Life is Strange: Double Exposure Review (Switch)

The Life is Strange series has been an interesting diversion from Square Enix’s typical MO of putting out endless takes on RPGs, instead offering heavily narrative-focused stories exploring the trials of various people who develop supernatural abilities. This series' strong storytelling has garnered a loyal fanbase, it’s also proven to be a bit uneven along the way.

The original Life is Strange followed the adventures of a time-bending teen named Max Caulfield, and its ending (whichever one you picked) was considered by its creators Dontnod to be the definitive end of Max’s story, as Life is Strange was intended to be a sort of anthology series and Dontnod introduced a new protagonist in Life is Strange 2. With development duties having shifted to Deck Nine, however, a direct sequel has now been produced that continues the story of an older Max who now lives in another part of the country. Despite its divisive premise, Life is Strange: Double Exposure does a solid job of exploring Max’s character further while introducing a new and interesting supporting cast, though it unfortunately feels like a clumsy fit for the Switch’s limited hardware.

Double Exposure picks up about 10 years after the events of the first Life is Strange, with Max now living in a quiet and woodsy Vermont college town as a resident professor teaching photography classes at the fictional Caledon University. Max is clearly still deeply affected by the events of the first game, as evidenced by her refusal to use her time manipulation powers and her general caginess when asked about her past by curious friends, but the support and companionship she receives from her new friends in Lakeport seem to be helping her heal. Things take a turn for the worse, however, when a key character is murdered towards the end of the first chapter, kicking off a thrilling whodunnit that leaves Max with little choice but to embrace her powers again.

The main key to solving this mystery is Max’s time manipulation ability, but here it’s evolved from when she was younger: She can now jump between two alternate timelines. The first of these timelines is her ‘home’ branch in which the murder happened and she must face the resulting effects on the community, while the other is an alternate where the victim is still alive, but possibly not for long. Max must glean information from both timelines to understand the bigger picture and discover the killer and their motive.

We generally enjoyed the writing here, though there are many instances where the dialogue can feel a bit too overproduced. It’s difficult to precisely explain what feels off about this, but there’s something intangibly performative about how many characters ‘act natural’ around each other, as if they’re trying too hard to present themselves as likeable to you, the invisible audience. Still, there are plenty of moments of genuine sincerity and a few cool plot twists along the way; despite some clumsiness, this ultimately feels like a story worth seeing through to its end.

In terms of its gameplay, Double Exposure is rather limited, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing considering the genre. Most of the game is spent simply ambling about as Max and interacting with everyone and everything in a given area. The occasional ‘puzzle’ will task you with finding a solution to an obstacle — such as an early example of scouring the environment for an object to pick the lock to a bookcase so an NPC can retrieve a book — but there generally isn’t anything that requires more effort than stumbling upon the thing the devs want you to find.

We would’ve appreciated a little more complexity, but the pace of gameplay adheres well to the focus on narrative. The flavour text of Max examining the environment and talking with random characters adds a lot to the feeling of Lakeport being a real place, and all the little inconsequential details you can uncover add to the experience. For better or worse, this is the kind of game where the objective is not so much to ‘win’ as to simply take everything at your own pace and immerse yourself—think of it like a movie or TV series that allows for more interactivity and freedom of movement.

Though the story itself is compelling and the gameplay is fine, the visual presentation unfortunately leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a trope by now that the Switch version of a new release comes with some performance problems and Double Exposure's awkward lighting, excessive pop-in, and wooden character models serve as a harsh reminder of this. This release is technically playable and we never experienced any crashes, but there’s a harsh disconnect when yet another cutscene is playing out and you’re trying to enjoy the excellent voice acting being spoken by dead-eyed, plastic models that don’t come close to conveying the same level of emotion in their voices.

Art style issues aside, the resolution also feels much too low in both docked and handheld mode, leaving an image that looks grainy and a bit like you’re viewing everything through an out-of-focus lens. Sure, Double Exposure is playable on the Switch, but it’s abundantly clear that the developers really had to stretch to make this one work on the ageing hardware and the results are merely passable.