Deck Nine and Hannah Telle Talk Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Last month Life is Strange: Double Exposure released, continuing the story of Max Caulfield, a girl with the ability to manipulate time. When Life is Strange first debuted in early 2015, developer Dontnod Entertainment used the popular episodic narrative structure to provide players with a different kind of story. Max was a normal high school girl going through the tumultuous period of growing up. And then, her life was forever changed when she somehow rewound time after witnessing the murder of her best friend Chloe.

In the years since Life is Strange‘s release, Deck Nine has taken over development of multiple entries in the series, including a prequel to the original game and the incredible True Colors, where the team was able to craft a story in the same universe but separate from Max and Arcadia Bay.

Double Exposure does not stray from the formula used in previous Life is Strange games. But it gives players a new look at Max, now in her late 20s and enjoying a new life where the trauma of Arcadia Bay and Chloe are in the past but still lingering on her heart. Gone is Max’s ability to rewind time, replaced by the power to move in between two different realities–one where her best friend has died and one where she is still alive.

As players weave their way through Double Exposure‘s five episodes, Deck Nine expand upon the series’ strength and its mythology. The narrative frequently escalating with difficult choices and shocking cliffhangers, never allowing players to guess where it might lead next.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Game Director Jonathan Stauder, Narrative Director Felice Kuan, and the voice of Max Caulfield, Hannah Telle. I wanted to learn more about Double Exposure‘s bigger questions, its development, and how it felt for Telle to reprise such a beloved role.

Be forewarned, spoilers for Double Exposure are openly discussed. And be sure to read my review of the game to learn more.

DigitalChumps:
The first thing that I wanted to talk about because it struck me with Double Exposure was all the art that is around, like the walls of the Snapping Turtle. All the poetry and prose that’s been written, how did Deck Nine source all this out? Because it’s really amazing. And the poetry reads like real college student poetry. It’s all been interesting to go into this as a person who was an English major in college, so I’m just wondering where did this all come from?

Jonathan Stauder, Deck Nine Game Director:
Felice, please, you should jump on the poetry.

Felice Kuan, Deck Nine Narrative Director:
Cool. So the I love to hear that. Thank you. The poetry was outsourced outside of Deck Nine and was written by a Palestinian-American poet. Her name is Jaye Nasir and we spoke with her about a lot of what was Safi’s arc, what the deal was, what she is truly writing about, the themes that you know about her writing or is informed by. And then I think the other place where we have literary stuff is the the book titles and such. And that was all just from the writing team, which is a very literary bunch.

Jonathan:
Yeah, and so all the murals in the Snapping Turtle with the exception of one, they were all internal. Many of them done by our our art director, Andrew Weatherl. There’s one particular mural in there that Losh did for us. Which was really cool, but a lot of those pieces of art in the Fine Arts building, the sculptures, the other paintings and stuff, they’re all internal, from our art team. It’s nice to be able to just let them cut loose on a weird sculpture when you know it’s not just we just don’t need to model a classroom. We just needed some bizarre kid with a skull balloon, hanging out looking cool. That’s a lot of the fun stuff that our our teams get to dive into when we’re fleshing out these spaces and making them feel full.

DigitalChumps:
Yeah, it all felt very natural and real. Because I went to a liberal arts school, so some of that stuff it feels kind of… I don’t want to say cheesy, but it feels very art-studenty. And I think that’s a hard thing to do naturally, like trying to intentionally have bad acting. That’s tough.

OK, so Hannah, this is for you. I was a big fan of Life is Strange when it first came out, I’m 38 now and I was never a teenage girl. But I really did enjoy that sort of like hipster dialogue. I know when you when you voiced the role of Max originally you were in your 20s, but now you’re in your 30s and lived through the time period that she’s in right now in Double Exposure. What was that transition like going from like a teenager to an adult as Max?

