On principle, Life Is Strange: Reunion should deeply annoy me. The latest entry in the supernatural adventure series is bringing back Chloe, the angry punk rocker from a broken home whose potential death is the entire emotional climax of the original game. She returns here regardless of whether you sacrificed or saved her in that earlier game, a concept which concerned me when I first heard about it, but after playing about an hour and a half of Deck Nine’s next expansion of Don’t Nod’s original strange life, I’m intrigued to see how the studio handles the quantum states it’s working within.
One of my biggest video game soapboxes is that player choices should have consequences, and developers that choose to integrate decisions into their game design should take great care to not only represent altered relationships and world states, but reflect those choices in future installments, or at the very least not contradict them and drag every player into some kind of universal “canon.” Most games let me down on this in one way or another, whether that be Mass Effect 3 railroading everyone into the same Rachni mission regardless of their decision to kill or spare the race’s last remaining queen, or Infamous: Second Son straight up choosing one of Infamous 2’s endings over the other.
Life Is Strange: Reunion is one of the few games that reckons with its predecessors’ multiple quantum states as part of the text, rather than overwriting history for all its players. At the end of 2024’s Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, Max Caulfield, who hopped between two different timelines throughout the sequel, merged two universes together to save a friend, an act which, as we learn in Reunion, has also unknowingly brought Chloe from one timeline into another, assuming she didn’t survive the finale of the original game in your playthrough. Whether Chloe is from your timeline or not, she’s suffering from contradictory memories of both of her possible fates, which brings her to Max’s doorstep and puts the partners in time back on track to solve another case after either being separated through death or circumstance. Thus, the titular reunion.
What I played of Reunion was pretty straightforward Life Is Strange stuff, having you play as both girls as they try to solve the mystery of how the Caledon University campus will end up leveled by a fire in a few days . Max uses her ability to rewind time once more while Chloe once again has her “Backtalk” skill from Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, allowing her to argue her way out of every awkward situation she finds herself in.
The stakes feel higher when playing as Chloe because, unlike Max, she doesn’t get do-overs, and if she fails to talk her way through something it can have lasting consequences that Max can’t rewind away. I’d forgotten how stressful those Backtalk segments could be; they have you choosing dialogue options to argue with someone or smooth-talk your way out of a situation and figuring out the right choice is mostly vibes-based. The section I played had Chloe getting in trouble on the Caledon Campus and trying to convince a security guard she was scoping the place as a potential grad student. I had one shot to talk my way through the situation, and it didn’t go well, a failure which came up later when I was playing as Max in a separate segment.
Meanwhile, Max’s segments return to the time-manipulating roots of the original Life Is Strange, with you finding out new information about someone, then rewinding a conversation and using that info to gain the upper hand, or giving yourself extra time to cut the wires on explosives before they go off, or even just positioning yourself in the right spot to prevent an event you’ve previously seen unfold. Reunion feels like it’s playing the hits as it returns to the series’ original leads, and I’m curious to see if it does something meaningful with that or if it feels like a bit of a fandom gimme designed in a lab to please the Pricefield shippers who latched onto the duo eleven years ago.
I’m approaching Reunion with a mix of skepticism and trust. Despite its eyeroll-worthy MCU-ass ending, I really did enjoy Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, as well as the rest of Deck Nine’s entries in this ongoing supernatural soap opera. However, the notion of a post-Life Is Strange game featuring Chloe, even if she exists in this overlapping, multiversal state, makes me cynical. Double Exposure already felt like it was retreating to safety by bringing Max back after the series had gone on to position itself as an anthology about people from different walks of life, and bending the universe nearly to its breaking point to add Chloe back into the mix isn’t helping it beat those allegations.
While my inner cynic is bracing for Reunion to feel like a desperate bit of fan service, the choice-based game sicko in me is intrigued by the situation Deck Nine has put itself in. To me, in sequels to choice-based games, the illusion that my choices persist out there somewhere, even if I’m not witnessing their ramifications, is more important than every game feeling like a direct continuation of what I’ve done before, with the impacts of my previous choices visible everywhere I look. I would rather a sequel look away from what I’ve previously done so it can create its own story where my past actions are a distant hum in the background, so developers don’t have to spend all the time and resources it would take to make a bunch of nods and references acknowledging my choices. Life Is Strange: Reunion is diving headfirst into all the messiness of trying to write a specific story in the confines of something branching and long-established. If nothing else, I want to see if Deck Nine can pull it off when the game launches on March 26.
