[No spoilers] Echoes That Didn’t Quite Land, My Feelings on Life Is Strange: Double Exposure

Hello everyone, i will apologise in advance for my long and weird post but i want to add my two cents in LiS Double Exposure. Before i start i need to preface what LiS means to me.

I am an avid adventure gamer since childhood. As I am in my mid-thirties right now, I can still remember the days of Myst, Amerzone, Sinking Island, The Beast Within, Monkey Island or Broken Sword (and so and so on) even to my two favourite games of all time Syberia and The Longest Journey (don't tell me to pick one of the two it's like choose between two of my children). I used to love the riddles and puzzles but soon with the advent of the two aforementioned games i fell in love with the story, character and world building. I play mostly games which involve a story especially one with interpersonal complex relationships like in Syberia where Kate Walker had to rediscover herself via her journey and in TLJ where April Ryan went from the saviour to almost a nobody in the second game trying to find her way into the world.

LiS for me represented the revival of this world. Back then there wasa long time that where i had played a good adventure game. Beyond Two Souls was a good game which left me longing but Heavy Rain was the "heavy" hitter that I was searching for but it had been i think 4 years since i played it. I fullfiled my need for fantasy and world building in books and stories in the meantime but I wanted again to play a game that would allow me to immerse myself into.

There comes LiS and it was the first time for a long time that i immersed myself into a world again. I loved every aspect of it, the bond between Chloe and Max seemed natural, the people around Arcadia Bay, the stories about Chloe losing her dad and the step-dad replacing him etc might be an easy trope but it was done right. How Rachel Amber was this perfect being in Chloe's mind but then we found out that she was as human as everybody else, this part specifically was gold to me, it was like when you idolise someone and u find out they are a fraud.

The rewind power, the creepy professor, the "ghost" of Rachel Amber hanging above the relationship of Max and Chloe, Joyce and the struggling household everything blend really well into each other. And it was a gay relationship or better a same-sex relationship finally done right, we fell in love with the way they fell in love not because they were gay, there was a friendship that the two build upon. Chloe forgiving Max for losing their friendship once she moved away and so much more. it has been 10 years that i played the game and i still remember everything vividly because it left and imprint on me because you could feel the love of the original developers on the game and the script. Don't Nod made a superb job but sadly they weren't allowed to finish it.

Now I have to be honest with something. There was once a time that me and a friend wrote a story about something and we were approached to sell the rights and the story itself. We decided to do so, because we had no money and it was a decent sum which allowed us to get back on our feet and finish our studies and find good jobs which helped us in building our lives. Thinking back though I don't know if I would have done the same. The product that was created from our story was nothing like we envisioned and even when we approached the developers to help them pro-bono we were pretty much rudely kicked out and we were reminded of the NDA we signed and what was looming for us if we ever bothered them again.

So when Square Enix stepped in and took LiS from Don't Nod, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I enjoyed LiS: Before the Storm but it was mainly because of the seeds that the original LiS put in terms of "Who is Rachel Amber? What is her deal?". The ending of Before The Storm with the mother in the fire building was mega cringe and really crapilly made but when i closed the game I was like "Yeap, this was find, I enjoyed it". So I understand that Don't Nod had financial troubles and they had to relinquish their game to Square Enix but it sucks man...it really sucks when the original developer gets shafted (I get that I am probably projecting here a bit now). And Don't Nod created some other interesting titles such as "Tell me Why" which was a really nice game and Twin Mirror that had a lot of potential but you could see they run out of budget in the end and they could not finish it properly and above all Lost Records which is a LiS clone pretty much which I thorougly savoured.

Anyway, I enjoyed for the most parts all the other LiS games and unlike many I liked True Colours, it had all the elements of a LiS game, the small town, the nice music, an interesting same-sex romance, some nice characters, the RPG sequence was genius. Which brings me to Double Exposure. I will be straightforward with you, I boycotted the game, I did not buy it. I was pissed off with Square Enix and i did not want them to get any of my dime. I continued the boycott of the game ever until a friend with whom we talk about adventure games and LiS games, gave me his PS5 disc for free and he said "take it i also bought it second hand so they did not get any of my money technically". I played the game, thought about it for a couple of months and I will say that my feelings could be summed in the following statement:

"if it wasn't Max's story and the massive disrepcted to the original LiS, I would say, it wasn't a completely terrible game but it sucked hard in some parts".

I won't go on a rant and trash everything but i will say the following. How can you make a game in 2024/2025 and be worse mechanically than the game in 2015? The game felt like Deck Nine studied LiS and tried to create a formula to recreate the magic.

The characters felt that they were made by cardboard (like Max's motel sequence in the end), there was no depth, I did not fall in love with them, I did not even like most of them. They were one-dimensional and all of them were either gay, bi, pansexual or everything else for the sake of being something other than straight. Lucas was the boring Temu version of Jefferson, most of the writing was pedantic and immature, the dialogue sometimes made no sense for example during the roast in the snapping turtle the sequences of dialogue were...questionable. The cop (I forgot his name) who appeared and disappeared, the friendship with Safi which also felt superficial and forced , the "romance" option of Vihn? and the Avengers ending with all of them sitting in the turtle and Max doing a rally (like any of it matters) and with the catch-phrase in the end "Max Caufield will return". When i saw the latter i was like "Is this...is this a threat?".

Anyway I am disappointed, because they disrespected a game that revitalised the world of Adventure games and finally we got so many story driven games out of it. The game felt formulaic, like the writers found the aforementioned formula but did not believe in their script. They seemed to be changing the goal posts again and again and leaving plot holes or creating Deux Ex machina plots to handle the characters (e.g. the cop).

I kept the most important for the end, the "choice" of Chloe is dead / alive. This for me was extremely disrespectful and poorly made. Imo keep a canonical ending. For example in World of Warcraft both the Horde and the Alliance fight the same raids but canonically only one kills the bosses, so a decision is made for the canon based on this. For me they should have decided one ending and for it to be done and build the story from there. Now they chose this shoddy option and in both cases they under delivered. I could not feel Max's sorrow for Chloe when I chose her to be dead (as i did in the original LiS) nor I bought the story of their "breakup" when I replayed it to choose her as alive.

Finally I will say the obvious, the comparison between Star Wars: a New Hope and Star Wars: The Force Awakens is palpable here as well. They tried to recreate LiS as close as possible, with Caledon being Blackwell, Safi the new Chloe, student drama in both, teacher is a villain etc.

I could go on and on like how Max is a teacher there who never taught or that she resembles more of a student than a teacher but what I want mostly to transmit is my disappointment and frankly sadness for the state of a beloved (to me) story / game and these characters.

I did not want to write a post about but I just saw the trailer of the new game and the return of Chloe and I felt pissed off.

Sorry again for the length of my post, I hope I did not insult anyone and if you liked Double Exposure nothing against you, I am happy for you actually.

Cheerio.