Life Is Strange: Double Exposure is my first encounter with the Life Is Strange franchise. I lack an emotional connection to the first game, so I was never swayed by Double Exposure's references, in-jokes, and callbacks to Max Caufield's inaugural adventure. Perhaps those with such an emotional connection, or at least a strong sense of nostalgia, will find Double Exposure a bit easier to swallow, but I walked away from it feeling mostly frustrated, confused, and bored.

Double Exposure takes place a decade after the first Life Is Strange, making it the first direct sequel in the franchise's history. Players will once again be filling the shoes of Max Caufield, a quirky and artistically inclined young woman with reality-shattering time-travel powers. These incredible abilities, despite their obvious potential utility, have been repressed by Max during the ten-year gap between games, until the inciting incident of Double Exposure—an unexplained murder—forces Max back into action. Only this time, her powers have evolved, allowing her to access a parallel timeline where this murder victim is still alive.

Players can hop between the two main timelines, appropriately dubbed "Living World" and "Dead World," essentially at will, and this reality-swapping forms the backbone of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure's gameplay and narrative. Without even playing the game, one could easily imagine the bevy of possibilities that such a premise may present: wacky and mind-bending parallel universe shenanigans, bullish practical jokes, and deep, flexible environmental puzzles are just a few of the tantalizing possibilities that had me rubbing my hands together in eager anticipation at the start of the game. Sadly, Double Exposure squanders its potential, never doing enough to redeem itself as a game worth the cost of admission.

Life Is Strange: Double Exposure's Writing Struggles To Get Off the Ground

Much like something from a studio like Quantic Dream or Supermassive, Life Is Strange: Double Exposure is a story-driven game in every sense of the term. There is some quasi-gameplay, but the game lives and dies on the back of its narrative; no one is coming to the Life Is Strange franchise for deep or nuanced mechanics.

This classification shouldn't be controversial, as even the staunchest of supporters would agree that the series exists more as an interactive movie or TV show than a challenging interactive experience. The thing is, if a game is going to bet all of its chips on its story, then that story needs to be a home run, and Double Exposure's story can't consistently hit the ball.

The game is ostensibly a character drama couched within a multiverse story, though it doesn't stick the landing with either of these genre tropes. Its characters are surprisingly unlikable, mostly as a result of baffling dialogue, which runs the gamut from painfully awkward to embarrassingly histrionic. These characters all seem painstakingly designed to cater to the audience, making sly jokes and references meant to endear themselves to the player, but it comes across as forced and uncomfortable. Many times, character interactions can feel like someone trying far too hard to get you to like them, which of course has the opposite effect. The dialogue can also suffer from the irony poisoning present in some of today's worst blockbusters, with characters making sarcastic jokes at the most inopportune moments.

Like the other Life Is Strange games, Double Exposure is guilty of egregious "hello, fellow kids" dialogue, but it's more absurd than ever here, as most main characters are supposed to be in their late twenties at the youngest; they all act like high-schoolers.

The shortcomings of the game's script aren't limited to dialogue. The story presents itself as something of a supernatural murder mystery, and while this is technically true, its construction suffers from a severe lack of logic that makes it hard to ever feel fully invested. A small example: shortly after the murder that serves as the inciting incident, Max is faced with the police's leading theory that the death was a result of suicide. But the victim died from a gunshot wound to the torso and no weapon was found at the scene, making this plot beat feel perfunctory and contrived rather than compelling or thought-provoking; there's no way that anyone, police or otherwise, would assume this was a suicide.

I couldn't help but feel like Double Exposure was making a mandatory pitstop here, checking off the "suicide allegation" plot point in the murder mystery checklist. For this sort of murder mystery to be compelling, the audience needs to be able to trust that the events of the story will be incorporated in a reasonable, or least consistent, manner. With plot beats like this nonsensical suicide speculation, Double Exposure fails to establish this trust.

Life Is Strange: Double Exposure: Beyond the Narrative

Bad writing is unfortunately commonplace in the world of gaming, but there are plenty of great games that suffer from poor narratives—they shine through their gameplay. But Double Exposure doesn't fall into this category either, sadly. The bulk of its interactivity is formed by environmental puzzles which, as previously mentioned, don't ever reach their full potential.

The apex of my disappointment with Double Exposure's gameplay came near the halfway point of my playthrough, where I was presented with a brief stealth section, allowing me to use two shift points at opposite ends of a room to accomplish a goal without being seen by an aggressor. This was an exciting prospect, and I immediately started experimenting with different ways to use my timeline-traversing powers. These ambitions were swiftly dashed as I realized that this section, like all the other set pieces in the game, was completely on-rails, with only one solution that is virtually impossible to mess up. For a game ostensibly about choice, there is remarkably little freedom in its gameplay.

Ultimately, Double Exposure boils down to interacting with every item or NPC you can find, its "puzzles" hinging on finding the correct white dots denoting an interactive object rather than engaging in critical or creative thinking. The choose-your-own-adventure narrative options serve as the only real moments of player agency, but even these suffer from contrivances and a lack of innovation, the majority of conversations tied to a specific outcome, with a clear "right" and "wrong" answer. Struggling with a moral dilemma or complex social conundrum was a rare occurrence for me, which isn't what I'd like to say about a choice-driven story game.

Admittedly, Double Exposure does have some strengths. Although I've seen some debate about the franchise's change in art style following the second entry, I was quite taken with Double Exposure's visuals, which leverage fairly stellar environment design and lighting effects to make an appealing game world. Character models are somewhat hit-or-miss, but the best ones, like Max and Safi, manage to strike a good balance between realistic and stylized, which I found charming. These visuals combine with a killer soundtrack to form a great sense of atmosphere at many points. This atmosphere was like a dose of sugar that helped the tough writing and lobotomized gameplay go down a bit smoother.

For as rough as Double Exposure's dialogue can be, its voice acting is generally fairly great.

For fans of the first Life Is Strange, Double Exposure might be a nice trip down memory lane, and it's a good way to get inspiration for indie music playlists, but its weak story and dearth of meaningful gameplay makes it a tough sell for most audiences. For $50, when story-and-choice-driven masterpieces retail for less, Life Is Strange: Double Exposure is probably only a good fit for die-hard series fans.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure Tag Page Cover Art

Your Rating

Reviewed on PC

Released
October 29, 2024
Developer(s)
Deck Nine
Pros & Cons
  • Great atmosphere and visuals
  • Strong soundtrack
  • Good voice acting
  • Good LGBT+ representation
  • Cringe-worthy dialogue
  • Nonsensical story
  • Shallow gameplay
  • Minor visual bugs

Life Is Strange: Double Exposure will release on October 29, 2024 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Game Rant was provided a Steam code for this review.