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Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Double Exposure. Feel free to skip to the end for the final verdict if you want to avoid spoilers.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is billed as the first direct sequel in this series of adventure/choice driven RPGs. After the first game featured wildly divergent endings, the developers made the smart choice of setting up future stories as stand-alone that only briefly touch on what happened since the first game. Because of the premise Deck Nine has chosen for DE, it is impossible to discuss this game without tackling spoilers.
The very first Life is Strange follows socially awkward, possibly autistic teenage girl Max Caulfield as she has difficulty navigating the social realities of high school. She moved away from her hometown of Arcadia Bay at a young age, only returning at the age of 18 to attend it's prestigious Blackwell Academy. While there, she reconnects with her troubled childhood friend Chloe Price and also discovers she has the ability to rewind time. A vision of the future tells her that a massive storm is coming to destroy the town, and while spending a whole week trying to avert disaster, Max and Chloe solve a murder mystery and uncover the seedy underbelly of their hometown. At the end, Max must decide whether to use her time travel powers one last time to prevent the disaster for good by allowing Chloe to die, nullifying the entire week's past event, or to save her best friend one last time and let the storm take its course.
Upon finishing every LIS game it will give you a full breakdown of choices, and the final choice of LIS1 (referred to by fans as "Bay versus Bae") is split right down the middle. Keep this in mind, that if any followup were to happen to LIS1 that any misstep will end up alienating 50% of the people who played the game and who are your potential biggest customers. Like other LIS sequels, DE is upfront about asking you at the beginning which choice you made at the end of LIS1. As it is a direct sequel set 10 years later, you can choose whether or not you decided to save Arcadia Bay, as well as whether Max and Chloe remained strictly friends or became romantic partners. To address the elephant in the room, no matter if you chose friendship or romance, Max and Chloe are separated. In an entire game that feels like badly written fan fiction, how the Max/Chloe relationship feels the MOST like bad fan fiction. If they were romantically involved, Chloe writes a breakup letter to Max claiming she's a free spirit that can't be tied down, a direct contradiction of her previous characterization. If they were friends, Max and Chloe go from being inseparable to literally hating each other and Max comparing herself negatively to Chloe's other close friend Rachel Amber.
This all serves to make Max herself feel like she hasn't aged a day. She's supposed to be 28 years old now but is still adorkably awkward and unable to function in social situations, though she will make very flirty and openly horny comments outside of the player's control. Weirdly enough, if the marketing itself didn't say that a decade had passed, you'd hardly know. Besides Max having regressed as a character to herself at the start of LIS1, there are no dates or mentions of passage of time in the game itself, a detail that was present in previous LIS games. I'd almost suggest that the reason for this is because they hadn't figured out when exactly this game was supposed to take place as they were writing it, and just left it open until it was too late to go back and change anything.
It begs the question then, if DE felt the need to practically wipe the slate clean, why even bring Max back? The obvious reason is because it's great marketing, and I wouldn't be the only super fan who got suckered in by this. I could almost forgive it if the game's writing and story felt fresh at all, but for something that lives and dies by this, it is easily the biggest fault with DE. The basic premise is that Max, having been so traumatized by what happened at the end of LIS1, has spent the past decade on the move and has now settled down at Caledon University to teach a photography class. Everybody from her past is out of her life now and she has not used her time rewind powers since LIS1. While hanging out with her new friends Moses and Safi one evening, she witnesses Safi get murdered. Upon witnessing another traumatic event, Max discovers her powers have awakened again, this time in a new form: now Max can shift between different timelines to one where her new best friend Safi is alive. Max's goal becomes to use this new ability to catch the killer in the alternate timeline and save alt-Safi's life. It's a genuinely intriguing premise but also a total misdirection.
It's these early parts of murder investigation that will make you question why Max is even here. There's nothing really unique to her character that screams "Max needed to be the protagonist of this story" and the game itself does such a poor job of establishing the relationships between Max, Moses and Safi that you just kind of have to take it on its face that these three are ride or die friends for life for the story to work at all. Of course, all is not what it seems and eventually the story becomes a complete rehash of LIS1 and THAT is when you see why they made Max the main character. Where episode 1 of this game spends its time retconning LIS1's ending and episode 2 will make you wonder why this game even exists, episodes 3 through 5 are basically a bad fan fiction retread of LIS1, with episode 5 making multiple direct spoiler references to LIS1's ending. It's truly baffling then that the marketing had the balls to say this game was the perfect entry for new players to the series. For a series that functioned well as an anthology collection of mostly unrelated stories, DE then ends with teasing a super hero teamup of other people with powers that makes me wonder if this is a corporate mandate from Square Enix.
So, if the writing sucks, is there anything redeeming about this game? The gameplay itself is nothing to write home about. Gameplay was never the strong suit of LIS but here it feels even thinner because it's basically impossible to fail. Usually you will need go from one timeline to another to traverse an obstacle or talk to specific characters and there will always be a conveniently placed time portal. The game itself at least looks very good if you have a beefy enough PC to run it, and DE once again uses the impressive motion capture technology that True Colors had. The music is your usual twee indie fair; by now you will have decided if you like or hate it. The performances are pretty good; Hannah Telle returns and knocks it out of the park as Max and most of the other actors are doing their damned best to sell the really awful writing.
Verdict: In the end, it's really hard to justify paying full price for a game clearly written by developers who either don't care any more or never did and just feels like you're playing someone's bad fan fiction. Matters are made worse by the absolutely terrible value for your money DLC. You only very briefly get to play with your pet cat in episode 2 and I don't know if it was a bug but not every DLC outfit is available at all times throughout the story. It is actually really funny that they did the early access period ensuring that the biggest fans who would be most disappointed would get to experience their disappointment up front.