Life is Strange: Double Exposure review

There’s a point in Life is Strange: Double Exposure where detective Vince Alderman asks Max: “Are you the one who’s unlucky or is it just everyone who ever meets you?” It might be a little harsh, sure, but he’s not wrong to say it. Double Exposure does a lot of retreading old narrative ground of its predecessor: dead besties, sus teachers, secret societies, a third girl whose mystery permeates the overarching story… you get it.

Considering Max’s time-rewind power of 2015’s Life is Strange (the one by Don’t Nod, rather than Deck Nine) is nowhere to be seen this time, I was getting a little more deja vu than I anticipated. A decade after leaving Arcadia Bay—which is either hurricane-torn with an alive Chloe Price or still picking up the pieces from her murder—Max is in her late 20s, now milling around a university as a lecturer-slash-resident artist rather than a student. 

She’s largely left Arcadia Bay and its people behind—she regularly ignores texts from her parents, with only one Blackwell Academy alum (or two, if Chloe is alive) making an appearance on her social media timeline. Instead, Safiya and Moses make up Max’s new friend group, the former being the university president’s daughter, the latter an astrophysicist graduate.

Her time warping has been put to rest as a result of the damage and subsequent trauma Max endured throughout the first game. That is, until Safi is found shot dead. Cue power reawakenings—this time in the form of timeline hopping rather than rewinding—and desperately trying to avoid the same fate that befell Chloe or Arcadia Bay.

Point-and-shoot