Life is Strange: Double Exposure serves as both a welcome return and an exciting leap forward, as fan-favorite protagonist Max Caulfield returns to the spotlight with new friends, a new secret, and reality-altering powers. I tried the game out during Gamescom, and the demo showed, to my surprise, that Double exposure This is perhaps the most mechanically intriguing game in the series.
The game takes place a decade after the events of the original game. Life is Strange.Now an adult, Max has left Arcadia Bay and is working as an artist-in-residence at Caledon University in northern Vermont. She has formed a new circle of friends in the form of Moses, a science enthusiast, and Safi, the daughter of the university president. Following the disastrous events in Arcadia Bay, both endings of which will be woven into this narrative, Max has vowed to never use her time-rewinding power again. However, her new world is shattered when Safi is mysteriously killed, prompting Max to attempt to save her by rewinding time for the first time in years. For unknown reasons, the long period of inactivity has caused Max's power to evolve, and she manages to break through the fabric of time and space to access an alternate timeline where Safi is still alive, but remains in mortal danger. Thus, Double exposure turns into a double murder mystery in which players use Max's newfound Shift ability to move between timelines and uncover the identity of the killer in one reality while preventing Safi's murder in another.
The Gamescom demo takes place shortly after Safi’s murder. I won’t spoil the narrative details, but Max must retrieve Safi’s camera from a classroom while avoiding detection from a spying detective. While the room is locked in her current timeline, things could be different in an alternate reality. Keeping track of which timeline you’re in is easy thanks to an icon in the top-left corner that labels the reality as “Alive” or “Dead,” indicating Safi’s fate in that world. Using Max’s Pulse ability, another new trick that allows her to detect and reveal ghostly elements from another timeline without completely replacing them, I find a glowing weak point between realities where switching timelines becomes possible. When Max makes the leap, she tears through the current reality, as if she’s opening a pair of curtains to instantly pass to the other side. The abruptness of this transition makes for a cool visual effect.
Retrieving Safi's camera becomes a complex exercise in exploring a two-story room, searching for clues, and running into dead ends that can only be avoided by switching to a different timeline. Elements like the layout of the room, the characters' current actions and moods, and the location of important items are different in each timeline, and the crux of the puzzle is figuring out how gathering information in one world answers a question in the opposite one.
What begins as a simple search for the safe evolves into using a celestial map to find an important constellation mentioned by Moses, and then activating a projector to superimpose the star map onto a classroom mural in such a way that the orientation of the constellation reveals the hidden location of the safe's item. Solving this single puzzle requires several timeline shifts to solve smaller puzzles that logically build toward the solution.
After solving this puzzle, the detective breaks into the classroom, triggering a stealth sequence in which I need to escape the room without being noticed. Simply sneaking past him isn't enough; I need a loud object to create a distraction, and that can only be found in the Living Reality. Since the patrolling investigator blocks certain paths in the cluttered, box-filled room, getting past him requires some strategic uses of Shift, as he's not present in the Living Timeline.
Bye Double exposure This installment feels like it’s testing your brain more than previous installments, but it still largely emphasizes managing character relationships and driving the story through dialogue choices. However, the timeline jumps add a little spice to the formula. While a character may be hesitant to reveal an important personal secret in one timeline, their counterpart may be more forthcoming, offering information that could give Max an advantage. However, resorting to using knowledge that Max technically shouldn’t have may not go over well, adding a thoughtful twist to conversations.
The Double exposure The Gamescom demo convinced me of Shift as a fun mechanic, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the game uses it more to tell its story. Add in Max's return, and I can't wait to see how this multi-faceted murder mystery unfolds.