168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Life is Strange has always been a balancing act. It's a series about the mundane and the magical, about everyday life and its protagonists' strange powers. It's simultaneously cool, with a soundtrack that has often trended toward ob🍰scure indie folk cuts, and deeply corny, with characters who say things like “amazeballs”. It emphasizes choice, but within a rigid framework where, regardless of their deꦉcisions, players will largely see the same content and events play out.
It's also an a🔯nthology series that can be about anyone — as indicated by Life is Strange 2, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, a🔥nd True Colors — but it's also the story of Max Caulfield and Chloe Price, with three of the games starring one or both of these fan-favorite characters. It has become a valued artifact of gaming culture that is both ripe for expansion and best left well alone.
💖 Life is Strange: Double Exposure S💫pells The End For Episodic Game Releases
Life is Strang🥂e: Double Exposure is only "episodic" as a way to drum up preorders.
Walking The Life Is Strange Tightrope
Enter 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Life is Strange: Double Exposure, which attempts to walk that narrow tightrope for the duration of꧑ its 8-10 hour campaign. It largely succeeds, but is brought down in th𒊎e moments when it can't quite maintain the balance that makes this series so beloved.
When the game begins, Max is attempting to strike a similar balance. She’s in her late twenties, established in her career as a photographer, and working as the artist-in-residence at the snow-blanketed Caledon University. The trauma of Arcadia Bay is in the past, but she still has texts from Chloe saved in her phone, still follows "that blue-haired girl" on the game's fictional social media𝔉 platform, CrossTalk, and still has a box or two of mementos from her high school days.
I enjoyed these links back to the previous games, but I also appreciated that Double Exposure never resorts to easy nostalgia. There are no "Luke Skywalker showing up in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Mandalorian season two finale" moments here. Double Exposure sets up Max's new home and her new friends and keeps the fo🌠cus on them, and despite what parts of the fandom might think, it wants to leave the past behind and look towards the future.
That includes her best friend Safi, whose murder in the opening chapter serves as the incitingও incident for the narrative and eventual return of Max's time-control powers. Well, kind of. Max's powers come back in a new form, allowing her to travel between two timelines: one where Safi died and one where she's still very much alive.
The game emphasizes the differences between the timel𝔉ines in multiple small ways, including by having more warm, yellow light in the Living World and a washed-out, blue-gray palette in t🅷he Dead World.
Double Exposure Brings Back Environmental Exploration And Extraordinary Powers
Like all previous Life is Strange outings, Double Exposure blends the ordinary with the supernatural. Each one has carried forward the first game's means of interaction with the everyday world. You look at an object꧟ and Max says a sentence or two about its purpose or what it means💟 to her. You talk to people and make dialogue choices that may or may not have effects that ripple forward throughout the story. This is the foundation of the Life is Strange formula and, if it's not working, it doesn't matter if everything else is.
Thankfully, this is an ‘if it isn’t broke, don't fix it’ situation. I still had a great time exploring each of the game's environments, but it does feel pretty limited in scope compared to something like Life is Strange 2, which took players on a road trip across America. Double Exposure has five or so prima𝓀ry locations that it returns to over and over again, co🉐mplete with invisible walls keeping you from exploring too far afield.
But most games aren't this focused on exploring a versio🐲n of the real-world, and I'll always treasure Life is Strange for caring about the boring details of everyday life. Hannah Telle's winning performance as Max (more on that later) really sells that she cares deeply about the p▨eople and things she interacts with throughout Double Exposure. This is her home, and you are a temporary intruder stepping inside of it.
Max's supernatural powers are, as usual, the star of the mechanical show. In my preview of the first🥃 two episodes, I likened it to Titanfall 2's Effect and Cause mission, but with lower stakes and lower demand for player skill. A late game set piece feels a li♏ttle like Ocean's Eleven spread across the two timelines. But both those comparisons call to mind works that have much more urgency. The mechanic works well, in the contexts Deck Nine uses, and I wouldn't want it to take the game in a more action-focused direction.
