What did you do in 2015?
Maybe you were playing video games back then too, so again, 2015 was the year this epic movie was released. Solid V metal gearsSlightly polarizing radioactive fallout 4and indie lovers Rocket League And Undertale. If you’re one of the few Wii U players, chances are you’re lurking in there. Splatoon lobby.
2015 was also the year of departure for Square Enix’s sci-fi TV game, which has a fitting codename What if? before it was released to the world as Life is strange. It’s a curious release for a publisher known primarily as the industry’s role-playing game kingpin. And even, strangely enough, the publisher allowed developer Dontnod to create a teen drama based on that original choice shortly after the release of their action-adventure game Miss mean out-of-field vision that paid off; Life is Strange has spawned two sequels, more DLC, a remaster, and now, nearly 10 years later: Life is Strange: Double ExposureDeveloped by veterans of the Deck Nine series (Life is strange: True colors, The Expanse: A series of stories).
In fact, it’s all about reliving everything that’s happened since 2015, which is a subplot of Double Exposure. We finally get the first direct sequel in the series, following Life Is Strange’s original protagonist, Max Caulfield, now a 20-something photographer who is far removed from the events disaster of the original title by about a decade.
Get to the point
Helping add to the nostalgia effect is the return of original voice actress Hannah Telle as the voice of Max, reprising the character she travels with. “We’re so happy that she’s so excited to come back – luckily we don’t even have to consider what we would choose to do without her,” the game director Jonathan Stauder told us during a preview at PAX West.
Life is Strange initially follows Max in high school, where both player and character discover she has the supernatural ability to pause and reverse time. A decade later in Exposure, after discovering the lifeless body of her friend Safi, Max is forced to return to the powers she rejected after the original game ended. No, you can’t take the drama out of Life is Strange. After trying to undo the initial tragedy, Max accidentally discovers that he has developed an additional power: the ability to enter and leave alternate timelines – not a coincidence, but the main attraction. in the gameplay of Double Exposure.
But what about the unavoidable fact that the original game is a combination of choices that lead to two very different outcomes?
“Both endings of the original Life is Strange are canon,” said the story director. Felice Kuan. “Near the beginning of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Safi is curious about Max’s past, and during that conversation, players will choose which LiS ending they want to use for their playthrough.” That’s right, Deck Nine is keeping the purity of player choice intact by not canonizing either event. What ultimately happens in Life is Strange will be up to you.
“I was involved in many later projects throughout the life of the series, so that was a struggle [a series’ past] is something I’m quite familiar with,” explains Stauder, a veteran of Telltale Games and its many franchises before directing the Life is Strange series.
Exposure to gameplay
Our demo begins later in the game after Max discovers her new powers, in a scene where you’re placed in the middle of a tense detention between her teacher friend , Moses, and a local police detective.
Max arrives at school after work and discovers Moses is about to be arrested, awaiting the impending raid on his classroom. Examining the tensions between minorities and small-town police forces is perhaps the most recurring storyline in the series, but real events in the intervening decade help make sense of the fallout. Max’s latest difficulty becomes less ambiguous and more determined than ever. .
Luckily for Moses, we can play cat and mouse with the police thanks to Max’s ability to see tears of light floating in the air, with the press of a button allowing for an instant jump between two timelines. alternate timelines: one in Max’s present reality, and a scene where Moses and she are relaxing in the room. This allows us to rearrange the raid scene to our liking. Phew.
What’s especially interesting about Exposure’s supernatural appeal is that it impacts gameplay as much as the series’ infamous choices; Sometimes during solving this particular police puzzle, you can see a blue hologram projected in front of Max (think “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi”), representing everywhere People and things exist in another timeline.
This opens up more complex exploration, creating a few “A-ha!” moments in the process. Sure, it’s not exactly psycho-shoot-a-person-across-the-room à la Contactbut it feels much more interactive than the series’ convention of pressing a button into a cutscene or a dialogue option opening up.
Other than that, though, all the basics of Life Is Strange are pretty much identical to every dialogue – planting and walking around that you’ve done before, albeit nicer. However, it was a pleasant surprise when one quickly realized that this was the first game in the series to be performed using motion capture by the voice actors themselves. Immediately, character animations are significantly improved in both subtle and overt ways, due to eyeball tracking and less rigid movements.
It’s gone a long way to making character emotions more intuitive than in previous games. And for a game series that is 99% about human interaction, these innovations immediately stand out as some of the most effective and natural uses of mocap technology implemented in a game. games of this scale to date.
Life is transformation
Yes, our demo is running on a high-performance PC, but a dedicated port is coming to Switch. So far, the only committed timeline is after the game’s worldwide launch at the end of October, but the priority is for the game to be available on Nintendo handheld consoles, Square reps said. tell us.
“The group that made the port for Nintendo is called Engine Software. They did a great job working with us to make sure the game worked as well as possible on that platform,” Kuan said of the launch of the Switch version. “We used some of Unreal’s advanced features (especially Lumen and Nanite) that would be difficult to use on Switch. So they had to re-light the game with baked light instead of dynamic light (Lumen).”
Engine Software’s previous ports that work on Nintendo handhelds include the first two. There are no more heroes title, Ni no KuniAnd Little Nightmares IISo the group is in pretty good shape when it comes to the Switch port. “Overall, they must determine how to replicate or replace the more intensive parts of the process, ensuring that the game is as close to the high-end platform as possible but can still run well.”
As for when the Nintendo version of this releases, we’ll let you know as information about Life is Strange: Double Exposure develops. (So sorry.)
Life is Strange: Double Exposure launches on other platforms on October 29. The Switch release is TBA at the time of writing.
