I didn’t start playing Life is Strange at the beginning. Instead, I came into the franchise with Life is Strange: True Colors without any expectations of what the series was. Then, I went back and played the rest. Now, nearly a decade after the release of the first in the series, Life Is Strange: Double Exposure is continuing Max Caulfield’s story.
Published by Square Enix and developed by Deck Nine Game, Life Is Strange: Double Exposure puts players back into Max’s life. Now a photographer-in-residence at the prestigious Caledon University, Max discovers that her closest new friend, Safi, dead in the snow. Clearly murdered, Max tries to save Safi by using her power to Rewind time, something she hasn’t done in years. Shifting through two parallel timelines, Max must solve the mystery behind Safi’s death and stop the killer from striking again in both timelines.
At PAX West, we got the chance to go hands-on with Life is Strange: Double Exposure, where we played through a chapter of the game, working to save Max’s friend Moses from a detective who has made Moses the number one suspect in Safi’s murder. After our time with the game, we spoke with Deck Nine’s Felice Kuan and Jonathan Stauder, the Narrative Director and Game Director for Life is Strange: Double Exposure, respectively.
One of the key elements of Life is Strange: Double Exposure is that we are returning to the character that began the beloved franchise. But nearly ten years later, Max isn’t necessarily going to be the same person. I mean, are any of the same person that we were in 2015? No. We’ve matured, grown, and ultimately been shaped by our experiences. That’s the same for Max Caufield. However, as a protagonist, the development team still needs to keep her recognizable to the players. No small task since Max was developed by a different studio in her first outing from Dontnod Entertainment.
On the subject of Max’s maturation between the debut game and Double Exposure, Felice Kuan explained the team’s take on Max. But the response wasn’t entirely about who Max was in 2015 but instead about how players, the developers, and even her voice actress have and will map their own experiences onto Max’s life in the years we’ve missed.
“One of the things that we most wanted to do was to take this beloved character and [recognize that] all of us were someone [else] when we played the first game. All of [our team] are bringing what we want to say about those intervening years to [Life is Strange: Double Exposure]. Hannah [Telle] was as well when she was doing the voice and motion capture. We talked about this a lot, and I think that what the player is going to bring to the game themself is going to melt seamlessly with Max, and that mix that was there in the first game is going to happen again for this one.”
For Jonathan Stauder, Max’s growth can be found in how Hannah Telle has changed since first voicing the character as well. “Part is getting to have Hannah tell back,” Stauder said, “That buys us so much in terms of making it feel like the Max you knew ten years ago has grown up and matured but is still the same person, even if she has so many new facets to her. Hannah is inherently tied to Max, and she can’t help but be Max in her performance.”
While players are surely excited to play as Max, it’s also important to note that the other characters feel just as deep, even in our short time with the game. This starts at the very beginning of the demo with Moses. Sitting in a chair outside of his office, the fame tightens on Moses’s hand. He’s touching the tip of his thumb to each of his other fingers in a rhythm. It’s a small element of the overall story and where Max’s relationships fit into it.
That hand movement is a grounding technique used by people experiencing high anxiety or panic attacks. I know this because I do it. It’s a detail that benefits from improved motion capture and fidelity, but it exists to drive emotion. A successful story isn’t just told through its dialogue but also through the environments and silent character moments. As we explore the lab and see Max interact with Moses, that’s extremely true for Life is Strange: Double Exposure.
“True Colors was the first time we did a full facial mocap,” Kuan explained, “We learned in making that game how often it pays not to say something. We had Erica Mori playing Alex, and she was so expressive. Right off the bat, when we started writing [Double Exposure], it was part of our consideration with every character. The story was not just about how they sound in the dialogue but how they move. What are their tells are. Who they are when they’re silent.”
“With the upgraded fidelity of our character models, it’s not just the higher quality facial capture, but the talent of our animators, Stauder added, “This is my first Life is Strange game. I didn’t work on True Colors, and coming from games I worked on previously, it’s such a luxury to be able to throw a camera on one of these characters and let them, without saying a word, express so much emotion and have it hold up on a screen twice the size because of the fidelity. I took every opportunity to say, ‘We have to do a close-up here’ and ‘We’ve got to do a close-up there’ as much as possible because it’s just something I don’t know that I’ve seen in other games again.
When asked to dig a bit deeper into their favorite elements of non-dialogue storytelling, Kuan and Stauder explored characters. Kuan answered, “The environment and cinematics are contributing to [the narrative]. Every single developer is telling a story with their [elements]. Our process is extremely collaborative, so every department can resonate with the same story in our poetry… Safi is a poet, and so throughout the game, there are snippets of her poetry, and it is important that an Arab American poet wrote that poetry. I’m excited for people to see that.”
