What did you do in 2015?
Maybe you played video games back then, so for a refresher, 2015 was the year of the release of the sweeping epic Metal Gear Solid Vsomewhat polarizing Fallout 4and indie favorites Rocket League and Undertale. If you were one of the few people who played Wii U, you may have been lurking in the lobbies of Splatoon.
2015 was also the launch year for Square Enix’s appropriately codenamed sci-fi soap opera What if? before it was released into the world as Life is Strange. It was an unusual release for a publisher known mostly as a role-playing titan in the industry. And even, uh, stranger, the publisher allowed developer Dontnod to create that original choice-based teen drama right after the release of their action-adventure game Remember Meout-of-left-field vision that paid off; Life is Strange spawned two sequels, multiple DLC sequels, a remastered reissue and now, almost 10 years later: Life is Strange: Double Exposure, developed by series veterans Deck Nine (Life is Strange: True Colors, The Expanse: The Treacherous Series).
Actually, all this reminiscing about everything that’s happened since 2015 is a subplot of Double Exposure. We finally get the first direct sequel to the series, which follows the original Life Is Strange protagonist Max Caulfield, now a 20-year-old photographer ten years removed from the cataclysmic events of the original title.
Coming into focus
Adding to the nostalgia effect is the return of original voice actress Hannah Telle as the voice of Max, reprising the character she grew up with. “We’re thrilled she was excited to be back – luckily we didn’t even have to think about what we’d choose without her,” Game Director Jonathan Stauder he told us at the PAX West preview.
The original Life is Strange followed Max in high school, where both player and character discover that she has the supernatural ability to pause and rewind time. A decade later in Exposure, after discovering the lifeless body of her friend Safi, Max is forced to return to the powers she gave up after the original game ended. No, you can’t remove the drama from Life is Strange. After initially trying to undo the tragedy, Max accidentally discovers that she has developed an additional power: the ability to enter and exit alternate timelines – which, not coincidentally, is the main hook of Double Exposure.
But what about the inevitable fact that the original game is a culmination of choices that lead to two vastly different outcomes?
“Both endings to the original Life is Strange are canon,” says the narrative director Happy Kuan. “Near the beginning of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Safi becomes curious about Max’s past, and in that conversation the player will choose which LiS ending they want to use for their gameplay.” Yes, deck nine keeps the purity of player choice intact by not canonizing any event, it’s up to you.
“I got into more projects later in the show’s life, so I struggled with [a series’ past] is something I’m pretty used to,” explained Stauder, a veteran of Telltale Games and its multiple franchises before taking on the Life is Strange franchise.
Gameplay exposure
Our demo began at a later point in the game after Max discovers her new powers, in a scene that puts you in the middle of a tense custody battle between her teacher friend, Moses, and a local police detective.
Max arrives at school after class to find Moses on the verge of arrest, anticipating an imminent raid on his classroom. Visiting tensions between minorities and the small-town police force may be the show’s most common plot twist, but the real-life events of the past decade have helped make the ramifications of Max’s latest predicament less ambiguous and more decisive than ever before.
Luckily for Moses, we can play cat and mouse with the police thanks to Max’s ability to see the tears of light hanging in the air, which at the push of a button allows him to instantly jump between two alternate timelines: one in Max’s present reality, and one in which Moses and her they just rest in the room. This allows us to rearrange the raid scene to our liking. Phew.
What’s particularly neat about Exposure’s supernatural hook is that it affects gameplay just as much as the series’ infamous choices; from time to time while solving the puzzles of this particular police scene, you can see blue holograms projected in front of Max (think “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi”), indicating where people and things exist in other timelines.
This made the research more complex, producing several “A-ha!” moments in the process. Of course, it’s not exactly psychic-shooting-people-across-the-room à la Contactbut it felt much more interactive than a series of button presses in a slot or a dialog option that pops up.
But other than that, all the details of Life Is Strange are almost identical to any previous dialogue initiation and walking around, albeit nicer. It was a pleasant surprise, however, how quickly it became apparent that this was the first game in the series to be made with motion capture by the voice actors themselves. Immediately, character animations are greatly improved in a subtle and overt way, due to eyeball tracking and less stiff movements.
We have contributed a lot to make the emotions of the characters even more intuitive than in the past games. And for a series that’s 99% about human interaction, these improvements immediately stand out as some of the most effective and natural uses of mocap technology in a game of this scale to date.
Life is a switch
Yes, our demo was run on a high-performance PC, but a specialized port is coming to the Switch. So far, the only time frame he’s committed to is after the game’s worldwide launch at the end of October, but the priority is availability of the game on Nintendo’s handheld console, Square representatives told us.
“The group working on the Nintendo port is called Engine Software. They did a good job working with us to make sure the game was as good as possible on that platform,” Kuan says of how the Switch version came to be. “We used some advanced features of Unreal (especially Lumen and Nanite) that would be difficult to use on Switch. So they have to relight the game with baked lighting instead of dynamic lighting (Lumen).”
Engine Software’s previous work on Nintendo handheld ports includes the first two No More Heroes titles, Ni no Kuni and Little Nightmares II, so the team has the form to turn in decent Switch ports. “In general, they had to determine how to replicate or replace those more intensive parts of the process, making sure the game was as close to the high-end platforms as possible, but still able to perform well.”
As for the release of the Nintendo version of this one, we’ll keep you updated as information for Life is Strange: Double Exposure develops. (Sorry.)
Life is Strange: Double Exposure releases on other platforms on October 29. A Switch edition is not yet available at the time of writing.
