Life Is Strange: Reunion: The Kotaku Review

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When Life Is Strange: Reunion was first announced, it was touted by developer Deck Nine as “by and for fans” of Don’t Nod’s original supernatural teen drama. I guess I’m not one of the “fans” the studio was talking about.

One of my favorite moments in the series, even as it has changed hands from Don’t Nod to Deck Nine, is an ending I never picked. To this day, the original Life Is Strange’s “save Arcadia Bay” ending has stuck with me in a way that the ending I chose, sacrificing the small town in favor of saving Chloe, the best friend (or girlfriend) of the game’s time-manipulating heroine Max, never has. The first Life Is Strange’s conclusion has always been divisive, as you could argue that the final choice undoes literally everything you’ve done in the first four episodes. But that first game generates a constant push and pull between the player and fate, making you feel the way in which Max is straining every fiber of her being to the breaking point in an effort to stop Chloe’s demise, even as the fabric of reality tears her apart over and over.

When the gun fires in the “save Arcadia Bay” ending, killing Chloe but sparing the town as the still-incredible needle drop of Foal’s “Spanish Sahara” kicks in, it’s almost a moment of relief, choked out through tears and the feeling that the push and pull that’s been tearing you in two has finally stopped exerting its force upon you. You’ve made a terrible sacrifice, but can finally start to let go of all the tension you’ve been carrying with you. At least, that’s what I thought had happened. I guess the “fans” Deck Nine says it made Reunion for never stopped fighting an imaginary fight against fate. Instead of being content with making a difficult sacrifice, they must have seen it as an omniscient writer forcing them to pick between thousands of innocent people and their new favorite video game girlfriend as a mean-spirited slight.

Reunion has all the trappings of a “Fix Fic” written by a disgruntled fan who desperately wanted some third option at the end of Life Is Strange a decade ago and was miffed that Don’t Nod denied it to them. Where the reflection on the events of the original Life Is Strange in 2024’s Double Exposure felt like a decidedly player-hostile take on what Max and Chloe’s relationship could have looked like, much to the chagrin of some long-time fans, Reunion’s is so risk averse it breaks Life Is Strange just to undo the perceived crimes of a team that hasn’t made one of these games since 2019.

Double Exposure ended with Max merging two timelines, one in which her friend Safi was dead, and another in which she was alive. But it turns out, she wasn’t just saving Safi, she was dragging Chloe into this convergent timeline as well. The Chloe we meet (and play as) in Reunion suffers from nightmares in which she experiences conflicting memories of both of the original game’s potential outcomes. She remembers dying on the bathroom floor at Blackwell Academy, but also surviving and visiting her mother in Arcadia Bay, whose life should be mutually exclusive with her daughter’s. Reunion “solves” a problem that a braver game wouldn’t have even considered an issue by merging two timelines, all so it can facilitate the titular reunion between Max and Chloe regardless of whether or not players made the choice to sacrifice her.

I, perhaps naively, hoped that Reunion would use this setup as a way to examine Max and Chloe’s perspectives on that ending. Acknowledging player choice from previous entries is no easy task, especially when the defining decision branches so divergently like the one in Life Is Strange did. Don’t Nod found some subtle but meaningful ways to reflect player choice in Life Is Strange 2, but it did that in part by not returning to the well of Max and Chloe. By and large, Life Is Strange had done a pretty great job of keeping that initial game’s final choice pristine by setting it on a shelf and not touching it. But Reunion just discards all of its ramifications, and does nothing in its runtime to say that it mattered in the end.

This converged version of Chloe barely contains any traces of the actual reality players have created with their choices, as her “fake” memories overlap with the real ones so much that everyone’s kind of getting the same angsty punk rock band manager here. The specifics of what players did aren’t important; all that matters is that a choice was made and Reunion is trying to stitch those incongruent outcomes together, even as its woven quilt of contradictions is coming apart at the seams.

