At the beginning of every chapter in Life is Strange: Double Exposure, you get an opportunity to choose Max’s outfit for the day. You can dress her up in an unofficial Phoebe Bridgers cosplay, made up of a black onesie emblazoned with a white skeleton right over where hers would be. If you shelled out for the Ultimate Edition, you can wear a Cactuar shirt and a Moogle hat. My favorite look has Max dressed like Rogue from X-Men: Evolution, with purple lipstick and white streaks in her hair.
But that last point brings me to the weirdest aspect of Double Exposure’s approach to fashion. I don’t mean that Max’s hair changes depending on her outfit – I’m used to suspending my disbelief around that kind of thing in games. If you’ve ever taken your bald character to the barber in GTA and left looking like Abbey Road-era John Lennon, you’ve gotten used to ignoring this kind of thing, too. No, what bothers me is that Max’s hair changes from scene to scene, not just outfit to outfit.
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Max’s Very Weird Hair Day
When you select your clothes, you can view what the outfit will look like indoors, when Max is warm enough to take her jacket and hat off, and what it will look like outdoors when she needs to be bundled up. When initially picking my look, I didn’t notice that Max’s hair might be different depending on whether she has a coat on or not. Not just the style, but the color, too. I would understand if Max’s hair was just covered by her hat and coat, or if she wore it down while wearing a hat, and up while inside. I had long hair for the better part of a decade and, depending on the temperature or the activity I was doing, I wore it in different ways.
But no, the color changes drastically from scene to scene, with some changes occuring just seconds apart from each other. Max might have that cool Rogue hair while inside, but it will revert to her natural light brown color when she’s outside.
Max In The Outdoor (Left) And Indoor (Right) Versions Of The Same Outfit
I’m not a game designer, so I can only guess at why this is the case. Is it easier, for some reason, to have the jacket and hat-wearing character models share a hair color with each other, instead of with the interior Max that they’re actually supposed to match? That doesn’t make sense to me. Was it the kind of small thing Deck Nine knew was weird about the game, but didn’t have time to change in the face of bigger issues? Given that three writers at TheGamer encountered the same game-breaking bug in the pre-release period, sure, it could have been a case of bigger fish needing frying first. Maybe this just wasn’t a priority in the face of actual glitches that could harm the experience in a major way.
Whatever the reason, it’s a weird choice that takes me out of the roleplaying process. This is a game about making choices, playing your version of Max. The game does a good job of having small decisions ripple. You cross Lucas in chapter two and it ripples all the way through chapter five. You tell Safi that Chloe survived the Storm, and there she is posting away on CrossTalk. Though the game has few huge choices, it does a good job of paying off the ones you do make. But the immersion that your choices create is broken a little when Max’s hair dye seems to have leaked out of her head like she’s Rudy Giuliani.
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