Life Is Strange Double Exposure: Max Return Ending Explained

Square Enix is set to release all the chapters for its latest “Life Is Strange” video game, “Double Exposure,” Tuesday, bringing fans back to the beloved indie franchise and rewarding them with the return of a fan favorite character, Max Caulfield.

But while it’s always nice to see a familiar face, the way that the “Life Is Strange” series left Max (voiced by Hannah Telle) at the end of the first game, which was released in 2015, didn’t exactly make for an easy return. (No spoilers, but the ending is a choose-your-own adventure style gameplay that gives players two different potential outcomes.)

“Obviously, folks have had 10 years to sit with the end of that last game and live with that version of Max that they ended the game with,” “Life Is Strange: Double Exposure” game director Jon Stauder told Variety. “So there was always going to be a challenge in bringing Max back with that level of expectation, in addition to creating a game that could account for either outcome at the end of the first game that would be able to sustain and produce and create a whole new game around. Those were huge challenges that just constantly presented issues that we just had to be on top of the entire time we were in production.”

Narrative director Felice Kuan added: “There was also the fact that, because it’s been 10 years, we knew that we would have a mixed audience of people who have come to the franchise for the very first time, versus people who grew up with Max and have many thoughts about her and identify with her. So we made sure that people who are new not only understand the facts of Max’s life, but also their emotional weight and impact. And I think the fact that it happens years after the first game is a real advantage in that way, because even people who are hardcore fans of the first game, they need to catch up on what Max has been up to. So she is, in a way, new to them as well.”

Per the description for “Life Is Strange: Double Exposure,” “Max Caulfield, photographer-in-residence at the prestigious Caledon University, discovers her closest new friend Safi dead in the snow. Murdered. To save her, Max tries to Rewind time – a power she’s not used in years… Instead, Max opens the way to a parallel timeline where Safi is still alive and still in danger! Max realizes the killer will soon strike again – in both versions of reality. Only Max can Shift between the two parallel timelines to solve and prevent the same murder.”

Deck Nine, which took over making the Square Enix-published “Life Is Strange” video games from previous developer Dontnod Entertainment beginning with “Before the Storm” and followed by “True Colors,” has been discussing the idea of returning to Max’s character — one created by the Dontnod team — for “quite some time,” according to Kuan.

“It has been something that we were thinking about for quite some time,” narrative director Felice Kuan said. “The concept started during production of ‘True Colors,’” Kuan said. “We were thinking of mechanics that can be metaphors for real things in people’s lives, which is kind of a hallmark of the franchise, and the idea of parallel universes and examining essentially both branches of a choice was something that really interested us. Especially as a way to showcase the different facets of the same person. And then simultaneously, we’ve been talking about Max for a very long time. We have been talking about her since writing ‘Before the Storm,’ again in ‘Wavelengths.’ So the more we talked about her story, and the more we talked about this parallel universe, it was very clear that they fit each other in a unique way and really made it click.”

Once the idea was in place, the next step was getting Hannah Telle to agree to come back to voice her character — a task that could have proved quite difficult, seeing as Telle had left showbiz to study neuroscience. But lucky for Deck Nine, Telle jumped at the chance.

“It was just a huge honor and surprise and the highlight of my life and career, because I had stepped away from acting to study neuroscience, and then this came about, and I got to return to it,” Telle said. “So it was a real dream. But I just wanted to make sure that I held all of the things about Max that people loved in the first game: her vulnerability, her relatability and just her general introspective nature, but just how that would have matured into into a more self assured and confident version of herself as being a 28 year old. And I wanted to also make sure that it was evident that she was stepping into her power as a potential superhero, and really taking the weight of that seriously and focusing on doing the best thing she can do in each moment.”