Life is Strange: Double Exposure Returns Fan-Favorite Max For Another Mystery [CNET]

Returning protagonist Max is older and more powerful than ever with a new mystery to solve.

Returning protagonist Max is older and more powerful than ever with a new mystery to solve.

Nine years and numerous sequels later, Max Caulfield is back and starring in another Life is Strange game. Double Exposure gets its name from her newly enhanced powers. Time has passed in the Life Is Strange universe and our hero’s supernatural abilities have leveled up. I got to go hands-on with a behind-closed-door preview of an early chapter of the game during my time at Germany’s Gamescom 2024 event. As a big fan of the first game (and the series as a whole) I left feeling nostalgic for my love of the original and excited for what other characters and easter eggs I’ll get to experience when it finally comes out.

Life Is Strange: Double Exposure begins when one of Max’s close friends, Safi, mysteriously loses her life and our heroine is determined to uncover what exactly happened. Judging by the demo and trailers for the game, it seems like studio Deck Nine is following the tried-and-true formula for the lauded series, with a protagonist using their otherworldly powers to solve a mystery and thread their way through a cast of memorable characters.

My preview began in a middle chapter of the game with Moses, a friend and classmate of Max, being under investigation for something to do with Safi’s death. While I didn’t see the previous chapters, it seems Max is convinced he’s innocent and wants to help get the detective assigned to the case off his back. However, Moses reveals that he did in fact take evidence from the crime scene, Safi’s camera, and hid it somewhere in his university lab, it’s only a matter of time before the detective finds that camera and comes down hard on Moses. This is where our main objective for the chapter is revealed: find and get the camera out of there.

With our target set, I was then introduced to the new magical powers that Max will wield in Double Exposure: the ability to shift between two different worlds. In fact, in this other world, Safi is still alive, leaving us with a pretty drastic change in everything and everyone around us. Practically, it works like this: in order to get into the locked lab we need to shift to the dimension without an investigation, and thus no locked doors. 

To do this, the player must find these kind-of glowing/kind-of-sparkly areas in the world and hit LB on them to ‘rip’ open a portal and cross over. It’s a very cool upgrade to her power from the first game, where she would be able to go back in time to a specific moment if she found a photo that captured it. In the alternate dimension, we encounter the other version of Moses, hoping to get a clue where in his lab he might store something valuable. As is customary to Life Is Strange, you will spend a lot of time in conversations, making binary decisions that will affect how the story will play out. 

These conversations stuck out to me for an odd reason: the voice acting for Max. Hannah Telle, the original actress, is returning to voice the character but for some reason it sounded off to me. This might be because I haven’t heard Max’s voice since that game came out almost a decade ago and I’m misremembering, or perhaps the same voice doesn’t work as well for older Max. Either way, the voice just didn’t seem to match the character model in terms of age or appearance, which put me off a little. I’m curious how I’ll feel when I’ve spent more time with the character when the full game comes out.

After a quick chat, Max learns that Moses uses a specific cupboard to hide a kettle that isn’t allowed to be in the lab, but in this world it’s locked — time to shift. Here in the dark timeline, and now inside the lab, we can search around for a key and gather more information. There’s plenty of posters, computers, and objects to interact with to further flesh out the world here and get some meaningful inner monologue from Max. After a bit of searching, and bringing the key back to the other world, we learn that the cupboard didn’t have the camera but left us with another clue: the name of a star.

This process then repeats as you will shift back and forth, bringing keys and other objects between them, in order to get around obstacles and continue your search — sort of an adventure game version of Titanfall 2’s iconic Effect & Cause level and its dimension-hopping mechanic. It’s a chapter full of environmental puzzles and a lot of trial and error when clicking on everything interactable, with the hopes it’ll reveal where to direct yourself next. However, it’s interrupted by the detective entering the lab and beginning his search. This leads to a comical moment where you must steal a singing hot dog christmas ornament and set it off on one side of the room as a distraction before warping out of sight and reappearing in a different part of the room. This, along with hiding and moving around some boxes so you aren’t seen, were the extent of this light stealth section. 

Getting the camera out of there, and subsequently clearing Moses’ name, set in motion the final dialogue section of the demo. Max is discussing the case with the detective and we’re presented with one of the main binary decisions that you can just tell will come back later in the game to either reward or punish us. The detective asks if there’s any information Max would like to give about Moses, to help him with the investigation, and you’re left to decide who to put your faith in. Obviously I sided with my friend, and since this is only a single chapter of the early game, I won’t know the ramifications of that choice for a while. Regardless, it has me interested in what’s to come, and if the previous Life is Strange games are any clue, the outcomes could vary pretty wildly.

I went into my demo very interested in the ongoing adventures of Max, especially when they revealed that her best friend Chloe, a character who might not be alive after that game, would also be returning. The demo left me with more questions than answers but that’s what I want from a murder mystery, and I’m happy to say that I’m still excited for it to come out.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is coming out October 29th for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.