Life is Strange: Reunion is Almost Exactly What I Wanted

About a year ago I wrote my review for Life is Strange: Double Exposure. It was the return of the original protagonist Max a decade after the first game with a lot of character progression since. She had become a teacher of photography and an award winning photographer, but Chloe was no longer in her life, even if you saved her at the end of the first game. I had issues with the game, primarily I thought it didn’t deal with the paradox of it all that well and it got too distracted during Chapter 4 of the game so it didn’t feel like the actual narrative progressed at all. I had some other issues but overall the game was a step in a good direction.

Then, there was the announcement just a few months ago that Life is Strange: Reunion was a thing and that Chloe was coming back. Personally, I was ecstatic, I thought Double Exposure laid some great ground work for a better sequel and was really intrigued to see what Chloe had been up to and how she had grown up as a person. I even wrote an article last week about how Life is Strange Will Always be Special just because I was so excited for Reunion.

So then, with me having played Reunion, rather quickly I might add, what did I think? Did it live up to my excitement? Were there flaws? Were those flaws something that made the game feel like shit? Or was the game finally a triumphant return of the Max and Chloe super team? Okay you’ve read the title, you know it’s great, so let’s go over the good the bad, and maybe a brand new section of my reviews where I go over the “meh”.

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About 9 months after the events of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Max and her friends have progressed as people, but most of them forgot about that giant storm that happened at the end of the first game and the powers that Max has and those two timelines merging. Those 9 months have lead to continually increasing tension between Caledon University and the town of Lakeport and, interestingly, Max’s original powers returning. After a birthday weekend in New York to be showcased at an Art Gallery, Max gets back to the school on Sunday and she finds it on fire. People are dying, buildings are burning, and she has to witness it all. After seeing some people she knows falling through a roof, she just so happens to find a picture of the selfie she took on Friday, a few hours before she was supposed to drive to NYC. She then uses her fancy returned powers to jump into that photo so she can go back in time and hopefully save everyone she can. Will she manage to save everyone? Will she have to use rewind a lot to do so? Will her ex girlfriend Chloe show up because she is dealing with the ramifications of the merged timelines from Double Exposure and needs to talk with Max about why she’s having the issues she’s having? Will that ex girlfriend then help Max uncover the reason the fire happened and how to stop it? Yes...probably. I mean it’s kinda up to you if you manage to figure it out.

The gameplay for Max in Double Exposure was a massive letdown for me. You had to go to specific points to shift between realities and it didn’t feel good going back and forth in order to have similar conversations over again and talk to the same characters again and again. It was disappointing. Yet, here in Reunion it was completely different because they got rid of that disappointing mechanic and brought back Max’s original powers. This was a really great change. It made the game feel like it should, like Max was doing what she was always meant to do. I mean the game just felt like it made more sense because of it. Less timeline fuckery leading to unsatisfying paradoxes and seemingly dropped plot points and moments of getting distracted, all of which Double Exposure suffered from.

The story is really really good. It moved fast of course, which I talk about more in the next section, but what was there felt so damn good. The characters had moments to shine, they each made sense in what they were doing, nothing really felt disappointing overall and, again, there wasn’t a significant distraction that Double Exposure seemed to have when dealing with the multiple timelines. Chloe particularly was a highlight. Seeing her having grown as a person, still being somewhat unsure about her future and traumatized, but also being an adult version of herself who wasn’t as reckless as she was as a teenager, and who had a full blackout sleeve coverup of the tattoo she had in the original game likely because of the trauma associated with it. She represented the punk adult who was that reckless kid but grew up into a less reckless but still punk adult who also manages a punk band because of course. It was great. I really enjoyed it and, as I really relate to Chloe as a person, it was emotional seeing her go through it. She thinks she’s doomed and I get it, I get it a lot. The writing here was top notch to me and I loved it.

Also I just want to say I really enjoyed the Humor of the game. In Double Exposure Max brought her characteristic wit and cheesy jokes to the game while here, not only do you have Max again, but finally you get Chloe and her standard punky jokey shtick that also comes with a lot of references. One that particularly made me laugh was she makes a Pepe Silvia joke. It was not something I expected and that’s kinda what I like about the writing of the humor in the game, it’s cheesy, sure. But it’s also fun and not trying too hard. It’s just enjoyable and that’s all that matters.

There were also many, many more key moments in the game, as opposed to Double Exposure, that really stuck with me and were fun. For instance, there’s a moment where Max has a...trippy experience where she learns that you might not want to look in a mirror when you find yourself tripping over some balls. There are many more moments that are very memorable but don’t want to spoil and I think that’s what the original Life is Strange also had, so Reunion hit that experience to a T.

These all add up to provide a game that brings me back to playing the first a decade ago. It brings me back to what I was going through back then. It helps me see not just how much these characters have grown but how much I have. The beauty of Reunion is that it provides a new experience of seeing the growth of the characters between games, not just nostalgia. Of course there is some Nostalgia, but it’s not the main push in my experience.

