Life is Strange: Double Exposure is, without question, the most controversial game in the series. It doesn’t deserve to be — given that Before the Storm used scab labor to replace the original Chloe, Ashly Burch, during the 2016-2017 video game voice actor strike, I’d say that it shouldn’t even be the most controversial Life is Strange from this developer — but it is. It’s the only game in the series with Mixed user reviews on Steam, a widespread discontent which stemmed from Deck Nine’s handling of Max and Chloe’s relationship. Some players, like TheGamer’s Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley, felt that Chloe was an inextricable part of Max’s story, and that telling a new Max story without her, missed the appeal of LiS in the first place.
I don’t feel that way at all, and was pretty positive on Double Exposure as a result. And the factor that elevated the game for me more than everything else I liked about it was Hannah Telle’s return performance as Max Caulfield. Now that the nominations are out, she’s easily my choice for The Game Awards‘ Best Performance.
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Life Is Strange Is A Balancing Act
Though I often enjoy video game performances, Double Exposure was the first time I noticed that a single performance was noticeably improving my experience with the game during a review. I love Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker in The Last of Us games, but when the whole cast is as good as Naughty Dog‘s casts tend to be, one performance stands out a bit less. Hannah Telle single-handedly lifted my Life is Strange: Double Exposure review score a solid point or so.
Life is Strange has always demanded a tightrope walk from its actors, and Double Exposure is no exception. The games are often grounded in a world that seems very close to our own, but with a goofy earnestness that can be difficult for performers to present with any degree of naturalism. The series’ dialogue has improved significantly since the first game — which is obvious when you hear lines from the original like, “You are gonna get in hella more trouble for this than drugs” repeated in Double Exposure — but selling its brand of corniness can still be a tough ask.
To get into exactly why, we need to dip into spoiler territory.
Hannah Telle Carries Double Exposure On Her Back
Telle nails the balancing act. She’s good in the raw emotional moments, like a late-game scene where she needs to tell Safi how much she means to her. She’s incredible when she has to play conversational, like in a scene where Vinh references a “Japanese single malt,” and Max has to awkwardly ask, “That’s… whiskey?” She makes you feel the full weight of the game’s heavy narrative beats, no matter how divorced from reality the game’s supernatural story becomes.
Max sees herself holding a gun in a photo Safi took the night she was murdered? Telle sells it. Max discovers that her house was broken into by her own doppelganger? Telle sells it. Max has to revisit the traumatic events of the first game via the nightmarescape in an abandoned bowling alley? Would you believe Telle sells it?
There is basically nothing else in Life is Strange: Double Exposure that is always firing on all cylinders. The graphics are the series’ best… but there’s a lot of pop-in. I enjoyed the story… but didn’t buy some key bits. Caledon University is a good setting… that feels significantly less ambitious in scope than previous games. Hannah Telle’s performance, which anchors a strong cast, is uniformly great, from start to finish. No asterisks.
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