Life is Strange: Reunion is a solid attempt at sending-off series progenitors, Chloe and Max. Unfortunately, due to some pacing issues, Max’s power usage, and the handling of Chloe’s return, Life is Strange: Reunion feels like less of a send-off and more of a one-off, resulting in a weak series entry.
Maxine Caulfield is moving up in the world. She has an agent; she just accepted a role as a professor at Caledon University and, as a result, is laying down roots. She’s been testing her rewind powers with a friend and fellow professor, Moses Murphy. Life is Strange? No, Life is good.
Max’s abilities are well established throughout the series. However, the powers she received in Life is Strange: Double Exposure are now gone, and she only has her rewind powers from the original game.
In Reunion, Abraxas, Caledon’s own Life and Death Brigade, takes center stage as the first clue in Max’s attempt to find the firestarter. And when she heads over to the Abraxas house to play detective, Chloe shows up in Lakeport.
Life is Strange is the type of game that’s often referred to pejoratively as a walking simulator. The player takes on the role of either Max or Chloe and wanders through a beautiful set piece, inspecting objects and talking to people, all with an objective in mind.
With Max, players will find themselves talking to people to learn something, rewinding time, and using that newfound knowledge to their advantage in the conversation. Max’s liberal use of this ability shakes the foundations set in the original set of games, where actions like this have consequences.
Chloe’s backtalk ability is back from Life is Strange: Before the Storm, putting players in a conversational battle with other people in the world. After Chloe does a lap around an area to learn as much as she can, she’ll backtalk someone and, if the information gathered was sufficient, use it against the person to get information out of them.
The split-protagonist works really well for Reunion, sometimes shifting as both Max and Chloe operate in the same space, which is very cool.
Though it’s clear that Max and Chloe have a deep reverence for each other, they spend almost no time speaking with each other about the past 10 years. If Reunion hadn’t specifically spelled out that Chloe died (or split up with Max) 10+ years prior, you would never know.
Max’s powers play a very prominent role in Reunion, but are treated as inconsequential. In the original game, Max’s power usage had far-reaching consequences. The end of the first game completely hinged on Max’s overuse of her powers.
In Reunion, she’s using those same powers to score points with students or find information out about a secret protest. The powers are the same, but the stakes are far lower. We’ve seen the consequences of her actions go from taking out an entire town to taking out a small liberal arts college in Vermont, to nothing.
Frustratingly, Max and Chloe spend very little time alone together. If Reunion were a spin-off or just another series entry, this might pass muster. This is supposed to be the final chapter, so we receive very little closure on the relationship between Max and Chloe.
One of the cornerstones of the Life is Strange narrative is downtime. Moments where the controlled character can sit somewhere and simply be. Some indie music will play, another character might be doing something in the background, but the ambiance was key.
Reunion has flecks of this throughout the game, but because the story is so focused on moving forward and on filling the player with as much information as possible, these moments are spent listening to podcasts.
Max and Chloe can listen to in-universe podcasts, and they’re treated similarly to the downtime of previous games. Though instead of a mellow song about being heartsick, it’s Loretta accusing staff members of being connected to Abraxas.
Kinda takes the mindfulness out of sitting and observing.
Reunion uses the same foundation as Double Exposure, so you should expect the game to look really nice. Characters look the same, with the exception of Chloe, who wasn’t in the last game. However, Chloe looks great! They aged her up perfectly, and seeing Max and Chloe together is almost unreal with how realistically they’ve aged since the original game.
Max and Chloe are these star-crossed lovers who have forged a bond before the first game had even started and are destined to be together. The misstep of having them apart in the last game wasn’t its only failing, but it was a big one.
The way Deck Nine has treated this story makes me glad the Max and Chloe saga is ending. There are moments towards the end that are sweet but don’t quite hit the mark. Reunion doesn’t feel like the big send-off that I was hoping for. Reunion treats the Max and Chloe story as more of a burden it’s looking to shake off rather than a celebration of these characters.
The Final Word
Life is Strange: Reunion is another misstep in how Max’s story is handled. While better than the last entry, this is simply not the send-off for Chloe and Max that I had hoped for. Between the lack of downtime, Max having virtually no consequences for her actions, and Chloe’s unimpressive return, I was fairly disappointed. I think Max & Chloe deserve better.
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