Life Is Strange: Double Exposure Review

The first two episodes of Deck Nine’s Life is Strange: Double Exposure flirt with Game of the Year potential by any metric. Keenly aware of the passage of real time since its 2015 series origin point, Double Exposure simmers with quiet maturity from the jump, infusing intentionality and confidence into its slow-burn opening act. It’s immediately beautiful to behold, polished and focused on assuaging warranted fears that returning to the cradle would cheapen the ten years of emotional investment players had established with that first game. In these episodes, we’ve never been more hella back. Then the camera clicks again and the double exposure begins.

With the events of Arcadia Bay firmly in the rearview mirror, regardless of whichever outcome you canonise through one of Double Exposure’s earliest conversations, Max Caufield is adulting. A decade since her supernatural high school drama, Max, now on the cusp of her 30s, has taken up a residency at Caledon University, falling in with a new social circle and breaking into abandoned buildings to take vaguely haunting photos in her downtime (Max would be a liminal space millennial). Amid cautious budding romances with bartenders and too many drinks with her writer mate Safi, Max’s life feels complete in a way only this much distance can afford a person from a traumatic event. So, when Safi is shot and left for dead on a snowy bluff overlooking the university, time unravels for Max Caufield once again.

Facial animations in Double Exposure are expressive and immersive

With Safi’s death and the subsequent mutation of Max’s powers (time has split into two realities she can step between at will) anchoring events, Double Exposure constructs itself a space in which it can meaningfully evolve the first game’s understanding of grief and even begin to interrogate the motivations, and actions, of Max. Her inability to not “main character” herself into everybody’s lives, prying at the edges of deeply personal issues under the guise of sleuthing and ostensibly sincere concern, becomes an active talking point during the game’s first two episodes. It offers an immediate and definitive answer to concerns that this sequel could do anything of worth in returning to Max’s strange life.

Within these opening episodes, the game begins a slow and steady turning of screws, dabbling in tonal comparisons to Twin Peaks and digestible but still mildly prestige-y TV. It’s a uniquely Life is Strange vibe, the collision between small-town broiling horror and borderline wish fulfilment queer safety and celebration; there’s something fundamentally wrong with Calledan University but at least you can get a drink with the cute girl at the bar and nobody will bat an eye. It’s a contrast that could easily land itself in the insincere but instead finds solid ground thanks to character writing that feels so starkly true to queer life as to be somewhat unmooring at times, in the best way possible; Max watches her crush walks away after she delivers a knock-out bit of banter/flirting and softly says aloud to herself “fuck me”.

Perhaps hard to convey on paper the intensely human way this moment lands but in practice, Double Exposure’s performances and frankly astounding facial animations deliver one of the most compelling presentations in a game this year. Hannah Telle returns as Max Caufield, expertly building on the vocal choices made in the first game to find the right balance between maturity and goofy kid that this person would carry with them into adulthood. Olivia AbiAssi also delivers a raw and nuanced take on Safi, barely concealed rage and playful deflections aplenty. There isn’t really a bad performance in the bunch, and Double Exposure’s ability to capture the essence of human emotion with stylised and readable face work is an achievement till credits.

Time gets weird and dangerous in Double Exposure

But Double Exposure effectively splinters at the arse end of episode 3, whatever hopes of a satisfying conclusion or even continuation of the first two episode’s ideas and quality locked in an alternate timeline while the player is left marooned in its opposite. The entire back half of the game feels like a series of grievously compounding miscalculations and priorities, as Max’s motivations all but vanish and events lurch with a lethargic lack of focus. Like Bart Simpson frame by framing Ralph’s breaking heart for Lisa, you can pinpoint the exact moment Double Exposure comes undone, a closing revelation in the third episode that jumps the shark and rewinds time to do it again for effect.

It’s not that Double Exposure doesn’t try to do something with this story choice; there are gestures to the kind of nuanced metaphorical storytelling that made the first game, and indeed first episodes of this, feel important and worthy. The game’s musings on identity and self-worth within the framework of societal and familial expectations are worthy ones, just entirely out of step with what Double Exposure established for itself and the audience initially. And even then, in its truncated episode 4/5 runtimes, it can’t build enough of a framework to meaningfully commit to its sudden pivot of identity, working overtime to leave Max’s character work adrift and its new ideas underbaked and underwhelming.

Double Exposure’s queer writing is true to life and wonderful

There’s an outright unfinished quality to these later episodes as the game’s previous sporadic audio/visual bugs appear more frequently, story beats are reshuffled haphazardly, and even interactivity feels a distant concept. The ability to step between realities was always more tonal than systemically interesting but the game’s initial episodes use it to great effect, ramping up genuine tension and compelling, new wrinkles to Max’s ability that make it feel dangerous and volatile. But as the narrative sidelines Max, so too does the game on a mechanical level as you’re confined to a handful of spaces and effectively told to standby while other characters work through middling levels of interpersonal drama. Life is Strange, for all of Max’s voyeurism, at least interlocked its threads under thematic cohesion and worldbuilding, Double Exposure simply decides something else matters now, thanks for playing.

Final Thoughts

The conclusions of its central narrative wobble between rote and nonsensical, the mystery of Safi about as inert as the game’s initially incredible recontextualising of Max’s powers and their effect on her ability to function as a person. Those amazing facial animations and likeable new cast at the end of all this found standing in a dead-eyed circle as Max delivers an unearned speech and the game fully commits to its new world order. But its Double Exposure’s closing moments (and post-credits scene) that lay to rest any notion that Life is Strange needed to return. An explicit effort to franchise this thing into the ground, it takes the very core of the series and bends it to breaking point- welcome to the LISCU, everything is worse now.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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