Hannah Telle, voice of Max Caulfield:
Well, it was definitely a challenge. I wanted to make sure that she still seemed like herself, even though she’s had to become so much more outgoing and self-assured, and in a way like authoritative, because she’s in this position of power as an artist in residence at this college where she has kids looking up to her and seeing her as an authority figure and as a point of influence. And they think she’s cool and she is kind of more comfortable with herself and realizing that she’s had some success and she’s really talented and maybe, you know, it’s time for her to step into her power and try to lead with a more assertive point of view. So I just tried to focus on that because that’s happened to me in my own life, where I’ve realized that certain quirks about my personality no longer served me. Sometimes, if you’re so nervous, it makes everybody nervous. So sometimes you just have to kind of suck it up and act as if everything’s fine and even though you have, you know, inner doubts, what you’ll hear Max’s inner monologues, she’s really making a strong effort to to be an adult here.

DigitalChumps:
How much input did you have over the tone of your acting? Did you ever? Because you are this character more or less in a way. So did you have any input on how you might emote a certain way or even in the motion capture?

Hannah:
Well, there’s a lot of things about Max that I aspire to be like. She is supernatural, so she has some, you know, extra abilities that are really exciting and cool. But no, when I was first coming into the role it took me a really long time to understand that Max was no longer a teenager and 18, introverted, withdrawn, and shy–that she had become, albeit haunted, but a strong, poised young professional.

DigitalChumps:
One of the more interesting things about the original Life is Strange was Max’s ability to go back in time and literally play out big key decisions that you made. And as the series has gone on–especially with True Colors–you couldn’t do that anymore. Was there any thought process or maybe a conceptual build or something where you thought about incorporating that back into the game because it’s not Double Exposure. Did you think about using that one element of time powers to give players that option?

Jonathan:
So the tricky thing for the story of Double Exposure and Max’s arc through it was she comes out of the first game with a really, at best, fraught relationship with that ability and what it means. There’s no way to end the game without that power having in some way played a role in someone’s or maybe many people’s death. So the idea that you could just walk around freely, rewinding without concern for the consequences, that would be very hard thing to start the game with. I think since you’ve played the game and we’re allowed to talk a little spoiler stuff, those powers aren’t 100 percent gone in Double Exposure. They do rear their heads here and there when she decides they may be of some use; but in an effort to get Max to a place where in seeing value in that supernatural aspect of herself that it can help people that it could lead to fixing things, not simply breaking things.

Potentially you could walk away from the first game thinking you know a new power to help rehab her ability or her relationship with her abilities. That is emblematic of her healing from the first game as well, like rehabbing that relationship with the supernatural also lets her start to make peace with what happened in that final decision at the end of the first game, and so that’s kind of where realizing that rewind, at least initially, kind of needed to be off to the side because we’re going to talk a whole lot about all the damage rewinding caused in the first game.

DigitalChumps:
The thing about that as well, just some of these choices that you made in the game on a sheer cliffhanger kind of note… I remember the one that hit me really crazy was when you’re trying to decide whether or not you’re gonna save Alderman or abandon him to his fate. I chose to try to help him out because I thought to myself, well, what if he comes back and was like, “Hey, that wasn’t cool.” But I’ve I’ve noticed that multiple times in this game there were just some really hard choices to actually make, even if it was one or the other. How difficult was it to not only pick these options but play out how the story was going to go around them?

Felice:
It’s always a huge challenge because as much as we’d like to have every choice branch tremendously, there’s a limited number that we will be able to fit into one game. So ahead of time we have to really plot out which of the ones are going to make a difference in just the pure storyline, and then which are the ones that are going to, you know, if it’s a relationship-based choice, which of the characters are really going to deserve or earn those huge relationship permutations.

I’m gratified to hear you say that a lot of them gave you pause because I think that these have always succeeded most when the player feels very connected to the character. So something as small as the tone of voice that you say something can feel much more impactful when you really care about that character. And so a lot of times, if we don’t necessarily have the budget or scope for huge plot changes, there’s more relationship-based ones or where we can squeeze a lot more emotion with less branching.

DigitalChumps:
Alright, Hannah, I love the relationship between Max and Chloe in the first game. I’m curious when you played this, what choice did you do in the very beginning? Did you save Arcadia Bay or did you save Chloe?

Hannah:
Well, I haven’t played it yet.

DigitalChumps:
Well then I’m spoiling everything, I’m sorry!

Hannah:
It takes me some time after working on something, of it being out and other people seeing it and forming their opinions on it. And I just have to kind of take a step back and watch it all unfold. And then once I’ve kind of like healed from the process of making it, then I’ll watch it and be like” oh wow.”

