Review for Life Is Strange: Double Exposure

I have been a massive fan of the Life Is Strange series since its inception, so I had high expectations, but Double Exposure is one of the best Life Is Strange games ever.

All of the Life Is Strange adventures involve people who have powers. In the first game, Max Caulfield can rewind time, and in the second, one of the characters has telekinesis. In True Colors (which is also excellent), the primary character is an empath, able to feel and influence the emotions of others around her.

For those of you who are not familiar with the series, the Life Is Strange games are mostly about dialog choices – although there are navigation puzzles and, occasionally, challenges of a different kind. There aren’t the traditional graphic adventure puzzles (no inventory or inventory combinations). But when and how to use powers matters, and your dialog choices do affect your relationships with other characters. There is always a strong emotional connection among the various personalities, some shocking events, and a level of tragedy – but the main character eventually prevails, despite tragic losses.

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Max Caulfield was the protagonist of the original Life Is Strange; this is the first sequel to feature her again. At the end of the first game, she was faced with a difficult choice: Either let her best friend Chloe die, or let her home town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon be destroyed by a storm. (I let Chloe die, which post-game metrics said was the minority choice; I wasn’t happy about it, but the greatest good for the greatest number, right? One life against who knows how many. Most other players chose their friend over their neighbors.) In Double Exposure, we learn that Max gave up her time-winding powers, because their use caused that storm to begin with, and playing around with the timeline is dangerous.

Double Exposure takes place ten years later; Max is now an internationally recognized art photographer, currently working as an artist-in-residence (and teaching a photography course) at Caledon University, a liberal arts institution in Vermont. Her best friend there is Safi, daughter of the college’s president. Early in the game, Safi is killed somewhat mysteriously, and Max acquires a new power: The ability to shift between a timeline where Safi is still alive, and the one where she is dead. Areas where there are dancing dots in midair allow her to transition between the two timelines; it’s also possible to stay in one timeline and see/hear what happens in the other. Sometimes paths blocked off in one timeline are traversable in the other, so switching between them is often a way to solve navigation puzzles. (1000xResist, has a similar mechanic, in that case switching between “present” and “past”; it’s a very different game, but also worthy of your attention.)

Max sets out to solve the mystery of Safi’s murder by moving between the two timelines, and discovers quite a lot of skulduggery among the college’s academics. She also realizes in mid-game that she is not the only person with powers, which is intriguing. Toward the end-game there is another town-risking storm, but Max has had it up to here with making horrible choices, and manages to find a way to defuse the situation and save her friend (not getting too detailed here, for obvious spoiler-ish reasons).

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One of the criticisms others have leveled against the game is the lack of Chloe’s presence, and I get why that’s a disappointment for some; Chloe was a great character. But it’s also a minimum requirement for continuity. At some point, a character asks you what happened to her, and you can choose between “she died” and “well, we were together for a while but drifted apart,” and both are believable – and you couldn’t really have Chloe here if in your first game, she did die. She does have to be out of the picture for the narrative to cohere. Also, the original Life Is Strange never suggests that Chloe was actually a romantic interest for Max; it skirts the issue, and you can certainly interpret the game to say they’re just friends.

There are two romanceable characters in Double Exposure – Amanda, who works at a local bar, and Vinh, who runs the Abraxas Club, something like a Yale secret society – but unlike True Colors, the prior game in the series, romance doesn’t get too serious, and you don’t end the game in a relationship. Instead, you can flirt a bit, and even kiss, but Double Exposure clearly has sequels in mind, so there’s no romantic commitment (and it’s kind of implied that Safi might be a romantic interest going forward).

The graphics and animation are excellent; not a surprise given that budgets for the Life Is Strange games have increased over time, and funding came from Square Enix. You might call the original game indie, but the success of the series has meant you no longer can, really; Double Exposure is AAA quality, but one of the few AAA games that focuses on narrative and characters rather than, you know, vast open worlds and lots of explosions. Character expressions are flexible, and animation attention was obviously paid to faces; they’re a lot more expressive than in the franchise's earlier entries. I did notice a weird graphical glitch whereby an inexplicable, vague square appears on Max’s hair when facing away from you sometimes, but nothing else distracting – and I liked the snowy landscape of rural Vermont.

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The soundscape is at the level of what you’d expect from AAA games; there’s quite a lot of music, mostly played when Max sits down to contemplate rather than during gameplay. The music is of a particular kind: acoustic instruments, mostly guitar, with single vocalists, evocative and often plaintive lyrics in an indie singer-songwriter kind of way. There are a surprising number of different artists represented, including Revenge Horse and Lov3less, Lights On Moscow, and NewDad. This musical style is not my jam, and I can’t claim any knowledge of them, but the basic vibe absolutely meshes with the game’s sensibility, and if this style is something you like, you may discover new artists to follow. Double Exposure is fully voiced – and surprisingly not only in English, but in French, German, and Japanese as well (big budgets are worth something, I guess).

The last two (of five) chapters in Double Exposure are trippy, amazing, and core to the overarching story. They reprise some events from the initial game and are completely adorable. If you liked earlier entries in this series, then definitely play this one. If you are a newcomer to Life Is Strange, consider trying the original title first – but I think any of these games are worth playing.