Since 2015, the Life Is Strange series has been a key player in innovating on the narrative adventure genre — heavily story-based games that revolve around player choice and agency. But up until now, the series had never had a sequel, instead choosing to focus on a new cast and setting with each entry.
Life Is Strange: Double Exposure finally brings back the original game’s protagonist, Max Caulfield, but this time 10 years older. That’s no easy task, especially for a character that’s utterly beloved by fans. But it was an intentional choice on developer Deck Nine’s part.
“We have to do this careful balancing act of showing what’s the direction that we’ve taken Max while not necessarily supplanting the person that has grown in fans’ heads over the years,” says narrative director Felice Kuan. “Because we want this Max to merge with the fan Max that each person carries.”
Bringing Max back is a bold choice, especially when coupled with Double Exposure’s unique power — letting you jump between timelines while investigating the demise of Max’s best friend. It’s an ambitious step forward for Life Is Strange, and Inverse had the chance to talk to Kuan and game director Jonathan Stauder — all about Life Is Strange’s big step forward.
After True Colors, why did you decide to bring Max back? Did you consider other ideas?
Kuan: We started thinking about this game while True Colors was finishing up. So this has been a long time in concept and development.
We really enjoyed doing our own new characters, for sure, but also our very first foray into the franchise had been with Chloe in Before the Storm. There was a great fondness for the original characters, and so it was always in the back of our minds: Will we ever get to work with them again?
Then simultaneously, after the empathy power, we were looking into other powers that might make good stories in this franchise, especially powers that are metaphorical in some way as opposed to just a superhero kind of thing. So this idea of two different universes, as well as talking about the lingering traumas of Max's life — it became clear that they go together in a unique way.
One of Double Exposure’s more interesting elements is how Max’s choices from the first game color who she is and how she interacts with the world. How did you make those choices feel impactful?
Kuan: Because it’s a 10-year gap, a lot of the things that we tackled in this game, we were always having to balance a few different considerations. One of the things here is that for both players who are very familiar with Max and players who are brand new, nonetheless, they are all coming to know a new person. And we need to show the ways that Max has developed from the first game. So it was quite deliberate that we wanted to let the player participate in shaping this sort of retrospective talking about her past, as opposed to feeding in from the prior game. Because we needed to put players, even those who know Max very well, in this sort of headspace of “I’m looking back; I’m somebody who is reflecting on what has happened to me, years and years ago.”
Stauder: We didn’t want to hit you right up front with a screen from the previous game. So incorporating organically the most important choices into the flow of Double Exposure was important, because what we wanted to do was bring you in, introduce you to Max and the state of her world as it is today, without then saying, “Oh, and by the way, go play the other games.” You don’t have to at this moment. You have everything you need to jump in and roleplay Max as she is now.
As much as we’re indebted to the first game and what came before, we also very much want this to be a jumping-on point for folks who might be seeing this and going, “Oh, I’ve heard of Life Is Strange. I’ll give this a shot. It looks cool.” And not be punished for not having been with the franchise for 10 years.
From a writing standpoint, how did you make sure this Max felt in line with her past self?
Kuan: It was a lot of work to get Max right, another balancing act. This is a person who’s had years between this game and the first game, and not only that, she’s had a development in a certain way. As the years have gone by, fans will all imagine their own directions of where Max has traveled. So we have to do this careful balancing act of showing what's the direction that we’ve taken Max while not necessarily supplanting the person that has grown in fans’ heads over the years. Because we want this Max to merge with the fan Max that each person carries.
Stauder: Being able to have Hannah Telle back in the role, it’s like a cheat code, because her voice is so unique. She inherently shares so many qualities with Max. So being able to have her immediately made it easier for things to sound like Max. Then the trick became how to make it sound like a max that's had 10 years under her belt.
When you think about the character of Max, there’s such a large range of emotions and perspectives that the character can have — some quite dark, and some extremely altruistic. The beauty of Max, of Hannah's performance, is that she could encompass all of those ranges when we took it even farther from a more adult point of view, and still sound like the sweet, caring individual that Max is.
Why did you choose to still have a school setting for Double Exposure? Was that an intentional choice?
Kuan: There are a lot of elements that are familiar to Max, and that is quite deliberate. She has been running away from what she left in Arcadia Bay for a very long time, and now this is a big effort on her part to try and do what she hasn’t done — just settle in a place and be with things that maybe she’s uncomfortable with, like the school setting.