Stauder dove into the part of Life is Strange: Double Exposure that we played for the hands-on preview. “The scene you played had the conceit that essentially, you had to walk around in Moses’s head and interact with enough things that you could deduce where he might have hidden that camera. Therefore, every button press, every push forward on the stick, had to deliver some story or character—which we tried to push into every scene of the game. If [the player is] pushing a button, it’s telling us a joke, it’s telling us about a character, or it’s telling us more about just the world Max is existing in. And if it doesn’t meet that bar, it’s done. I’m really proud that that scene played as much as possible. Every button press tells you more about Moses without the average person having to go and talk to you, Moses.”
As any fan of the series understands, Life is Strange is about the relationships the main character has with others as much as what they’re processing on their own. Where the environment helps with storytelling, so do the relationships. In the demo we played, Max has the option to either be amenable to the detective trying to accuse Moses of Safi’s murder or be combative. I chose the latter.
When you do this, Moses becomes visibly and audibly uneasy. He asks Max to stop, he shifts in his seat, and his facial expression turns to visible anxiety and fear. Moses is a man of color, and as he notes when you first talk to him, he’s been the number one suspect his entire life. It’s a sad moment that made me uncomfortable with my choice. But it’s also the reality Max can push back on the cops because of her identity; Moses doesn’t have that luxury. And Max’s choices can make it harder for her friend. And all of that’s intentional.
“So this franchise is an easy privilege to work in because, from day one, we can say, what social issues are we going to talk about,” Kuan explained, “We can talk about what marginalized groups are we going to represent? Then, just explicitly, ensure that our dev group is representative. Make sure that we can have the long conversations that we need to have, and make sure that we have the budget to do things like animate Moses’s fingers [performing the grounding technique]. It is a deliberate and constant part of the process, and it means a lot to me that you called out those specific moments; they were extremely deliberate. That’s the feedback loop of doing something and then seeing if it resonates with the [player] base, which keeps us going to do it more.”
Stauder added, “Where we aren’t able to hire in for those roles, we spend the money on outside consultants and get their advice about how to better represent different folks and issues. I mean, [how Moses deals] with the anxiety is literally taken from someone in my life who does that same thing to manage their anxiety.”
But for every player coming back to the franchise after understanding what the other games have brought to the table, there are also newcomers. Every game, regardless of its place in a franchise, is going to be someone’s first entry point into a franchise. And that’s something that the developers at Deck Nine also thought about when developing Life is Strange: Double Exposure.
“We are hoping, and we have designed the game so that new folks will fall in love and want to retroactively play [the other games in the series]. So I think that we have made sure to put in everything that you need to understand, not just plot-wise but emotionally, about what’s driving Max and what’s behind all of our decisions,” Kuan said about bringing in new players.
“We basically had the benefit of getting to treat the original game as this rich backstory. It’s okay if you never got to play the first one; you’re jumping into Double Exposure for the first time… We have the benefit of playing it all ten years ago. We’ve all had it sitting around our heads for ten years. [We asked] what do I need to get into Max’s headspace? And then we got to cherry-pick that, and that’s what you’ll see as you play through the game. If this is your first experience with Max, you should get everything you need to onboard emotionally and know why she is the way she is. And it’s all consistent with that first game.”
Each game in the series has a clear message that the player can take away. Kuan and Stauder want players to walk away from Life is Strange: Double Exposure thinking about choice.
“I think that on the nature of choice, the idea that the first game’s big innovation was letting you take one of these big choice-based games and functionally be able to explore the road, not taken. I think, likewise, we took it upon ourselves to question choices again. To question the value of making a decision and sticking with it, maybe not accepting the two paths in front of you and attempting to forge your own third or fourth path forward. And so, hopefully, folks come away thinking that we’ve at least contributed something else to the conversation about choice-based games,” Stauder said.
Kuan closed out our interview by saying, “Without spoiling too much, this game has let us think a lot about the choices we’ve each made as individuals and why we might have made them. I really hope, and I expect, that people will think long and hard after this game about the paths they’ve taken and hopefully learn to be a little bit forgiving to themselves,” Kuan said.
From what we played, Life is Strange: Double Exposure is setting itself up to continue the franchise’s emotional legacy. And to be honest, there is something deeply sentimental about playing as Max after a decade has passed. Not just because we’re back with her character, but because through her choices, we can explore how much we have changed since we first met her.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch on October 26, 2024.