Bosterm Life is Strange: Double Exposure Review

This review only has spoilers for the first game. I first played the original Life Is Strange in 2016. The game had a profound impact on me like few other stories have. Eight years later, this new game manages to profoundly disrespect the original story and is built upon a fundamentally flawed premise. The first game ends with an impactful final choice: save Max's best friend and love interest Chloe or sacrifice Chloe to save many more lives. The final episode of the original game is titled "Polarized", symbolizing the dramatically different outcomes for Max depending on which choice the player makes. The many fans, including myself, who chose to save Chloe did so because of Max and Chloe's powerful bond and love story. And the game ends with Chloe telling Max, "I'll always be with you," and Max replies, "Forever." While many lives are lost in the storm, Max and Chloe survive and take comfort in each other, promising to remain forever bonded. Max and Chloe's love story remains one of the most powerful in video games and is significant in the history of LGBT representation in gaming. Double Exposure takes the dual endings of the first game and decides that Max ended up in basically the same place a decade later, which is absurd and takes away the impact of the player's choice in the first game. It furthermore disrespects the fans who chose to save Chloe by separating Max and Chloe for no reason other than it would be inconvenient to include Chloe in the game (and according to a former Deck Nine employee, higher ups in Deck Nine and Square Enix do not like Chloe). Effectively, this decision takes away all of the agency players had in making the final choice in the original game and does not restore any agency by giving players the option to reunite Max and Chloe. The game does absolutely nothing interesting or substantial to justify their separation. Even if you don't care about Max and Chloe's relationship, the breakup serves little point in the narrative. It’s all setup with no payoff. Instead, this new game tells a mediocre story with choices that do not matter and an edition of the game that costs an extra $20 for little more than a few bonus scenes. It also attempts to treat Life Is Strange as an MCU story, when the whole point of the first game was to subvert superhero tropes. It's so bad that it's funny, until you remember that the game was made under toxic working conditions where alt-right employees attempted to include white supremacy symbols in the game. I will give the game a few points because it is far more explicit with its LGBT inclusion than previous entries in the series. But ultimately that rings hollow considering how they treated Max and Chloe's relationship. The good news is, Max and Chloe's love story is more powerful than this silly excuse for a story, and the fans of the series can continue to believe in the true canon: that Max and Chloe stay together the rest of their lives. And there are literally thousands of fan works that tell their story far better than this game, written by people who actually understand Life Is Strange.