u/TheDoctor__50

I just finished playing Double Exposure. I bought it a few days ago wanting to experience more of the series. Before this, I've only played Life is Strange 1, Before the Storm, about half of Life is Strange 2, and the first chapter of Life is Strange 3. For personal reasons, I unfortunately can't play 2 or 3 anymore, so I moved on to Double Exposure. I don't normally pay too much mind to reviews before I buy a game if I've already decided I want to play it, or in general honestly, but I was googling Reunion while Double Exposure was being shipped to me (I didn't know they'd made another one after Double Exposure already), and I came across a lot of reviews being really harsh on Double Exposure.

I didn't read too far into the reviews, as I didn't want to get spoiled, but a lot of the review outlets I'd seen had called Double Exposure anywhere from "bad" to "the worst in the series." Given that I was looking up info about Reunion, I mostly saw them criticizing Double Exposure in the context of "there's nowhere to go but up from here, so let's see if Reunion is any better than that mess." I'm paraphrasing of course, but still. I know it's only a pretty surface-level look at reviews and a bit of other fan sentiment, but when you look something up and all the top results say it's bad, that leaves a strong impression on you about what others think of it, even if that might not be the majority opinion. Of course, I was still looking forward to playing the game, and proceeded to do so anyway, so I figured I'd lay out some of my thoughts and ask what people here think (not that asking a subreddit for their opinions on its subject normally goes well, but eh...).

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Overall: I actually liked the game a lot. I played it on Xbox Series X in performance mode, and it had a bunch of little technical/performance issues, but it was still fun and easily kept me wanting to pick it right back up and keep going after each time I had to step away to do anything else. I understand why some people might not have been thrilled to hear they were bringing Max back, but I honestly liked seeing how things have gone for her since the first game.

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The Story:

From what I've played of the series up to this point, it felt like a Life is Strange story; everything seems cool at first, shit goes sideways, someone dies, and there's a big mystery about it that proceeds to unravel a bunch of hidden secrets among the cast of characters. I liked having Max back again and seeing how she's developed. I know a choice-based series like this is obviously going to have a very hard time keeping things narratively cohesive if it continues using characters that have already been through stuff in previous games (hence the new people/places in 2 and 3), but Double Exposure seemed to handle the context of the first game pretty well (it mostly just focuses on what happens to Chloe in the end and doesn't really make much mention of much else that had the option to go differently). I liked that Kate texts Max though, which tells me she's still alive according to the events of Double Exposure. I get that it's not a good idea to "canonize" past story paths unless you really have to, but I managed to save Kate myself in the first game and I like the idea that (if there's a way things are "supposed" to go) Kate lives on in this world.

Honestly I was hesitant about Safi at first because I accidentally saw one of those reviewers called her the "antagonist" of Double Exposure, but now that I've played it I really don't think that's true. Amanda was great and she made a great interest for Max in my opinion, but I have a close relative with that name and ugh it makes me hate that her name is Amanda. I'm also glad they didn't try to push for a romantic angle between Max and Safi at all. Vinh was okay, but kind of annoying since Max didn't pursue him at all in my playthrough, Reggie was fine but I don't think he served a whole lot of plot relevance I guess. Moses was an absolute delight and possibly my favorite character in the game (maybe besides Max). I always loved astronomy and science in general so his personality hit close to home, and he has a heart of gold. Diamond I think was on the same level as Reggie in the sense that she wasn't all too relevant to the main plot honestly, but I liked her a bit better than Reggie overall.

I like that I didn't really see all the twists coming; it felt like every time I thought I'd figured things out it was actually something else, but not in a cheap or badly written way, which is how it's supposed to feel in my opinion. It's good to not be super predictable while also being believable so no twists feel like bullshit. I genuinely didn't expect Safi to have powers at all, and it was really interesting to see an NPC have powers too, or even multiple people in the same game (please don't tell me if that happens in any of the others I haven't played). I love thinking about this world as a whole and the idea that sometimes people in it just... randomly happen to have powers. Max learning that she wasn't the only one in the world who does hits right at that interest for me, and I wish they would've explored that idea just a little bit more (not asking for crossovers or anything, I'd just find it interesting to see someone aware of others with powers like them in this world).

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The Choices:

I think they did a good job of balancing "obviously I'd pick this one" choices with "jesus christ these both suck" choices overall, although I do wish I had more information on what exactly they're asking with some of the major choices (like with Safi at the end, when she asked if I'd stand with her when she came back, I didn't know if she meant that as in the whole "our powers make us gods" thing or what), but I guess that's kinda the point to some extent: just like real life, you don't always know exactly what your choice will immediately result in. For some of the smaller dialogue choices, the game tended to have a habit of "what the option I chose said is not at all what the character proceeded to say," which I never really liked in games with dialog options like that, but that's just me. Overall it felt like the big stuff was (almost) never too obvious to me which option I should pick, but I also didn't have to constantly think "I should've chosen the other thing," which is good.

