4Gamers – Hands-on Preview | Time Travel in Life is Strange: Double Exposure

We still have to wait a while for the new Life is Strange: Double Exposure game to hit the gaming scene, but Square Enix has already given us the chance to play a short chapter.

In this new story, Max Caulfield returns to the scene, years after the events of the original story. She promised herself she would never use her powers again, until she found one of her best friends, Safi, dead in the snow. Just as she grew, her powers also grew from simple rewinding to the ability to travel between timelines. With her advanced powers, she can travel to a time when Safi is still alive to search for information that could help her not only solve the murder, but stop him as well.

Gameplay-wise, we’re well aware of the Life is Strange formula. You can explore different locations and you can view and investigate different things. You can always view the other timeline, and a shadow of what happened in the same location at a different time will appear. And in certain places that are hidden from others in the room, you can then move from one timeline to another. This means that you can move things from one timeline to another to use them there, or you can distract someone at one point and then go back to another place at the other time and do your thing there without anyone noticing. As the title suggests, Max hasn’t lost her passion for photography, so you can hunt for Polaroids throughout the different chapters again, just like in the original Life is Strange. Unfortunately, after one chapter, we can’t fully appreciate the consequences of our choices, although we do get hints here and there that these consequences do exist. Life wouldn’t be Strange if the story wasn’t shaped by the choices you make along the way.

The Life is Strange games have always been eye-catching, but with the many technological advances that have occurred since the first game, the game also looks better than ever. Unfortunately, the camera controls are a bit clumsy. You can’t glide smoothly over space using the camera, but you have to make do with a camera that moves between different angles to explore the space. Of course, we’re also a bit concerned about how Square Enix has integrated the two very different endings of the original game into this new title. If the game took place in different dimensions instead of timelines, it would be easy to explain, but it’s about the present and the past as far as we know. In addition to the beautifully designed graphics, we also get some great acting from the voice actors. The sound design is also on point once again. A bit of atmospheric music on the occasional note makes the whole thing feel very cinematic again.