Deck Nine and Square Enix’s choice-driven narrative adventure Life is Strange: Double Exposure releases today, 29 October, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Having had early access to the game’s first two (of five) chapters, below are my initial spoiler-free thoughts on the title, which is not only the next entry in the beloved Life is Strange franchise – following 2021’s Life is Strange: True Colors – but also the series’ first true sequel, bringing back the protagonist of the original game, to continue her supernatural-touched story.
In Life is Strange: Double Exposure, twentysomething photographer Max Caulfield has earned an artist in residence position at progressive, prestigious Caledon University in Vermont. After years of being closed off and nomadic as a result of the events in Arcadia Bay, Max has found her people in the form of colleagues Safi Llewellyn-Fayyad and Moses Murphy.
When Safi is found dead one snowy December night, a grief-stricken Max tries to use her time-rewind powers for the first time in a decade. Instead of travelling back, though, Max finds herself able to shift between two parallel timelines in the present: one where Safi is dead, and the other where she is alive but in deadly peril. To save her friend in the “Live World,” and get justice for her in the “Dead World,” Max must unravel a very tangled murder mystery.
Just as Max has matured in Double Exposure, so too has the franchise as a whole. This is most evident in the writing, which paints the supporting cast in various shades of grey. Characters who initially appear as villains, and vice versa, are revealed to be far more complex figures, making your choices – remember, your actions will have lasting consequences here – considerable harder because it feels like you’re affecting real, multi-faceted people.
Gameplay also enjoys additional sophistication. It’s still very on rails and prescribed (you’re only allowed to explore one area hub at a time, for example), but Max is not only able to move between the two universes to do things like access locked rooms, but also use a pulse ability that temporarily superimposes one world over the other. This power reveals environmental changes and allows her to eavesdrop on hushed conversations. Later, she even gains the ability to bring the two timelines momentarily together, swapping items wholesale. Rather unsurprisingly, with this reality-altering, others notice, like Loretta the Emma Roberts-lookalike podcaster, adding a further level of complexity to Max’s quest.
For the record, Life is Strange: Double Exposure distinguishes the two timelines well. It’s never signposted but there’s a poignancy in pulsing and seeing how Safi’s death has sucked the festive spirit out of Caledon. Holiday decorations are gone, students are grieving and the lives of Safi’s loved ones have clearly hit pause. This said, the worlds are a bit harder to keep organised in the player’s mind. It would have been handy if Max’s journal separated out the two realities because some characters have very different story arcs depending on where you are at the moment, and it’s easy to muddle them.
Reportedly, Life is Strange: Double Exposure will take players somewhere around 10 hours to complete, although that sounds like a conservative estimate. Fifteen hours seems more likely as I’ve personally already invested over 8 hours in a non-exhaustive playthrough of parts 1 and 2. On that note, the padding in Double Exposure is definitely noticeable. There’s a lot of running around, and it doesn’t ring true that Max would care about an undergrad Nerf Gun war or interacting with an art installation when her best friend is in mortal danger.
Then again, maybe these are simply signs of Deck Nine knowing the wants of their player base by now – barring one controversial decision regarding the fate of Chloe Price from the first game. Life is Strange: Double Exposure encourages you to leisurely explore its world: one that presents players with serious social topics (both Black Lives Matter and trans rights feature, however disingenuous you find that), LGBT+ romance potential, cool mural and poster art, plant watering, bonus cat content if you purchase the Ultimate Edition, cliff-hanger chapter endings, a banging indie soundtrack, and multiple outfit changes for Max.
I’m not sure I prefer Caledon as a setting to the Gen Y escape-from-it-all paradise of Haven Springs in True Colors, but Double Exposure is an exceptionally good-looking game. You can spend hours alone just admiring the textures on Max’s winter wear, or her character expressiveness due to top-tier performance capture. You’re far more likely to encounter audio glitches than visual here, with the latter running silky smooth.
Two chapters in, Life is Strange: Double Exposure is delivering a compelling and immersive mystery with a lot of polish. It just could do with less bloat and laid-back pacing when the in-game stakes are clearly so high.