Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Life is Strange: Double Exposure was provided by Square Enix for review. Thank you!

It's time for the long-awaited sequel to the original Life is Strange, released back in 2015, with Max Caulfield returning as the protagonist. However, we've jumped forward several years, with Max now teaching at Caledon University instead of being a student at Blackwood. If you enjoyed the previous installments of the series, I'll start by saying it's probably a given that you'll enjoy Life is Strange: Double Exposure. It follows a similar style to the previous games, allowing limited exploration of the area but largely focused on its narrative story-telling and dialogue choices.

The story of these games is what it's all about, and the story of Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a hit. The game revolves around Safi, Max's friend whom she found dead in the snow with a pistol shot to the chest. You'll encounter others trying to discover what happened and some who just want to get on with things after the traumatic event and leave the investigation to the police. However, you will use your unique power to travel between 2 timelines, one where Safi is alive and one where she's passed, to piece together what happened that night and find the killer.

While the main story concept of traveling between 2 timelines is revealed early on, there are plenty of twists and turns that you'll encounter that keep you on your toes. The story of Double Exposure gets pretty wild pretty fast and soon runs away with itself, beginning to prefer cutscenes and dialogue over gameplay, which is a good thing in this case.

As you continue your investigation, you'll meet a colorful cast of characters. From your nerdy friend Moses, who is always looking for an explanation and easily gets lost in his work, to the curious Detective Alderman, to Professor Gwen, who is on vastly different paths in the two timelines. You'll get to learn about these characters, their motivations for their actions, and something they all have in common, and it's a joy to do so.

The 2 timelines are portrayed heavily in both gameplay and story, so be prepared to get your brain a little confused regarding interactions with both. Max might have a good relationship with a certain character in one timeline and a not-so-good one in the other timeline, and this can also be affected by the choices you make in the game.

There are plenty of big choices you have to make in the game, which will have a significant impact on your relationships with other characters and, thus, how elements of the story will pan out. They aren't easy to make, with many not falling into a "right or wrong" category and sitting more in a grey area of morality. It'll be up to you to decide whether that's worth it. At the end of each chapter, you'll see what other players chose, and surprisingly, I seemed to be in the overwhelming minority for most choices, often selecting the choice that 10-20% of players picked (so far).

Life is Strange: Double Exposure chooses to render all of its cutscenes in real-time, which means there's often no or little transition between gameplay and the cutscenes that expound the story. This is good in the sense that it does an excellent job of keeping you immersed in the game world, with the characters and environments not suddenly changing how they look or sound and minimal loading screens in between, but it's bad if you are running lower graphical settings since cutscenes will lack any visual niceties you might get with pre-rendered ones.

Regardless, the technical aspects on display here are pretty on point. The characters' facial expressions and body language do a great job of capturing emotion and help make the scenes feel more natural. There's no need to fill every moment with a voice or needlessly explain how a character feels because you can see it displayed by their actions.

Backing all this up is the voice acting, which is also fantastic. I can't say I found a character where I thought their voice was off. The voice carried every emotion, and I could tell when the characters were angry or sad just by vocal cues. It's been a while since I've played a game with barely more than "acceptable" or "average" voice acting, so this was a treat.

Visually, Life is Strange: Double Exposure won't break any records, but it does present a pleasant picture. The standout for me is definitely the design and detail of the characters, allowing them to have facial expressions, including movement in their eyes and mouths, that tell us so much while saying nothing. The environments do their job, and we've seen better-looking worlds before, but they're picturesque and well-crafted.

Ultimately, Life is Strange: Double Exposure feels like a time-traveling parallel universe-traversing murder mystery movie with gameplay elements breaking up the story. Are the gameplay elements the best things ever? No, they can be pretty mundane as far as gameplay goes, requiring you to go back and forth between timelines and interact with different objects in the small space you can walk around at that moment. But these are just a vehicle to transport you to the next cutscene, where the intriguing storyline can play out more, and you can learn more about these characters and their personalities, which really shines.

