Mad at Max
you might feel two ways about something at the same time.
The feuding academics ofLife Is Strange: Double Exposuremight call this “emotional superposition”.
But the word “ambivalent” already exists.
I’ve been deeply moved by individual scenes in this sequel.
By the end I was sorry to leave its characters behind.
If you’re allergic to spoilers, take off.
To discuss a Life Is Strange game requires spoiling, even a little.
For everyone else, let’s recap.
Double Exposure picks up the pieces many years later.
Max is an award-winning photographer and visiting artist at a prestigious university in snowy Vermont.
That relationship is over.
This game is not out to explore it.
That decision has provencontentious with some fans, but I’m on board.
I prefer studios to move on from old stories.
Yes it hurts, but let’s move on.
Yet even this reopening of wounds is appropriate.
Early in this sequel, a major character is killed in mysterious circumstances.
Her name is Safi, the outgoing daughter of the university president and new best friend to Max.
There is a gunshot, Safi is found bleeding, dead in the snow.
What follows is a five episode jaunt of dimension-hopping detective work (who is the killer?)
and much investigating of suspicious professors.
This results in exactly the kind of simple “puzzles” you expect from dimension-dippin'.
One world has a guard blocking the way, the other does not.
A friend in one world requires a spanner - you might grab one from the other world.
But it’d be hard to find someone who plays these games for the adventure game mechanics.
Writing and storytelling is the focus.
Characters show inconsistencies from the start.
Plot holes are plastered over with papier mache reasoning.
Many of your own actions as Max will defy common sense.
Then there is the cascade of references.
Double Exposure takes reverence for reference to obnoxious new heights.
“Life finds a way!”
quips Max, evokingJurassic Park.
It is not the only allusion to Twitter that makes it into the game.
Other characters are weirdly homogenous in their mannerisms and habits of speech.
Almost everyone is deeply literate in therapyspeak (some have their reasons, others don’t).
Half the cast areGilmore Girls-level quipsters.
Max especially has a real case of jokebrain.
It can become exhausting.
banter, a few characters with distinct voices start to poke through.
Moses, an astronomer friend, is another sigh of relief.
He’s a literal-minded guy who quips little and calms often.
Gwen is a standoffish professor who doesn’t suffer fools.
She is “a hugger” yet holds grudges bitterly.
She sits on a high horse some moments, and tumbles from it in others.
Other characters who seemed grating at first quickly grew on me.
And Vinh, a looksmaxing sleazeball, is so horny it should immediately be reported to HR.
I wrote him off as a rich kid with arrogance and ambition.
But later he shows himself to be deeper, certainly not the elite he often pretends to be.
The millisecond lip bites of indecision or concentration, the semi-squints of recognition, the mouth tautening of skepticism.
Players ofLife Is Strange: True Colorswill recognise this close attention-to-eyebrows.
It’s a little distracting sometimes, in a LA Noire kind of way.
And the physical body acting is still sometimes deeply exaggerated.
What impresses less are the bugs.
Voice lines reactivate long after the characters have left the area.
Max’s internal thoughts are sometimes utterly at odds with what is in front of her.
Characters sometimes don’t reply, lines get skipped, interactable items are conspicuously absent.
It’s hard to stay immersed in a fiction when so many things shunt you out of it.
But bugs aren’t the main offender in this regard.
That would be the implausibility that flows through the storytelling.
We’re asked to believe that Max and Safi are best friends.
On top of this, people’s sense of urgency and significance is skewed.
They will act with severe shock at mild revelations, yet basically shrug at a firearm.
I routinely yelled at my screen as characters did the least sensible thing imaginable.
This includes some classic annoyances.
Max will climb tall shelves instead of clambering easily over a nearby railing.
The first two episodes make up the bulk of the detective-ing, and housed the majority of my frustrations.
At this point, I laid back and let the extended trauma metaphors rinse over me.
It was interesting; a symbolic insight into Max and the years she spent between games.
It is at its strongest when it stops being a murder mystery and starts being a story about grief.
Even so, it wildly flip flops between the two.
Said cat is stinking dead in a trashcan of quips, yet also alive and often beautiful.
That, alongside the lack of Chloe, will make it a challenging story for some fans to accept.
