HomeFeaturesLife is Strange: Double Exposure
Max Caulfield is a terrible detective - I wish her all the bestBad cop, bad cop
Bad cop, bad cop
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Square Enix
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Square Enix
Lots of spoilers for Double Exposure ahead - you’ve been warned.
A major theme of Life Is Strange is the inability to change the misfortunes of your life. Powers throughout the series are manifestations of trauma, a coping mechanism for all the stacking psychic damage that is smooshed upon protagonists like so much plot avocado on character toast.
Take Max. Her entire history is one of hurt. She witnesses a friend’s murder and is filled with regrets - she wants to alter the past and change the future. Daniel, the telekinetic child ofLife Is Strange 2, also saw his father shot dead - he wants control over objects sufficient to stop a bullet. Alex inLife Is Strange: True Colorsgrew up in foster care - she is a psychic lightning rod for other people’s fear, rage, and sorrow, while being reluctant to embrace those emotions in herself.
This power-analogising of humanity’s psychological hangups (the engine that gives Life Is Strange stories much of their weight) continues in Double Exposure. In a later episode, we find out that Safi (the murdered woman) has her own power: the ability to shapeshift and mimic others. Long story short, it seems to be the result of an image-obsessed mother pushing her daughter to be perfect in the wake of her father leaving.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Square Enix
Even though a lot of the storytelling in Double Exposure often confounds me, you can clearly see emotional introspection is what drives the game. These people are broken, but in that brokenness is beauty and resilience. They arekintsugipeople. “What if I like the way my scars define me?” asks Max in a sardonic tone after seeing a self-help book on a bedside table. “What if they give me character?” She’s being snarky about it, as anyone cursed with nosebleeds and time travel might be. But in a way, she’s not wrong. You can’t undo a trauma, but you can choose to look at it as a scar that turns to gold.
All of this well-observed and psychologically literate characterisation is great. It also makes the ridiculous shit that characters do or say in Double Exposure mildly frustrating.
A piece of paper hangs out of a briefcase, and instead of just yanking it out the rest of the way, Max goes on a dimension-dipping prankathon to get the briefcase key. She tells people to go away instead of questioning them more fully on the weird things they saw. She routinely neglects to call or text her friends to fact check. I don’t know what is happening in her brain.
She doesn’t lead with the most urgent questions, but gets herself caught up in mundane tasks. Did I really need to go snoop on two secret society members before asking two-legged hair gel advertisement Vinh about a recent act of vandalism? No. He was standing right there the entire time. Max could have just asked. She is a terrible detective. She is Veronica Mars, if Veronica Mars were an alien who loves human crime shows yet had never been to earth.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Square Enix
The implausible lack of communication that happens in the game is probably the most irritating. If you were given the ability to talk to the deceased in a murder case, you might sit them down for hours and go through everything in their personal and professional life to understand what’s going on. Max asks a single question about what enemies Safi might have, and then basically ignores her. In an investigation, your first instinct may be to go to the source. Max goes to every puddle of muddy water except the source.
Double Exposure constantly seeks to invest you in the reality of its world, yet there is barely any sense to the way Max behaves as a person. She is very often a flimsy piece of narrative fabric, stretched, bent, and folded into whatever shape the plot or gameplay demands. She constantly takes insensible actions, and jams herself into black and white decision-making before actually knowing anything hard or fast about the world around her.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Square Enix
This is what I meant in my review when I explained it was a sequel of “ambivalence”. Max is both a well-realised human dealing with terrible memories, and an awful finder-outer of facts. She is able to step into her fears and confront her worst horrors, yet unable to send a text saying: “yo, did you know someone called Maya?”. She can bumrush a cerebrally horrendous hurricane of the past, yet is unable to surreptitiously check more than 2 emails in any given stranger’s inbox at a time. She is an accident of wacky plot, and the result of some keen character writing. I really hope she gets the healing she deserves. Because if anyone else dies around her, I’m calling the actual police. And I hate those guys.
