#even in the depths of hell i will in fact continue to lispost. incurable!

[pochapal]

i know i wrote it off but on my evenings i've been watching a letsplay of the first two episodes of double exposure and now because i'm Like That i semi-genuinely constructed a theory for the game because i'm nothing if i can't solve video game mysteries for enrichment

anyway thots below (spoilers for those who care):

i think based on everything the whole of double exposure's some kind of timeloop. they're trying to distract with doppelgangers and timeline bleeding (the latter is true) but i think the safi murder is objectively as it seems: max kills her. a future max coming back from the very end of the story under safi's guidance because safi herself is secretly the mastermind of her own killing in what is maybe some kind of mega twist maybe.

anyway the way i think this works is that the whole game takes place in an altered timeline leading up to the loop instigated initially by max/safi from the secret third polaroid timeline. what happens is i think safi's murder spurs max into her old instincts which eventually culminates in max revealing her time powers to safi which inspires the latter to send max back to set this whole thing in motion except to fulfill her aims.

what i think that is seems to be based on everything is some kind of misguided revenge quest to do with maya okada. based on everything it seems highly likely that safi would have reason to blame the caledon faculty for her friend's death and seek to enact revenge. of course she wouldn't normally be able to ruin them without getting caught and/or arrested so it's not until the polaroid timeline where a max who has grown close to safi reveals that she used to have time powers as a teen and maybe still does but she just doesn't use them.

polaroid!safi who never let go of this grudge would therefore be very interested in time travel as a means of getting back at people she believes are responsible for her friend's death. she would obviously be inspired particularly by max mentioning that trying to undo chloe's death was the catalyst and therefore thinks something like: hey what if we both went back in time and killed past me while future us ruin gwen/lucas/etc. theoretically given that max was willing to turn a whole town to rubble for her previous bestie it's not impossible she'd be convinced, either out of some kind of manipulation OR as some kind of "this already happened" timeloop thing. kinda like a whole dark inverse of the chloe/rachel situation that sucks max in because of her guilt over failing to stop it the last time.

due to whatever reasons i'm guessing the following facts are true: the time travel murder works, but polaroid!max vanishes or otherwise can't be in the past. also for some reason, perhaps to do with a time travel x2 combob, the timelines start bleeding into each other (maybe polaroid!max could still rewind but something goes wrong and that's why present!max's power manifests as the timeline shifting). likely alive!world supplants polaroid!world in the order of operations. this also means that alive!world consists of two safis while dead!world contains zero safis.

we've not been actually allowed to spend time with safi in game really yet and the off screen stuff is on purpose because while we might end up suspecting alive!safi most of the crimes of sabotage are due to future!safi with some timeline knowledge using bleedpoints to her advantage. somewhere there is a drug dealing gwen. somewhere there is a timeline where lucas is abusive to his son. similarly there's a timeline where vinh doesn't care about abraxas and thus can't get into his own phone. etc etc. accidental and deliberate timeslips abound.

similarly but different to polaroid!world, alive!safi eventually grows aware of max's powers due to max's desire to stop/solve the murder, like polaroid!max and safi knew she'd do. all the while future!safi is very neatly behind the scenes ruining the lives of everyone she thinks wronged her. the confusion in the game will come from figuring out the two safis and figuring out who did what because alive!safi will presumably still be attempting the minor acts of revenge she already planned to do (gwen and lucas took action before the start of the game, likely due to safi's relentless harassment of them).

at some point alive!safi and max both independently learn of this; safi decides, as she would, that the plan is great and that it's in her best interest to fulfill the loop. max, meanwhile, encounters polaroid!safi who, for stable timeloop reasons/timeline hubris, ends up having her existence eaten away by belonging to a dead timeline erased twice over, grown irrelevant now that her past self can meet all the requirements for the timeloop just as easily. i guess maybe polaroid!safi will, in a moment of regret, ask max to stop herself from doing this - it'll probably come out that no, there really was nothing suspicious about maya's death, and safi destroyed so much genuinely for nothing.

final confrontation of the game is max and safi at the point where they're ready to go back to kill past!safi and start the loop over. the choice will be between going back alone and killing safi to stop everything from happening, or staying in the ruined alive!timeline to bring safi to justice that way, very much laterally echoing the arcadia bay choices. justice in a broken world vs fixing the world with blood on your hands - the needs of max vs the needs of everyone else etc.

i think if executed well it might be a kinda technically decent timeloop mystery but i also think deck9 lacks the narrative chops to actually make the characters compelling enough for this to land given that there are a trillion chloe/rachel/arcadia bay parallels in this story that you know they won't capitalize on because despite their best efforts they can't capture the heart of life is strange. anyway yeah this is my humble onion on what they may be very clumsily attempting in this Video Game lol