In 2015, Square Enix published and DON’TNOD developed Life is Strange released and changed many people’s lives with its intriguing mystery, exploration of superpowers in time-rewinding and, crucially, its groundbreaking depiction of sapphic love in teenagehood.  I say this because I was one of those people. Not yet out as the trans woman I am now, that original game cracked my egg, and made me see myself in the blue-haired riotous punk that is Chloe Price and the more reserved, contemplative but selfless Max Caulfield. The story of Life is Strange taught me that femininity can come in many shapes and forms. Naturally, the title became a touchstone for me and thousands of others. Nine years later, we have Life is Strange: Double Exposure from the True Colors developer Deck Nine: a follow-up and wholly new story for Max Caulfield, sans Chloe.

Just a few weeks ago I previewed the first two episodes of Double Exposure, walking away from it optimistic for the future, even with the revisitation of Max without her bestie-turned-bae causing pause. Having now cleared the whole new venture, with the remaining three chapters, it brings me no pleasure to tell you that the game fundamentally doesn’t understand and frankly ignores, what made the original such a milestone. It whiffs the ending and feels a lot less like an artistic and thoughtful return to Max. It’s a crying shame if I’m honest.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is set a decade after the original game’s events and sees Max at Caledon University, serving her residency where she shares her photography knowledge with those around her. She finds a series of new friends in people like Moses, an adorably cuddly teddy bear of a guy who’s majoring in science and has a real thing for Astronomy, and her best friend Safi, a poet with spunk who is the daughter of Caledon’s president. Also in her orbit are others such as the adorable bartender Amanda who Max harbours a crush on but is still divided about pursuing as she’s still trying to shake off Chloe, who is either dead or Max’s ex (depending on the dialogue choice you make early on). Having not used her time-rewinding powers in years, Max is living out a pretty standard life with everyday problems 20-something-year-olds typically have… until Safi is murdered in cold blood late one night. Until someone close to Max has their life cruelly ripped away from them once again.

Attempting to rewind time just this one last time to save Safi, Max splits the universe and creates two timelines: one where Safi is alive and one where she is dead. Now having a unique situation where she can find out as much as possible about Safi while she’s around and post-mortem, our hero sets out to solve the mystery of a murdered friend once more. Suddenly you learn more about the rest of the cast. Gwen, a trans character (frontline for the first time in a Life is Strange game!) is a writer and teacher at Caledon, serving as Safi’s mentor. Lucas is another successful writer on campus who not long ago published a best-selling book. Vinh is Yasmin’s assistant and head of a frat society called Abraxas. Peel back the curtains on each of them, and you learn all of these figures seem to have slighted Safi or have issues with her. All have their motives for taking Safi’s life.

There’s plenty of time spent getting to know the effect Safi has on people’s lives too. We got to learn a sufficient amount about Safi before and after her death and it left a crushing feeling inside me as I saw Max grieving once more, trying to pick herself back up off her feet and also work out just what on Earth is going on. The mood in these moments is palpable. Max can open a door that lets her travel between two different realities of Caledon University, and you strikingly see a juxtaposition of a campus in the middle of winter in the Midwest prepping for Christmas and the holidays, promising an exciting end-of-year party where Krampus will show up. In the other timeline though, you see a campus in mourning. The staff and students haven’t gotten around to hanging up those holiday decorations yet. A majority of that good stuff is all in those first two chapters before the game enters breakneck speeds and barely lets you have time to sit with anything, but more on that in a bit.

I say largely the prettiest because there are a handful of things that ripped me out of the experience. Life is Strange: Double Exposure, at least on PlayStation 5, isn’t a stranger to a series of bugs and other less nice problems. Some are more minor but just don’t look good, including characters’ hair clipping through clothes and the more minor NPCs just looking a little funky. The more egregious issues for me included audio totally disappearing from the experience until I relaunched the game. One humorous instance that I’m sure wasn’t the studio’s intention was when I had to attempt to distract a character by turning a radio on. It annoyed the character to my delight, but he was reacting to no radio chatter or music. Just nothing.