Max Is A✨ Total Delinquent In Life Is Strange: Double Exposure
Max is committed to invading everyone🐻's privacy in Life is🌄 Strange: Double Exposure.
Life Is Strange: Double Exposure Struggles With Being Corny And Technically Thorny
When you break it all down, Double Exposure has two big weaknesses. First, the writing ♋can be extremely corny. I complained about this in my preview — highlighting Safi's quips as the worst of it. Vi🔜nh, a former Caledon student who stayed on at the school to work as assistant to Yasmin, Safi's mom and the school's president, is similarly cringe-y. He's one of the two optional romances in the game, but whenever he flirted with Max, it struck me as kinda icky.
He isn't a bad character, per se, but both he and Safi were undercut fairly often by the kinds of lines Deck Nine gives them. There's also a moment in the first chapter where Gwen, a Caledon prof, wants to give Max a fistbump because they're ‘bad reputation twins’ at the school that struck me as similarly goofy and tin-eared. The 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:cringe never goes away, but you get used to it.
Max Around Caledon University In Life Is Strange: Double Exposure
Telle's earnest, likable return to Max goes a long way toward shoring up any deficiencies✨ in the writing. It's rare that a performance makes a game (and the reverse is also true: it's rare that I dislike a game because of bad voice acting). But Telle was always one of the best parts of the game for me, with a vulnerable performance that frequently had me on Max's side, ♑even if she was doing heinous stuff in the name of helping Safi.
It also helps that the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:motion capture work is fantastic. This is the best looking Life is Strange game by a significant margin and that may just be because it marks the first time the series isn't targeting a PS4 or Xbox One launch. Deck Nine has plans ꦆfor a Switch version at a later date, but the decision to deprioritize last-gen hardware was a good one. Though the game's art style remains stylized, the facial capture feels incredibly real and specific.
Second, there are some technical issues, too. In its pre-release state, Double Exposure is pretty buggy. I and two other writers at TheGamer who were playing the game pre-launch all ran into a pretty game-breaking bug that cut out the audio, then brought an already-completed objective back up. We were able to g💟et past it with a very specific workaround courtesy of the game's PR team, but the glitch seems pretty widespread. The game largely runs well, otherwise. The biggest graphical hitch I encountered consistently was pop-in, which is common in this kind of cinematic game that needs to switch from shot to shot fairly quickly. But still, it's jarring to see the textures arrive a second after the object they're supposed to be texturing appears before your eyes.
Life Is Strange, But Also, Not That Strange
This is a high point for Life is Strange’s graphical and performance work, but it doesn't feel especially ambitious otherwise. The story is strong, but doesn't move the needle for branching path narratives. The setting is quite limited, offering only a chunk of Caledon Un🏅iversity to explore. And the dialogue is still cheesy in the ways it has been since its inception. But maybe fans don’t want this part of the series’ identity to change, because what would it be without it?
As modest as it is, it still accomplishes what it set out to do. It's a good, fun Life is Strange game, and there isn't much else like that. It maintains the delicate balance between campy and comforting throughout, but you just can't help but no🌌tice that the tightrope is only a few feet off the ground.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Life is Strange: Double Exposu𒐪re
Reviewed on PS5.
- Top Critic Avg: 71/100 Critics Rec: 54%
- Released
- October 29, 2024
- ESRB
- M For Mature: Mild Blood, Strong Language, 🍬Suggestive⛦ Themes, Use of Drugs, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Deck Nine
- Publisher(s)
- 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Square Enix
- A well-paced, exciting story keeps you invested
- Hannah Telle's strong performance as Max grounds the game
- The best the series has ever looked
- Man, this series is still super corny
- Technical issues hamper the game somewhat
- The setting is pretty limited
- Doesn't feel especially ambitious
﷽ Life Is Straඣnge: Double Exposure Has Great Fake Book Titles
Deck Nine's writers nailed the modern publishing industry's namingꦍ 𒉰conventions.
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