DigitalChumps:
Hearing you speak now and I’ve watched interviews with you before, you do very much sound like Max. But there is sort of a certain maturity and like a little bit of sadness in her now. How do you come about doing that, especially because you sound so bubbly jovial in person? I’m wondering how difficult it is to kind of especially hit these very dire, sad moments that Max goes through.

Hannah:
Well, I have some really heavy mood swings.

DigitalChumps:
Haha we all do, yeah.

Hannah:
And I’m all smiles right now because things are great. But, you know, depending on what’s going on, I can get pretty low. I know what it’s like to hate yourself and also what it’s like to feel like you could do anything. So I just try to tap into where her emotions live in my own life and I can usually find some good parallels and draw upon that to make it be as real as possible.

DigitalChumps:
How difficult was it to render two different universes at the same time? Like when Max uses her power the player can basically see all the NPCs and I noticed even things like cups and random objects that you wouldn’t even interact with would show up when you performed her pulse ability.

Jonathan:
So the idea was we’re showing you ideally all of the visual differences. Max’s power sort of picks up what’s different between these timelines. So the Moses office scene where you’re sneaking around and trying to avoid Alderman and find the cameras, a good example of what we would try to do is we try to bury as much environmental storytelling in the differences in the set dressing. When you pulse it’s like seeing a bunch of visuals you want to sit there and look at, it’s a bunch of story coming your way.

We could only do the two timelines simultaneously because we moved to Unreal 5. So it’s our first Unreal 5 game. But even then there’s there’s limits. So you know, however many NPCs we can render on screen simultaneously… Well, if we want to have a party full of 60 people, but you can visit it in two timelines, if I wanted to split it evenly between the two timelines, I got to have 30 in one and 30 in the other. We have to load balance between the two so that it still fits in memory and it doesn’t just run on a high-end PC, it also runs on your PlayStation 5. There was always a technical back and forth as you would design these scenes to make sure that they were performing while still getting across the storytelling we wanted in the differences between the two timelines. That’s a constant battle up until we shipped the thing.

Felice:
To some extent, then the fact that one timeline is happier–roughly speaking–and more and more is happening was a real advantage because, like Jonathan said, we had two Krampus parties that would have been very difficult, whereas we have less happening in another timeline.

DigitalChumps:
Yeah, I know that when you go to the “Safi’s dead” timeline it’s cool colors. When she’s alive, it’s warm light, music’s different. Like some people might see that as kind of like a binary thing but what’s the rationale behind that and not making things too subtle, rather making it more obvious for the audience?

Jonathan:
So the goal was on multiple levels to have a bunch of different information coming at the player, to let them figure out and understand which timeline they were in, big cognitive load jumping between two versions of these spaces, two versions of every NPC. And so you know, it’s set dressing, it’s the lighting, it’s the music. We also, over the course of play testing, developed all the UI elements that wind up telling you which timeline you’re into. So if you just want, we tell you, but you can also turn that off for a more immersive experience if you want.

It was a trick. Most of the changes ought to be subtle. Maybe until you get to the end game where things start going a little haywire, and then there’s some pretty wild divergence like a storm happening at one timeline and everything’s fine and peaceful in the other. But for most of the game we didn’t have that, it was gonna be in the nuance of how a character acts one way in one timeline and another in another timeline. Just based on how Safi’s death affected them and that’s how we treat each of the NPCs. So then that naturally lends itself to subtlety and it was just a just a balancing act. And again, those UI elements, while they kind of saving our ass because there’s some scenes where it’s just really nuanced. I can’t help it, it’s a Life is Strange game. It is going to be subtle. So we got to use that timeline indicator to let you know where you’re at.

DigitalChumps:
The game is sort of marketed as a murder mystery. The first two chapters indicate everything as such. Then I think in Chapter 3 when you find out Safi can shapeshift… Even though I think the player in the back of their head is wondering, “Oh, there’s two Max’s running around. What is the impetus of that?” I notice in Chapter 4 it transforms into less about the murder and more about kind of like the silencing of women’s voices. I think about Safi’s book. I think about Maya Okada’s book as well. And then I also think about Max trying to stifle her own powers–to think it’s either a choice of having to kill your friend or let a town die. But we find out you don’t have to do that.

