Rating: 5 out of 5.
Now THIS is a Life is Strange game.
When the original Life is Strange released in 2015, it revolutionized the adventure game genre. The game offered players a compelling mystery to solve with iconic, well-rounded characters, and navigating the game world with Max Caufield’s time travel powers was incredible from both a mechanical and thematic sense. Using her abilities felt like they mattered, right up to the end.
The following three games in the series never quite lived up to their predecessor. Oh, they were fine enough stories with some interesting high points, but they lacked two things that made the first stand out. One, they all seemed positively allergic to actually letting their protagonists use superhuman abilities in meaningful ways. Two, they just weren’t, well, strange. Double Exposure restores both of those things in spades.
Max is now a grown woman in her late 20s, and she hasn’t rewound time since her last adventure in Arcadia Bay. Instead, she focuses on photography and being an artist-in-residence at the prestigious Caledon University in Vermont. Things are going well until her best friend is shot, and Max tries to uncover the perpetrator by slipping between time streams.
Let’s get something out of the way for the fans sitting on the fence. Players are given the opportunity to choose which ending of the first game is canon, or Double Exposure will work off your save file assuming that you’ve played the first game on your current machine. Whichever you choose, Chloe Price is only a distant presence for most of the game, alive or dead. If you were hoping for the further adventures of Max and Chloe, this is not it.
Instead, Double Exposure works at telling a new story, though its narrative beats are sometimes a little too close to what happened in Arcadia Bay to be called truly original. There’s a punk rock close female friend of Max’s who dies, a scientifically minded guy friend who helps her, an impending school party, an angry law enforcement figure, and even some puzzles involving keys that are almost exact copies of ones used in the first game.
That said, the series has rambled weirdly all over the place so much in the last nine years that developer Deck Nine probably needed to look at the old schematic to find their place. I found the call backs to the first game comforting rather than irritating.
For want of a better term, Max now has Elizabeth’s powers from Bioshock Infinite. Her old rewind powers have atrophied to the point of uselessness. Now, she can slip between a world where her best friend is living and one where she is dead, as well as listen to ghostly echoes from either world or even swap objects between timelines. The game even gives you handy visual cues to help you remember which timeline you’re in, such as subtle lighting changes and the fact that Living world is decorated for Christmas.
It takes until the second chapter for Max to get to use these abilities regularly, but once she does the gameplay really soars. She switches back and forth to acquire items and information, and at one point even has a cool stealth portion avoiding someone by using her abilities. Being in two different time streams immediately takes an effect on Max’s mental state, turning her into an increasingly unreliable narrator, which is novel for a player-controlled character.
Could the story stand on its own if the game wasn’t so ready to hand these godlike powers to the player to solve a campus murder? Sure, but these abilities are what separates Life is Strange from a hundred TellTale clones. For the first time since the original, I felt like I was experiencing something that should be a game instead of a film, TV series, or comic book.
And then there is the weird. The opening of the first game remains one of the best openings of any game period this century. Max was immediately dropped into a premonition of disaster, saved Chloe from death with her time travel powers, and it starts to snow during a warm October day. The game was not afraid to go big.
Double Exposure is slower to step on the gas, but it still has some speed. There is more strange weather phenomenon, cryptids, doppelgangers, and something I can only describe as quantum autocannibalism. It’s exhilarating, and the game is not afraid to pull the rug out from under the player to keep things spicy.
What flaws the game has are mostly series staples at the point, things like baffling forced player choices, unrealistic reactions to those choices, repetitive use of areas, and sometimes cringe dialogue. While that could all be better, they are also part of the Life is Strange experience and have their own charm.
After nine years of misses, Life is Strange is back. Better than ever? Not quite, but definitely great and absolutely a unique gaming experience worth playing.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is available Tuesday, October 29 on PlayStation 5, XBox S/X, and PC. $49.99 to $79.99.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
