So! Finished Double Exposure!

So! Finished Double Exposure!

Well, I liked it. I really enjoyed it! It was super fun to play as Max again and I plan to play again and hunt for all achievements.

But damn, I don’t want to sit and complain and make it out that I hate this and “they ruined Max” “they ruined Life is Strange” but it felt like too little, too late.

I had such an emotional journey playing the first game and well, I was heartbroken afterwards. Cause well, the first game is about Max reconnecting with her childhood friend as they investigate together. And you get to learn Chloe alongside Max as they spend time together. Stuff like, hanging out in her room, break into the school and mess around in the junkyard. So when the final decision arrives, it becomes more personal and feels emotional and intentional that you have to choose between two awful options for this town you have come to know or the girl you come to know.

And after that, I needed closure, which I found throughout the comics. Double Exposure could have been that… if it came out sooner.

Double Exposure feels smaller. You spend all the time at any of the buildings around Campus and you get to know Safi in the same chapter that she dies. The rest of the game is more of a detective story on how she will actually die but when that moment comes, I know more about her and the context, but I don’t actually feel that much closer to her cause an amount of that time between, you never get to meet her and when you do, she’s pissed at you.

I wasn’t as invested in Max’s, Safi’s and Maya’s story. I didn’t get to spend time with Safi until they worked together to expose Lucas which wasn’t satisfying as it was for… a handful of students. "No, my career is over!" Is it tho...?

The stories felt similar in yeah, you help Safi get revenge for Maya the same way as Chloe and Rachel but it felt that Rachel’s disappearance had more of an effect. You learned what she meant to Chloe an you saw her reaction to finding the body as well as Max going through the same torture. Here it felt more like, you’re told what happened to Maya, you kind of saw how people felt but it was so long before Max arrived so they have calmed down about it and I never got dragged into the emotional pull of it.

Well, you understand it was wrong, Lucas stole her work and got famous and she ended herself which is really dark, mature and grounded but when the story wraps up, the end-result ends up being of something that happened without you around so it just felt like Max was an outsider all the time solving other people’s problems.

Max was an outsider in the first one as well but she was closer in the sense as Rachel became this replacement for her and she learns how her appsense hurt Chloe and she works to make up for that lost time during the game. She’s an outsider to everyone except Chloe, where she instead got pushed out of her life and slowly tries to get back in and I was curious on how the relationship would change once they found Rachel.

It didn’t feel Max had anything to lose in this story. She was at the right place at the right time and the right skills to fix it. She also had the maturity of a 28-year old instead of an 18-year old so the climax wasn’t the same emotional rollercoaster. She met her friends, she discovered how to help and crossed them off her to-do-list.

It was fun, I will play it again, I will draw it alot and curious on Max’s next adventure but my opinion in the end can, once again, get summarised in “too little, too late”