Lots of spoilers for Double Exposure ahead - you’ve been warned.
A major theme of Life Is Strange is the inability to change the misfortunes of your life.
Her entire history is one of hurt.
These people are broken, but in that brokenness is beauty and resilience.
“What if I like the way my scars define me?”
asks Max in a sardonic tone after seeing a self-help book on a bedside table.
“What if they give me character?”
She’s being snarky about it, as anyone cursed with nosebleeds and time travel might be.
But in a way, she’s not wrong.
All of this well-observed and psychologically literate characterisation is great.
It also makes the ridiculous shit that characters do or say in Double Exposure mildly frustrating.
She tells people to go away instead of questioning them more fully on the weird things they saw.
She routinely neglects to call or text her friends to fact check.
I don’t know what is happening in her brain.
At one point, Max plots to expose a professor as a charlatan.
He has plagiarised a student’s novel wholesale.
All this instead of, say, posting said photos on the game’s equivalent of Twitter.
The implausible lack of communication that happens in the game is probably the most irritating.
Max asks a single question about what enemies Safi might have, and then basically ignores her.
In an investigation, your first instinct may be to go to the source.
Max goes to every puddle of muddy water except the source.
Still, for all this character’s inconsistencies, I can’t bring myself to dislike the dorky twit.
A reminder of the years Max spent running from her past.
Everything goes black and white.
A desire to sleep, to numb out, overtakes everything.
This is what I meant in my review when I explained it was a sequel of “ambivalence”.
Max is both a well-realised human dealing with terrible memories, and an awful finder-outer of facts.
She is an accident of wacky plot, and the result of some keen character writing.
I really hope she gets the healing she deserves.
Because if anyone else dies around her, I’m calling the actual police.
And I hate those guys.