Where do you go leading the player into this one mystery and then throw all this subtext. In Chapter 4 you throw a lot of things at the player that, unless they’re paying attention, they might not really notice it or they’ll just be focused on the main mystery.

Felice:
Thank you for picking up on all that. I love this series in general because it’s every single game. You play it once and then you think about it and then a week later, you’re like, “Oh, wait, that little detail was actually somatically relevant to something. And so the the hope is that all of the games have different layers and different thematic resonance across the board that kind of can keep giving.

So with this particular story, it is a murder mystery. But before any of that, it was a story about Max and where she would go next. In particular exactly what you said, which is “I have to kill a girl or I have to kill a town.” And that has stuck with me for 10 years and we wanted to basically take that final state that she had been at at the end of the first game and allow her not only to heal from that, but in fact to reject it entirely. And I think that you mentioned Maya and Safi… All of the other characters–the non-super-powered characters, except for Safi–in the game, are similarly squeezed in this feeling of I have to rat out my friend or be poor for, you know, the next 10 years or I have to keep my mouth shut or experience career suicide, things like that. And so this this feeling of not being constrained is something we really wanted to grant Max because she deserved it, a way to overturn that.
A way to overturn that?

DigitalChumps:
Hannah, this would be kind of spoiler for anyone who hasn’t played the game, but–whether or not there’s a sequel–where do you hope Max goes, at least emotionally, from here?

Hannah:
Wow. I hope she just continues to evolve. And grow stronger and more confident in her abilities and her capabilities and her powers. And just really embrace the fact that she has this ability to interfere where no one else can and create positive change even though she sometimes creates chaos. I would just want her to lean into the good side of her powers and the light and lean into being good to people.

DigitalChumps:
I like that.

So, with Safi turning out to be a shapeshifter, we’ve had a shapeshifter, time changer, and an empath. What was the reason to make Safi have that power in particular?

Felice:
There are many powers that don’t really map that well and… Well actually, Never say never!

But yes, we’re particularly interested in powers that map onto a human condition, right? Like, with rewind and regret. And for Safi, I know that the word shapeshifter sounds verysci-fi but for her more it’s about presenting herself in the way that others want to her to be, or basically meeting others’ expectations. That’s something that I very much could relate to in her character. I think that she grew up with her mom as a model minority, the first woman president of Caledon. She’s just steeped in this kind of idea that you need to mold yourself a certain way. You’ll notice a lot of her writing is about identity and authenticity, she basically doesn’t know who she is. And I think that’s why Max is so appealing to her. Because Max, even though she’s got this sad past is, like Hannah said, she’s self-assured. She expresses herself through photography, she has a certainty about who she is, even though she’s sad about it. And Safi really admires it and kind of wants that.

DigitalChumps:
The inclusion of the storm in the game… are players maybe meant to imply that similar events, emotions, self-doubt–things like that created the storm like in the first game?

Jonathan:
I mean, I think a lot of it’s meant to be open to interpretation. There’s a lot of things about how things work in the series that ought to just speak for themselves. The storm is sort of one that I think it’s best maybe folks have their own head canon about. But it certainly seems to respond to the vibes, right? So I’d say that’s probably the the right area to be thinking in.

DigitalChumps:
I think so. And finally, one more question. Are we supposed to imply anything from the comet that seems to be featured so prominently?

Jonathan:
It’s part of the, you know, it’s part of the sauce. It’s part of the alchemy of the different things we’ve put into the game. On its own it isn’t necessarily something super specific to be too concerned about in the context of Double Exposure. But it’s just a part of the table, set dressing for the supernatural.

Felice:
Like the owl, it’s… vibe connected, but it didn’t cause anything in a direct sense.

DigitalChumps:
Yeah. Just adds to the mystique.

Felice:
It’s like the two moons, yeah.

DigitalChumps:
I love that moment because you think “Oh god, what’s about to happen?”

That wraps up our interview. But I wanted to give my sincere thanks to Jonathan, Felice, and Hannah for taking the time to answer all my questions about Life is Strange: Double Exposure.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.