Double Exposure is a profound coda to the original game

Life is Strange: Double Exposure completely surprised me. I was expecting to like the game, given that it features original Life is Strange protagonist Max Caulfield and hails from Deck Nine, the team behind the excellent Beyond the Storm and True Colors spin-offs. But what I didn’t expect was how deeply cathartic it would be.

Like a lot of people, the ending of that first Life is Strange has stuck with me. In it, Max, an angsty teen who’s been grappling with her mysterious time travel powers, is forced to choose between the lives of her best friend (or, depending on player choice, love interest) Chloe and their home of Arcadia Bay. Ultimately, I think the more dramatically interesting and thematically rich outcome is for her to have sacrificed her friend to save the town, and so that’s what I went with, as much as it hurt. And while Beyond the Storm and its DLC epilogue told prequel stories that gave you more time with Chloe, that really only made her demise sting all the more.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure, then, is all about processing those feelings. It’s an astute acknowledgement that they’ll always linger with you, no matter where you go or how much time has passed. That’s where Double Exposure picks up. In the ten years since the events of the first game, Max has travelled across the U.S. to focus on her photography in an effort to escape her pain. As Double Exposure begins, we find Max (Hannah Telle in a wonderful reprisal from the original game) trying to settle as a photographer-in-residence at the prestigious Caledon University in Vermont. Finally, she’s found a home of sorts, with new friends and students to teach, giving her a sense of purpose. But when her best friend, Safi, is found dead in the snow, she has to find out who did it.

What elevates this beyond your run-of-the-mill murder mystery, however, is the fact that Max’s powers — which she has sworn to never use again — have evolved to allow her to travel between timelines. This allows her to visit a world in which Safi is still alive, and, hopefully, save both that version while getting to the bottom of what happened to her own. (The game officially refers to these two timelines as ‘Alive’ and ‘Dead.’) It’s a smart premise for multiple reasons. For one, it lets you learn more about Safi and come to fully appreciate why her vivacious personality (brought to life excellently by actress Olivia AbiAssi) would have been a source of comfort for Max. On top of that, what you learn in one timeline recontextualizes what you understand in the other. For instance, Vinh, the smarmy assistant to university president (and Safi’s mother) Yasmin Fayyad, is initially grating, but your exploits in Alive reveal a more sympathetic backstory involving a former student.

That level of characterization extends to the whole cast. Through sharp writing and performances, Double Exposure presents an eclectic and diverse group of characters who are both likeable and multi-faceted yet also all believably suspicious in their potential culpability. This includes Moses, Max and Safi’s loyal and introspective friend; Amanda, the charming waitress at the local bar who has an interest in Max; Gwen Hunter, a well-regarded trans professor, and Lucas, the head of the literature department whose cockiness belies domestic struggles.

Max and Vinh.

This, in turn, makes your decisions decidedly more challenging. In certain points in each area, Max can zip between timelines, and you’ll have to do so often as you carry out your investigation. But what do you do with the knowledge you glean from each? Vinh told you his darkest secrets in one timeline, so how do you approach that with his unassuming self in the other? To learn more about the university’s troubled past, is it worth putting pressure on Yasmin in the ‘Alive’ timeline, jeopardizing your warm relationship with her there in the hopes that you can salvage things in the ‘Dead’ universe?

Admittedly, though, I was disappointed in how many of these decisions ultimately pay off, falling into the trap of many choose-your-own adventure games by not really making much of a difference in the end. It can also sometimes be tedious having to go back and forth between the dedicated timeline warp points, especially with Max’s relatively slow run speed. But it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters, and in that regard, you’ll still be deeply invested due to the quality of the moment-to-moment characterization.

Nowhere is that truer than Max herself. Immediately, this feels like the perfect evolution of Max’s character. In one corner, you can see a marked growth from the original game, as Max genuinely tries to put herself out there and make more connections with people. But in the other, she’s still the same inherently awkward and dorky girl, which we see in her goofy interactions with friends and internal monologues, like saying, “All your pieces belong to me,” as she cleans up a broken beer bottle.

Max can view and travel through two different timelines.

And beyond that, Double Exposure proves to be a moving exploration of processing grief and trauma. As many of Max’s friends and colleagues point out, she keeps a big part of herself sheltered off — everything that happened in Arcadia Bay — from everyone. Between that and her decade spent more or less just running, she’s never truly come to terms with her past. All of the complicated feelings that spring from that — sadness, regret, fear, self-loathing — are all still prominently there, especially through Chloe, whose absence is absolutely felt in Max’s candid journal entries, lovely photographs and longing lines of dialogue. (You don’t have to have played the original game, but Double Exposure hits that much more if you have.) Only through her investigation into Safi’s demise is she finally pushed to properly confront it all, and this is where that aforementioned catharsis comes from.

I have a lot of regrets from my high school and university years. The people I thought were friends. The girls I likely let get away by being too afraid to say anything. The social activities I anxiously avoided. All of this happened as I would become estranged from my father, which only exacerbated these feelings. Often, I find myself reflecting on what I should have done differently, especially when I consume a piece of media featuring these kinds of adolescent settings. There’s a tendency to be overly self-critical about it all, despite your best efforts to not do that. The fact that I first played Life is Strange not that long after all of this only further endeared me to Max and her struggles.

Max and Amanda.

In that sense, Double Exposure proves to be the perfect coda to that first game. It’s a poignant reminder to Max — and, through her, any player who’s grown up with the series — to forgive yourself for the past. Youth is messy and unpredictable and frightening, but also full of beauty and discovery and joy. Max, having finally stopped running from everything, has a chance to come to that realization and move forward. Sure, it might not be easy, especially when she has to figure out what happened to her friend, but on the whole, it all makes for a profound and emotional arc.

That’s what I’ll remember from Double Exposure. As a choice-based narrative, it doesn’t always prove satisfying, but as a thoughtful continuation of a beloved character’s story, it’s a resounding success.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure will launch on October 29th on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. A Nintendo Switch version is set to release on a later date.

Image credit: Square Enix