Life Is Strange: Reunion Review – Rewinding Too Far Backwards
Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher:
Square Enix
Developer:
Deck Nine
Release:
Rating:
Mature
Life is Strange: Reunion lives up to its name in more ways than one. Players return to Caledon University, the setting of the previous game, Double Exposure, to unravel a new mystery alongside much of that game’s cast. Max Caulfield’s time-rewind powers from the first Life is Strange are back in full force. And, of course, fan-favorite character Chloe Price makes her grand return to the series after over a decade-long absence. Retreading these familiar grounds offers nostalgic fun and some effective emotional beats. However, Max and Chloe’s swan song also lacks the exciting freshness of its predecessor, and its core mystery takes some frustrating missteps.
Reunion is a direct follow-up to Double Exposure, taking place nine months later. It’s the least newcomer-friendly entry due to how much its events hinge on having played the 2024 adventure and, to a lesser extent, the first Life is Strange. Although Reunion opens with a cinematic recap of Double Exposure’s pivotal moments, character development and characterization of its cast are largely lost. The game doesn’t spend much time re-establishing the snoopy journalist Loretta or the sly and secretive Vinh, and my interactions with these characters were largely colored by knowing how they behaved in Double Exposure. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend playing the last game before embarking on this new journey.
Reunion’s plot centers on Max returning to a Caledon engulfed in a fire that kills her friends and students; she jumps backward in time three days to try to prevent this destruction. I was immediately disappointed with how Reunion quickly walks back a big element of Double Exposure’s shocking finale. Perhaps in an effort to keep newcomers on a similar level of familiarity, a reveal involving the larger cast with huge implications for the future is essentially retconned in an extremely unsatisfying way. It more or less resets most of the cast to where they were before Double Exposure’s ending, making interactions in Reunion overly familiar and devoid of interesting character growth. Reunion’s new characters, like the school’s villainous new president, don’t fare better and are woefully one-dimensional. I was also bummed that the endgame status of one particularly special student is not followed up on in any major way, despite multiple teases. Double Exposure’s final big decision, which also had wild implications, also winds up going nowhere significant and is hardly elaborated on.
Those complaints aside, it’s great to hang out with Max and her best friend Moses again. They remain a delight thanks to strong dialogue and even better performances, and this extends to Chloe and other core characters, too. Double Exposure’s reality-hopping shenanigans paved a good excuse to bring Chloe Price into the fold, a character who, depending on how you ended the first Life is Strange, may be coming back from the dead. My biggest fear coming into Reunion was that Chloe would feel shoehorned, and I’m happy to say that’s not the case. The story justifies her presence both logically (as well as multiverse stories can, at least) and thematically, and I enjoyed getting to know an older, more mature version of her character. Chloe still has her signature rebellious streak, but I like how Reunion softens her in the way growing up tends to. Chloe’s supernatural existential crisis offers some poignant moments, and I like how this thread weaves into the similar plight of Max’s frenemy, Safi. But it ultimately takes a backseat to the less intriguing, more convoluted main plot of preventing the school fire.
Splitting time playing as Max and Chloe and using their respective talents to interrogate suspects has enjoyable moments, but it is overall less stimulating than Double Exposure’s more engaging reality-shifting puzzles. Rewinding time with Max was never a deep mechanic in the original game, and that remains the case here. It largely boils down to redoing actions or conversations that go awry (sometimes multiple times) until you find the one correct path, with interesting moral dilemmas, such as whether to erase someone’s memory to keep them in the dark, arising less often than I hoped. Chloe, meanwhile, has her backtalking mechanic from Life is Strange: Before the Storm, which I didn’t love then and still don’t now. This involves choosing the correct responses in a row (typically two or three) based on knowledge of events to manipulate characters as you need. Again, it’s fairly shallow, and there are surprisingly few of these sequences given how much time you spend playing as Chloe. The unfortunate downside of Max and Chloe sharing gameplay time is that neither character’s mechanics has enough time to grow in complexity.
Regardless of who you control, you’ll explore familiar locations, like the Caledon school grounds and the Snapping Turtle bar, alongside a couple of new areas to gather and inspect clues to build cases against potential suspects. Your accusations can be wrong, and you can miss helpful items; doing so leads to different outcomes, and I appreciate how this adds real stakes to my sleuthing. However, I didn’t always feel as hands-on with the investigation as I would like. For instance, one crucial clue implicating a character was simply given to me toward the end. I never found this clue myself – it just appeared on the evidence board as if I always had this information – so the resulting revelation feels hollow and unearned. The mystery is a bit messy overall, to the point I lost the thread a couple of times on how or why a character could be involved. It only coalesces towards the finish line into a somewhat satisfying conclusion (the one I got, at least) despite taking a few narrative leaps to get there.
The primary draw of Reunion is seeing Max and Chloe reconnect and make up for lost time. The game delivers on that front; their heartfelt interactions sometimes made me forget the game’s other shortcomings. The manner in which Deck Nine sends these two off into the sunset – again, the version I unlocked – is truly wonderful. The rest of the package is overwhelmingly familiar to Double Exposure and takes a step backward in some cases. As much as I love Max and Chloe, everything around them seems to fall apart when they come together; Reunion is, sadly, no different.
Score:
6
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