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One of the core gameplay mechanics is supposed to be Chloe’s backtalk where you, through your responses, convince people to believe something or tell you something. Yet, during the entire game I only did that 2 times and missed the other 1 option (and to be fair might have missed another, it's hard to be sure). It felt like a significantly underutilized gameplay mechanic which made me sad as I was looking forward to using it as a way of mixing up the gameplay. Instead Chloe segments felt more like going around and talking to people and investigating, but not really doing anything that was uniquely hers, besides her personality. I still loved her segments but not using backtalk more felt bad. I think this likely has to do with how condensed the game felt given that it was likely built in around 18 months.

Which, speaking of. I think that’s a core problem with the game. It was very short. You could really tell that it was built quickly. They reused a ton of things, which I actually appreciated, but everything took place over the course of 3 days which made the game go by very fast. Overall it took me probably close to 9 hours, comparable to Double Exposure which I also thought was too short but this still felt shorter somehow. Maybe it’s because it was very fast paced. It didn’t feel like there was enough room to breathe, let alone enough time for Chloe and Max to feel like they did in the original. Many of the best moments came when they were apart and that kinda sucked. They had great moments together, don’t get me wrong, and I loved that you were able to decide how each of them responded to each other when they were in conversations together. But I think the quick pace of the narrative made me just want more. I mean I beat it in a couple days. I didn’t even feel like I played THAT long. I just wanted more. In a perfect world I think it would have been a week before the fire so we got a ton of extra time not just with Max and Chloe but with the characters we came to love from Double Exposure. Again, this is at it’s core the reality of how the game was built so quickly, it’s hard to make a long game when you have a year and a half.

Something the game does NOT communicate to you is the “time state” or something to that effect. Essentially, the more you rewind to get the “perfect” choice of yours, the worse state time ends up in. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. It’s a really interesting mechanic and all but there is zero communication of the state you are currently in. So, for instance, what I think would have been beneficial is if in the menu you could see how bad or good your time state was. Honestly, I’m thinking similar to a Dishonored situation where if you killed more people the city would get worse and it told you as such after every mission. I wanted something like that. Just some way to know this mechanic exists and have it represented somewhere so I can see what the state is. This state has outcomes late game so not being able to know how bad things are means I don’t know if I have to replay the entire game to get an ending I desperately wanted, or if I just have to replay the last half hour. It’s very frustrating.

There’s two Meh things here, mainly that the game didn’t fix two problems I had with Double Exposure. You walk too slowly, even when you run, and there is no FOV slider. Max and Chloe take up a third of the screen and that was just too much. Let me see more of my surroundings, and let me run faster along side it. The game is perfect for these two changes but it really feels like Deck Nine are resisting allowing the characters to move faster because it would make the world seem smaller. And that they don’t want to increase the FOV because it....I dunno...it doesn’t feel like there’s a reason for this one especially since Unreal Engine has a integrated FOV slider (I say as a person that uses Unreal for my indie projects). It wouldn’t be that hard, it wouldn’t hurt the intimacy of the gameplay, they just need to do it. I mean, more and more games need to increase walk speed and include FOV sliders but aren’t. I hope that trend doesn’t keep going because it’s exhausting even if it’s something that is my particular pet peeves about many modern games.

Rewind to Buy me a Coffee maybe?

I mostly enjoyed the ending. I liked how I was able to come to a solution to save as many people as possible, I liked that several of my earlier decisions came into play. I even liked the “one week later” segment. What I didn’t think was the best was that there wasn’t the best closure on one of the main aspects of the game. I thought there was going to be a larger resolution instead of just finding ways to cope. In some ways that is a more realistic ending, not everything can be resolved or fixed. Sometimes you just have to find a way to deal with your problem and cope, even if it’s hard. If that’s the goal then I think it did a great job, I think I just expected resolution. It’s still a good ending though! Even the final decision is one that I appreciated, I even went back and quickly did the other option, which was actually the one I preferred. Most games don’t let me go back and try the other ending again without significant replaying so being able to do that was really nice. There also seemed to be hints that, if the game is successful, there might be another game that doesn’t have to directly do with Chloe and Max but might still include them as side characters or something, which I hope happens because I want more. I also found out that there was an ending montage I didn’t get but really wanted to and thought it was what was going to happen in the ending I got but didn’t like. So if you want that montage, maybe use Max’s power very very sparingly. Overall, I liked it even if I had nitpicks.

Life is Strange: Reunion is the best Life is Strange game I’ve played since the original and almost exactly what I wanted out of a game like this. It’s got great characters and writing, a great story, and much better gameplay than Double Exposure. But the flaws still exist and because of the brisk pace of the story, likely from the brisk pace of development, it feels like there’s less time for the narrative and characters to breathe. That fact just holds the game back from really being fantastic. It’s still great, but the flaws are noticeable.

I think if you’ve experience Life is Strange at all then you should play Reunion. Not only is it a great experience, and a pretty quick one, it’s one that only costs 40 bucks. Even if you didn’t like Double Exposure I still think you should play Reunion. It allows you to get closure in a way we haven’t had with these characters before and I adored it for that. Also if you get it on sale then that’s a super good deal because it’s well worth the 40 bucks but less than that it’s even better. And also remember you can save everyone and if you want the best ending then use rewind sparingly. Or don’t, rewind to your hearts content, just know the game will remember it.

Meow,

Cat