Major choice highlights:

- I said Chloe died (matched what I actually picked at the end of the first game)

- I told Amanda it was a date, and her and Max later kissed (never pursued Vinh)

- I called Loretta's bluff about telling Gwen about the eavesdropping

- I let Lucas pursue his restraining order against Safi

- I let Gwen burn the USB instead of saving it

- I didn't call out Yasmine for lying about Maya

- I said I wouldn't help the detective, but I did still try to save him later

- I told Safi I could never hurt her

- I told Safi to confront Lucas on stage as herself

- I tried to talk Safi down instead of rushing her

- I told Safi she has my support when she gets back

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Gameplay:

It felt pretty similar to the others in terms of controls of course, although I appreciated the toggle to run the whole time so I didn't have to keep holding the trigger to run (a little annoying it resets whenever you change location, but it still works). I don't remember if this was an option in previous games, but it speeds up movement. Speaking of, I didn't like how limited the range of movement felt, in the sense that if someone was standing too close to the edge of a table, you couldn't walk between them at all, even if it looked like there'd be enough room for you to go through. I also wished the Pulse aura moved with you instead of staying in one place so you wouldn't have to keep turning it off and then back on again in the next spot as you moved (especially when chasing "Max" after the break in). The fact that I couldn't just use it a second time to Pulse the next area without disabling it first added to this issue.

I think this was similar in previous games, but I didn't like how hidden some of the extra choices were at times. I know the point of that is to encourage you to poke around and see what you can interact with wherever you go, but there were times where important story stuff was happening and I wanted to just get right to it, but didn't want to miss extra choices or Polaroids or something, so I had to stop to check anyway. Even then, I still completely missed a good handful of choices highlighted at the end of each chapter and some of them were really frustrating because I either never even saw the thing happening or didn't know a different (often better in my opinion) outcome was even possible. I appreciate the flexibility in the outcomes of a heavily choice-based game, but I find myself having difficulty judging to what extent the options for different outcomes can go. I also get that some of it is probably stuff I never knew could go differently because it was never going to happen given some major choice I made and then I just wasn't given the option afterwards, but sometimes it still felt like I was missing out.

The biggest example of how these frustrated me was when I didn't know you could get Dead World Moses his hot chocolate for him. I literally walked right up to the café counter and looked at it before interacting with him, and I even stopped to look at him before talking and heard Max say it looked like he didn't get his hot chocolate yet. I felt like I'd already checked around for extra stuff before starting the interaction with him and when options are not even visible until you specifically select to look at something/someone, it makes me feel like I spend the extra time checking for nothing; how many times am I supposed to go back to check around the whole area after I press look at each item/character? As for bigger stuff like how I didn't know Gwen could've fought to stay at Caledon, or that Yasmine could've stayed president or stepped down voluntarily, I'm chalking those up to the way I went with major choices related to Max's relationship with them, and that those outcomes would've never been options for me given the major choices I made.

Sidenote: I liked the extra accessibility and gameplay options in the game Settings. I always disliked making dialogue decisions under the pressure of a timer and it was nice to not have to worry about that. Requiring confirmation of major choices was nice to have too because I would've definitely fat-fingered the wrong option a couple times otherwise. Most of the sensitive content warnings weren't necessary for me, so I personally left them off, but I appreciated that they were there for people who do have legitimate trauma with any of that stuff and need a heads up before it's mentioned or shown to them.

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Performance:

This is probably the single biggest weakness of the game in my opinion. It wasn't unplayable by any means, but there were a lot of graphical glitches with the lighting and texture detail popping in and out sometimes. There was even a glitch where Max's Polaroid decided to just float in the air on its own in front of Moses a good couple minutes after I'd already taken a snapshot of him, while I was just talking to him at that point. The lighting glitches honestly sometimes break the sense of atmosphere the game works so hard to build and it can really take you out of the game mentally during a cutscene. It wasn't a deal breaker at all, it just made me laugh a bit and stop taking the cutscene seriously.

The game also had some pretty regular bugs throughout as well. For literally the entire playthrough, opening Crosstalk and going to the "Main Feed" section would not let me scroll on the right side at all; I'd have to either flick the right stick around until it jumps all the way to the bottom of the list, or move the left stick to get out of and back into the Main Feed section. The game also wouldn't give me interaction buttons when looking at people or objects with which to interact a few times, so I couldn't do anything to interact with them until I walked away and came back, after which the prompts would show up again. Apart from that, a lot of dialogue either overlapped at random or cut off other dialogue entirely (specifically dialogue from NPCs to whom you aren't actively speaking), and even though I had it set to performance mode, the frame rate clearly dropped drastically at some points when there wasn't even anything crazy going on, like when I would just walk around the Snapping Turtle or Max's house. I don't actively monitor framerates like this on consoles but I could easily feel how much slower the game was running in those moments, for a good few seconds each. I stand by the fact that I like the game a lot, but it really could've used more polish on the technical side.

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This post ended up being a *lot* longer than I expected. Sorry for going on for so long, but thank you to anyone who took the time to read all this. Let me know what you thought of the game if you've played it, especially compared to other games in the series; I'd love to hear what people here thought.

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