Reunion doesn’t only undermine the original Life Is Strange with its setup. The jarring “Max Caulfield will return in Avengers: Doomsday” ending of Double Exposure is kind of tossed out the window as well. Yes, Max is still here, but the looming problems she had at the end of the last game, such as Safi’s plan to go find other superpowered people, end up discarded because they no longer serve the story of Max and Chloe. The world is quite literally twisting itself to bring them back together, where once it was unraveling as it tried to tear them apart.

All of this could have been forgiven if it felt like Reunion actually did anything meaningful with this reality-distorting carnage beyond turning Max and Chloe into dolls to play house with. The game lets you play as both women, and there are several conversations where you swap back and forth between them with each response so you’re basically given creative control to define their relationship. If you didn’t have a romantic relationship with Chloe back in Life Is Strange, you can start one up in Reunion because you are in total control of both characters. I understand this is because Reunion is supposed to be a sequel to each of their games, in which players have inhabited both Max and Chloe at different points, but when you’re essentially playing matchmaker for them by controlling each character’s thoughts, the whole thing feels like fanfiction. IP-owner-endorsed fanfiction, though. It’s “for the fans.”

Perhaps the most baldfaced example of how Reunion retreats to safety is in the way that it falls back on old mechanics. Max is using her time-rewinding powers from the original game again instead of the reality-jumping ones she had in Double Exposure, and Chloe once again has her “Backtalk” mechanic that lets her mouth off to people and authority figures like she did in prequel game Before the Storm. It keeps both girls’ sections distinct, and I certainly missed having Max’s powers when I would fuck up something as Chloe, but I quickly fell into an old rhythm with both characters. The puzzles Max solves have the same solutions as always, whether that be rewinding a conversation with new information or appearing just in time to stop some catastrophe from happening. Chloe’s Backtalk mechanic has always been a little spotty, as it has you basically playing a weird game of Simon Says to talk people down, and the “right” and “wrong” dialogue choices are still communicated to you in a way that feels a little abstract and wishy-washy.

BACK-OF-THE-BOX-QUOTE:

“Life could be stranger, actually.”
DEVELOPER:

Deck Nine Games
TYPE OF GAME:

Narrative adventure starring characters from the original Life Is Strange
LIKED:

It’s pretty sometimes, I don’t know sometimes I’m just sad enough for one of these games to hit even if it’s bad

DISLIKED:

Panders to the weakest among us and unravels the fabric of the series to do it
PLATFORM:

PC, PS5 (played on), Xbox Series X/S
RELEASE DATE:

March 26, 2026
PLAYED:

~8 hours

In returning to Max and Chloe, Reunion also loses the distinct identity that each entry in this series once had. Life Is Strange was once an anthology series following different people from multiple walks of life. Life Is Strange 2 is still an incredibly timely story of two Mexican-American brothers trying to find a place for themselves in a country that did everything in its power to disenfranchise them. True Colors’ use of empathy-based powers let it explore some truly ugly emotions about family and the farce of small-town coziness. For a series called Life Is Strange, the series did a pretty great job of capturing how even when you have superpowers, life isn’t that strange at all, actually. People are messy and scared, and having supernatural abilities only magnifies those parts that are already underneath the surface. But Reunion? It would rather foreground people we know than risk exploring the experiences of someone else, because going elsewhere and finding someone new to follow is scarier than falling back on ol’ reliable sad girl yuri. Well, by the end, it’s probably not going to be as sad. At least, if you make all the right choices.

If Max and Chloe are back at square one, using the same powers, saving the same people, and learning the same lessons, how is Reunion supposed to be an actual step forward for Life Is Strange’s most recognizable leads? Two games, internal strife, and a team of developers raked through the coals, just to pretend it’s 2015 again but Max and Chloe will do things “right” this time? What is “right” to Reunion? A story in which nobody has to lose. Well, the “fans” Deck Nine says the game is for don’t, at least. For the rest of us who have weighed that decision to save or sacrifice Chloe for a decade, accepting a loss that we couldn’t stop and living with our choices? We lost something, that’s for sure.