with Max and it’ll be glorious.
I’m just going to guess there’s a lot of rose tinted glasses towards the first game, because the improvements in dialogue felt palpable to me but the subreddit is insisting the writing is dogshit, it’s terrible, I really don’t know what they’re thinking because the first game spends like 2 hours to just explore a completely alternate timeline smack dab in the middle which you never really return to, the final episode is so long and you have to escape the same photo dungeon twice… Double Exposure feels a lot more focused.
$30 DLC that adds a cat to Max’s house
Double Exposure on PSN had three purchase options, Ultimate, Deluxe, and Standard. The Ultimate edition was listed as the default version on storefronts and cost $149NZD.
The Ultimate Edition allowed people access to chapters 1 and 2 several weeks early which is really cool for a story based game and sets great precedent to sell early access for a good $50. The Deluxe edition was like $130NZD and just added a few extra outfits for Max, the standard game cost $100NZD.
Now that the game’s released, there’s a thirty dollar DLC sitting on my PS5 home page promising “Exclusive Cat Content” which appears to be a subplot in the existing game as opposed to a bonus chapter or the like. $30NZD for a DLC that adds a cat to Max’s house is… possibly one of the worst DLCs I’ve ever seen. Oblivion’s horse armour was sold for $2.50USD, or $4.20NZD. $30 for a cat in an on-rails game is possibly the most egregious DLC I’ve ever seen.
I am a person who’s honestly kind of lenient with micro-DLCs or cosmetic DLCs, they’re there for people who want them, but I’ve never seen a singleplayer game charge 30 dollars for a minor subplot in an on-rails video game.
It’s been pointed out to me that often a lot of these weird little DLCs or digital deluxe editions are an attempt to charge higher for the game with little extra development time? Like, yeah just bundle in the soundtrack and the art book and a few extra costumes for an extra $15 maybe and alright fine that’s not a bad deal. $49 extra dollars to get a cat subplot and early access is really bad!
Summary
Double Exposure is probably the second best Life is Strange, even if it trades the height of the first game’s ending by having a tighter focus and stronger characters through most of the game. Chloe not making an appearance is disappointing even if I like her having left Max. I like the atmosphere, I like Max, I like the little puzzles.
All that said, the developers seemed to want you to pay $149NZD for this and no way, no way. $100 is much more reasonable, even $120.
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