Life is Strange: Double Exposure has a fantastic first chapter

I was enjoying my time with the new Life is Strange game until I encountered a game-breaking crash

Deck Nine/Square Enix

Update: Following the publishing of this preview, a representative for Square Enix reached out with a workaround for the crash I experienced, along with an assurance that the issue had been fixed in the retail version of the game on PC — we can confirm this is true now that the game's advanced access period has started. Original story follows.

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Despite its very cringe-inducing writing and some questionable choices, I was a fan of the original Life is Strange. It had a lot of problems, but it was an interesting concept executed mostly well, and it kickstarted a series that has only gotten better with time. After original developer Dontnod stepped away from the series, Deck Nine stepped up, and 2021’s Life is Strange: True Colors was a masterclass in choice-driven story games. Now, the new team is returning to old characters, with original character Max Caulfield front and center once more with a new set of powers and plenty of struggles. 

The most noticeable change in Life is Strange: Double Exposure is that Max is actually written well. The constant self-doubt is gone, she’s got a strong personality and a clear motivation, and she actually feels like she has real agency. There’s still a lot of the dorkiness that was present in Max’s first outing, but it’s been refined into a charming character trait, one facet of many that make her an interesting character. In the first chapter’s four hours of gameplay, I saw more of Max’s actual personality than I did in an entire game and change previously, and that’s a huge step forward. 

GLHF / Square Enix

The mechanical approach to storytelling is largely unchanged, but you don’t fix what’s broken, and Life is Strange is well established in its own tropes and design language. You walk, you talk, you make choices — it ain’t much, but it works well to tell the story they’re trying to tell. I had hoped that this would finally be the game where I could walk faster than a snail riding a tortoise, but hey, maybe in the next one. 

I did see a few glimpses of what I call the Fallout 4 Effect, where the very brief descriptions of dialogue choices didn’t quite match what Max actually said, leading to a few situations where I felt like I was cheated very slightly. I didn’t mean to piss off the cool fellow professor with the sick tattoos, I just thought what I was saying was going to be nicer. I hope she forgives me in future chapters. 

Story-wise, there’s an interesting setup here, too. Max, who hasn’t used her rewind powers in years, has become an established photographer and now acts as an artist in residence and professor at a university. She has friends, a few love interests – Max is unapologetically queer and it’s great – and plenty to look forward to in life. 

GLHF / Square Enix

And then it all comes crashing down when one of her friends gets shot and killed. It’s a bit of a bummer, and in trying to deal with it all, she accidentally awakens her new powers, which lets her do a quick hop over to an alternate universe where her friend didn’t die. It’s a logical evolution of her powers, and I’m sure it has some really cool gameplay ramifications, but despite being allowed to talk about chapter 2 in this preview, I can’t do so. 

That’s because the game crashes every time I try to activate the new power for the first time, in a scripted and very mandatory sequence very early into chapter 2. I have tried this on three different PCs at this point, all with differing hardware – including a laptop that was very much not built for gaming and sounded like it was a few RPM short of a jet engine – in an attempt to troubleshoot the issue, but it crashed at the same point every single time. What does chapter 2 hold? I can’t say. I can say that I hope the issue gets fixed before the game’s advanced access launch in a matter of hours because I was enjoying what I’d played and it would be really nice to see what happens next.