The second thing is that the school setting was the age group that we were particularly interested in. We wanted to talk about young adults who are slightly older than the True Colors demographic. Then, of course, just logistically, having everybody gathered in the same place in a school setting is good for mysteries.
Double Exposure has a pretty realistic depiction of grief. What was it like designing that section, especially knowing it could be difficult for some players?
Stauder: We had a very specific design goal with the end of that first chapter, the first time you shift timelines. It needed to feel like Max was suddenly surrounded by ghosts, and you had the ability to reach out and make that ghostly figure corporeal, actually run up and hug that person, and they’re alive again right in front of your eyes.
Working backward from that, the entire first chapter has to make you have to fall in love with Safi. You have to really value her friendship and her relationship with Max, and then you need to sit with Max when she feels like she’s been ripped away and could never possibly be a presence in her life again.
Then we build and breadcrumb and tease with the supernatural that maybe there is some way, somehow. Is this possible? Is this really happening? We give you one big-button press at the end of that chapter to get you to that hug. It was all very deliberately built to be like it has a very human thing that anyone can relate to.
Kuan: It needed to be that visceral, because Max doesn’t use her powers lightly. In fact, she can’t anymore. To have her grief and Safi in her face, we knew it had to be something as powerfully inevitable as that for Max to go back to the supernatural.
Have you ever thought about villains having powers in the Life Is Strange universe? Or is it important for villains to always be grounded?
Kuan: It’s an inevitable part of any conversation. When we’re talking about a Life Is Strange game, Dontnod starts it already with Max having the power to decide over life. Then they go even harder in the second game, where you are advising Daniel and shaping his morality, and what I love about that is that it’s the protagonist, not the villain.
So this is really two sides of the same coin: What is and isn’t villainy is going to be a topic when you have powers. And that absolutely came up in our writers’ room and across the studio for some time.
I agree that villains have been quite grounded, they always have to make sense. In both our games and Dontnod, there’s been a spectrum of villains who you understand as human beings but don’t condone, and then villains you understand as humans and feel empathy for. I appreciate the range that’s there.
Stauder: The closer you push toward more mainstream superheroics, it feels like an X-Men or Avengers thing, and then you're running the risk of that Life Is Strange DNA not really being a part of the equation anymore. At that point, then you’re just some other superhero thing being out there in the world. So in any conversation about different powers, it always has to come back to that. Like the reason it’s Max and the shifting power is that power is an incredible vehicle for examining her grief and her trauma coming out of the first game.
Similarly, were we to push that direction with any other characters or villain or anything like that, it would have to serve the function of probably feeding back into that protagonist’s story, and be another expression of their arc — as opposed to just wanting that cool pose of Max and her flying midair, freezing time against some super-powered baddie.
Where do you think narrative adventure games go from here? How can the genre keep innovating and attract new players?
Kuan: As the genre ages, we can get more and more sophisticated with what we’re trying to do, like any medium.
I feel very privileged that we work in this franchise, because there is both a fan base that loves it and a slice-of-life feel that means there is a ready audience for it as it continues. This really is a rare place where the kinds of stories, whether from a diversity standpoint or a genre standpoint — or trying new things with the mechanics and storytelling — I think there is room here to do those things. And I appreciate its rarity, because I also don’t know how stories find that audience from scratch. I want the genre to grow and be sustainable and for it not to have to find ways to survive, and instead can be free to innovate.
Stauder: In Double Exposure’s case, our hope was, at least within the larger Life Is Strange franchise, that this feels like the most playable story that’s been delivered yet. If we can start there, and people appreciate the push for more story expressed through gameplay, hopefully, we have the opportunity to push further in a future title and keep evolving.
Then always looking for new ways to make what could very easily be just an interactive movie, something that the player legitimately has to play in order for the story to work. The more that story plays and by your choices, it’s like a reflection of a personality test; that’s compelling to me. If our games can tell you something about yourself, that’s when they’re at their best.
With Max coming back, is there any chance we could see other characters or games return? Have you thought about that?
Stauder: Never say never. It entirely depends on how folks respond to this game and how it goes over, where we head next. Take a different swing every time out, and nothing’s ever off the table. It's one big interconnected universe, and because it’s a choice-driven game where we have time travelers involved and whatnot, canon is pretty flexible.
We can put you wherever, and it’s the player determining the course of events, so there's a lot of flexibility and freedom there to explore different stories, bringing back past characters and integrating them with new ones.