As the story progresses, the gameplay segments get shorter and shorter. Towards the end of the game, most of your time is spent in cutscenes, not walking around. Double Exposure might also be the shortest game in the series so far. I finished the game in about 10 hours, and that's with messing around optimizing settings and taking screenshots.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure - Steam Deck Performance

Life is Strange: Double Exposure hits the Steam Deck pretty hard, but we get full controller support and the ability to play the game at the Steam Deck's 1280x800 resolution, so you don't have to worry about black borders around the screen. I did notice that the loading screen does not cover the full 16:10 aspect ratio, though, as it is 16:9, meaning you can see the game behind it. Also, the end credits screen had the same issue.

As the game is pretty tough to run, I'm only offering 1 preset here.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

You'll want a SteamOS Frame Rate Limit of 60 FPS, and no TDP Limit set.

I debated whether to have shadows on or off. Turning shadows off does result in a smoother framerate, but it makes interior scenes look truly awful, so I've decided to take the hit and recommend you keep shadows on here.

You'll be running the lowest settings, apart from keeping Shadows on Medium, not "None" here. Then, we'll tweak the resolution scales a little so we can maintain an "acceptable" framerate while keeping the shadows on. Check out the image below for a reference on how we're handling the settings, especially the resolution scale.

Note that we're also using the 30 FPS frame rate limit in-game. Introducing the SteamOS Frame Rate Limiter here causes input lag, and the in-game limit does a good enough job.

Running these settings, you can expect a fairly stable 30 FPS in most scenes of the game, however, some areas, such as the Fine Arts Building (FAB) on the campus do drop to around 23-25 FPS at certain angles. The most intensive area in the game is the Turtle Bar at night, which drops to 19 or 20 FPS. However, given the type of game Life is Strange: Double Exposure, I felt that these drops are an acceptable trade-off for adding shadows in the game world.

You'll also experience some slowdown if you use your ability in one world but see/hear the other world. Generally, the game drops a few FPS when using this ability, too, although you don't use this side of Max's powers too often.

The power draw stays high. Depending on the scene you're in, expect the game to use around 20W-25W. Temperatures also stay high, around 75C-85C, with the fan audible throughout play. You should expect around 1.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck LCD and about 2 - 2.5 hours on a Steam Deck OLED.

Accessibility:

Life is Strange: Double Exposure's accessibility menu is the biggest in the game. You can enable whether or not you can "ping" the game world for objects that can be interacted with, whether you want a "crosshair" visible so you can see what you're looking at, the frequency of Max giving the player hints via her inner monologues and more. You can adjust the subtitle size, although the default was fine for me.

Content warnings can be toggled on and off, depending on whether you would prefer to be notified of certain topics that are about to appear in the game. For example, you can be notified before a scene containing violence, sex, drugs, suicide, mentions of transphobia, loud noises, and the like. This can take the form of a message appearing at the top of the screen, or you can make it pause the game and warn you, as shown below.

Conclusion:

Life is Strange: Double Exposure starts off with a strange story, which quickly turns into a perplexing one and ends up being slightly bizarre and worrying. If you wanted to continue Max's story from the original Life is Strange, this should satisfy that desire. The original game is referenced quite heavily throughout, so if you haven't played the original Life is Strange, I recommend you do so before playing Double Exposure to get a full grasp of everything mentioned. If you don't fancy playing the first game, then Double Exposure does explain some of the events that take place so you can get by. You just might not fully appreciate everything mentioned.

The gameplay is pretty middling. There's nothing particularly interesting going on here, and Max's powers of going between timelines, while novel, are on the basic side, and you use them for the same thing over and over again. The story more than makes up for this, though, and as the game progresses, it takes over more and more from the gameplay.

As for Steam Deck performance, it isn't quite as performant as I'd like. You will have to accept some frame rate drops from 30 FPS to make the game look "OK," but I played the entire game through on my Steam Deck, so while I would recommend you use a more powerful device to play this if you have one available, don't hold off on buying Life is Strange: Double Exposure if all you have to it play on is a Steam Deck.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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