Puzzles take advantage of the exploration of two timelines. Often you’ll need to gather items, information or clues in one timeline that Max can then take with her to the other to present to a character. That’s largely how the puzzle-solving and investigative work is conducted in-game, admittedly not too dissimilar to the original title’s idea of taking advantage of the knowledge of time (instead via rewinding) to overcome obstacles in your way. It’s an engaging enough re-skin, with the big distinction being that Max can ‘pulse,’ getting silhouette previews of what’s going on in the timeline. This is aptly used to overhear conversations or notice a notepad with information is in another place than the current timeline you’re in, further prompting you to jump back. It’s not the most original or inventive new power or means of exploration for Max, but it is one of my favourite parts of Double Exposure. Slipping through different timelines and finding threads for the mystery made me feel like I was an interdimensional detective sleuth, solving the murder of my best friend.

Where does that mystery go? Well, that’s the game’s biggest issue. It doesn’t go much of anywhere and where it does is thoroughly uninteresting. The end of chapter two teases who the murderer may be and this tease feels exciting. The evidence is damning and you’re curious to see where it goes. Then when it nears the later chapters, players don’t get the definitive answers they’re after. It hand waves explaining properly what led to Safi’s demise because there is so much else going on, supernatural and otherwise, it decides to focus on instead. None of it is interesting. It is explored throughout all three of the final chapters of the game and makes everything pass by at breakneck speed. When it was all over, I blinked slowly in disbelief and was just shocked at how much and little happened at the same time. “No time to sit with everything, we’ve got newer less exciting stuff to focus on!” says Double Exposure.

The very mark of a good mystery game is subtle and well-written foreshadowing and hints. This lets players create theories and be along for the ride. If you have enough moving mystery parts and pieces that are well-introduced (and not as a last-ditch effort in the very last act), then audiences that aren’t entirely right with their theories are likely still going to be on board with a story’s shifts and changes. In Life is Strange: Double Exposure, that just isn’t possible. My partner and I are pretty pleased with the theories we had coming out of the first two chapters. There were a lot of breadcrumbs and that’s why I found those parts to be so strong. I’m here to tell you to never mind all that and throw all your theories out the window! Double Exposure does the mystery game cardinal sin of unsatisfyingly making the mystery nigh unsolvable by answering it with lore and canon previously not explored in the franchise. Nor is it remotely plausible for the series!

Spoilers and embargoes prevent me from giving you specifics, but I feel utterly compelled to get as close as possible to doing so so that you know just how much you should steer clear of Life is Strange: Double Exposure. I have been a Life is Strange fan for about a decade. I’ve loved every single entry so far, each telling unique experiences in their own worlds, all with valuable stories and lessons to tell and provide the player. Here, we get none of that. This is the first time we’ve had a Life is Strange game truly feel not self-contained, and it’s worse for it. Up until now, Max is special not because of her powers but because of the trials and tribulations she’s been through and how that manifests in her abilities. Double Exposure does away with that entirely. She isn’t special or unique anymore. They change the lore and canon about powers, seemingly for good, and if it’s where Life is Strange truly is going then I don’t want it.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure truly feels like the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe-style approach of having franchise project pipelines mapped out for perhaps the next several years, only they all might be a continuation of Max herself rather than the stellar standalone ventures they’ve been doing so far. The ending heavily implies Max will be back for another journey. When I was already trepidatiously excited and considered a return to Max Caulfield to be valuable only to be proven wrong, teasing another return is a tall order. Simply put, Life is Strange: Double Exposure is an example of a game being released largely more because it makes money and is reliably a cash cow of an IP, rather than a title with a story to tell. It is everything Life is Strange is not.

Double Exposure is in a difficult and unenviable spot. Having all that pressure laid upon Deck Nine to not only follow up the beloved original game but have people even on board for it ultimately hasn’t paid off. All the marks of a Life is Strange game are there; Amanda is an adorable love interest and I found myself with butterflies when she and Max inevitably kiss. A win for sapphics everywhere. The series staple of wonderful cutesy indie girl music that’s a little twee is all there too, backing the picturesque experience in the mid-Winter. However, the essence of Max’s world is missing. Its callbacks to the original game are lackluster and the few times they really go for it with those callbacks they feel cheap and unearned. In my game, I chose to make it that Chloe lived through the events of Arcadia Bay, but she and Max later split up. People grow up and break up, it’s whatever. It feels like a cruel position following the events of the game and even the quality extended universe graphic novels. All I’ll say is this: I didn’t let a whole city die for a girl just to be left on read on a text.

Seeing our beloved Max again only goes so far for the experience. At the end of the day, you’ve got a mostly okay cast at best with frustrating late-game emphasis on characters that didn’t get enough screentime. You’ve got a mystery that becomes mind-numbingly boggled the more timey-wimey it gets. It’s not the return our hero deserves and it’s a regression for the franchise.