Double Exposure has a fantastic first chapter

Despite the very cringe-worthy writing and some questionable decisions, I was a fan of the original Life is Strange. There were a lot of problems, but it was an interesting concept that was mostly well executed, and it was the start of a series that only got better as time went on. After original developer Dontnod stepped away from the series, Deck Nine stepped up and 2021’s Life is Strange: True Colors was a masterclass in choice-driven story games. Now the new team returns to old characters, with the original character Max Caulfield taking center stage again with new powers and lots of fighting.

The most noticeable change in Life is Strange: Double Exposure is that Max is actually well written. The constant self-doubt is gone, she has a strong personality and clear motivation, and she actually feels like she has real agency. There’s still a lot of the silliness that was present in Max’s first appearance, but it’s been refined into a charming trait, one facet of many that make her an interesting character. In the four hours of playing the first chapter, I’ve seen more of Max’s actual personality and change than I have in an entire game before, and that’s a big step forward.

The mechanical approach to storytelling is largely unchanged, but you don’t fix what’s broken, and Life is Strange is well established in its own tropes and design language. You walk, you talk, you make decisions – it’s not much, but it works well to tell the story they want to tell. I was hoping this would finally be the game where I could run faster than a snail riding a turtle, but hey, maybe in the next game.

I saw a few glimpses of what I call the Fallout 4 effect, where the very brief descriptions of dialogue options didn’t quite match what Max actually said, which led to a few situations where I felt like it was , to have been easily cheated. I didn’t want to upset the cool fellow professor with the gross tattoos, I just thought what I said would be nicer. I hope she forgives me in future chapters.

In terms of story there is also an interesting structure here. Max, who hasn’t used her rewind powers in years, has become an established photographer and now serves as an artist in residence and professor at a university. She has friends, a few love interests – Max is unapologetically queer and that’s great – and a lot to look forward to in life.

And then everything falls apart when one of her friends is shot. It’s a bit disappointing, and as she tries to come to terms with all of this, she accidentally awakens her new powers, which allow her to quickly jump to an alternate universe where her friend didn’t die. It’s a logical evolution of her powers and I’m sure it has some really cool gameplay implications, but while I’m allowed to talk about Chapter 2 in this preview, I can’t do that.

This is because the game crashes every time I try to activate the new power for the first time, in a scripted and very mandatory order very early in Chapter 2. I’ve tried this on three different PCs at this point , all with different hardware – including a laptop that wasn’t meant for gaming at all and sounded like it had a few RPMs less than a jet engine – in an attempt to fix the problem, but it crashed every time in the same place. What is in Chapter 2? I can’t say that. I can say that I hope the issue is resolved within a few hours before the game’s expanded access release, because I enjoyed what I played and it would be really nice to see what happens next.