Double Exposure Stretches Life Is Strange Across Two Gripping PS5 Timelines | Push Square

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The Life Is Strange franchise is at its best whenever Max Caulfield is around, so Double Exposure already has a leg up on its predecessors. The latest narrative entry on PS5 marks only the second time the popular protagonist has played the lead role, and Deck Nine Games isn't purely leaning on her welcome return to sell copies. With a new superpower and a murder case to solve, Double Exposure proves compelling across two timelines — and her friend Safi is dead in just one of them.

Set years after the events of the original title, Max is attending university and has found a new home with a fresh group of friends. She's stopped using her powers — actively suppressing them — until she witnesses the death of a pal named Safi. Max attempts to tap into her original power and rewind time to save her, but fails and instead creates an alternate timeline in which Safi is still alive. This event forms the core structure of the narrative: using the two timelines, Max has to figure out who killed Safi and clear any innocent names.

Our demo, running on an Xbox Series X dev kit, picked the action up at the start of the second chapter, with Max and her friend Moses raising the suspicions of a police officer. Moses took a camera from the crime scene, and if it's found by the cop, then he might become prime suspect number one. Max can shift between the two in-game timelines by interacting with sparkly spots in the environment, and doing so removes her physical presence from the place she was just in. With the policeman trying to enter the locked office belonging to Moses, you shift to the other timeline when he's going about his day with an open door. By asking the Moses in this timeline about where he might hide something, we work through the scenario by phasing between the two existences, narrowing down where the camera might be. You can take objects and keys from one timeline into the other, and also plant distractions for the police officer after he's had enough of waiting for