Life is Strange: Reunion Review – Partners in Crime, Partners in Time

Life is Strange: Reunion builds off the ending of Double Exposure but rather than letting players import their save file from the last game and create the choices organically this way, Deck Nine resorted to the tried and true method of letting players choose which (if any or all) of three key characters from Double Exposure that Max Caulfield romanced, whether they picked to save the Bae or Bay in the first game, and whether or not they agreed to help Safi out in the previous game.

I get that the most important choice here isn’t something that could be carried forward from the original Life is Strange game (you still have to make that important decision with Chloe when starting Double Exposure anyway), but it seemed like an omission not to offer the choice for players to carry over the prior experiences more organically, instead of a simple questionnaire.

Regardless of her past trauma of losing her true love, Chloe, Maxine Caulfield is doing alright by herself, having taken the official step forward to being a photography professor at the same Caledon University she attended during the events of Double Exposure. It’s here that she became intimately connected with a few characters, from astrophysicists to investigative journalists, while discovering a completely different set of powers from her ability to merely rewind time in the first game. The Max in Double Exposure had lost her ability to manipulate time, instead working on a new power to jump into an alternate timeline where a key character hasn’t died. By the end of the adventure, Max ultimately comes to a final crescendo by bridging the two divergent timelines together.

In doing so, this also causes a rippling effect on some of the most important events of her life. Chloe Price, whose sacrifice was necessary to prevent the destruction of Arcadia Bay (or wound up leaving Max’s life in exchange for keeping a storm from wiping the city off the face of the Pacific Northwest), is brought back into the fold in the midst of a band tour. Chloe has some very real concerns that her fate is ultimately one bound for destruction, and the only way she can hope to assuage these fears is to try to reconnect with Max once more and make sense of the supernatural and tragic events she keeps hallucinating. 

At the same time that Chloe is going through some real emotional strains, Max is brought into a supernatural event of her own. After witnessing the school she teaches at burn to the ground and some of her best friends among the students and faculty perish in the blaze, the trauma reignites one of her long-lost supernatural powers of being able to rewind time, this time by diving into a photograph that she had taken earlier in that same week. With a time limit of only a few days, Max’s goal in all of Life is Strange: Reunion is to prevent the arson and death it causes, or at least do her best to attempt to do so. 

With the exception of Chloe Price returning into Max’s life, Life is Strange: Reunion focuses on the residents of Lakeport, Vermont, from the staff of the local watering hole, disgraced professor-turned-MRA-podcaster, and various folks for whom Caledon University is their home away from home. For the arson of Caledon University, nearly everyone is a suspect in Max and Chloe’s eyes.

Exploring Caledon University as the lovebirds is handled as a separate affair, with chapters focused on either Max or Chloe, while the two regularly cross paths to share their findings or an awkward, intimate moment. There’s still a spark between the two that death and a decade apart still yearns to be kindled, and some of the best moments in Life is Strange: Reunion are seeing those two act just as awkward as they were back in their high school days. Even with a new cast of characters that have worked their way into Max’s life, Chloe has still remained number one on her mind across the entire Life is Strange timeline.

With the threat of a campus fire as what appears to be an inevitability, Max and Chloe’s adventures together are focused on stopping the arson that will raze Caledon University to the ground, or at least catching the culprit and trying to mitigate the damage. To accomplish this, players wander around the campus in bite-sized chunks, with each chapter running around 10 minutes and only having a few set objectives. The bulk of the gameplay consists ot picking up pieces of evidence and, more importantly, conversing with the locals.

Most of the clues players uncover to solve the mystery come by way of chatting it up, and these conversations matter. If, for the first time, you visit the local watering hole as Chloe and chat up Lucas Colmenero, you have the option to name-drop the person you’re in town to visit. Announce your intent to visit Max Caulfield, and Lucas will be apprehensive around Chloe for the rest of the game. By instead coming up with a literary figure on the spot, Lucas will take note of her quick wit and be more open to sharing his insight on the investigation. By no means has Lucas redeemed himself from Double Exposure, and he’s still quite the brash asshole, but all of the characters surrounding Caledon University have their own quirks and help the story feel more impactful by the end.

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Having played through Life is Strange: Reunion twice and gotten a double major at Caledon University, I came away from the experience thinking one time was more than enough. Once you understand the mystery and the key players, a secondary playthrough is really only about seeing the other side of the choices Max and Chloe could have made, or perhaps going for that golden route and saving everyone possible from perishing in the campus fire. I’m certainly glad that I didn’t have to wait for another six months to enjoy the story, as the episodic format just wasn’t my thing from Max and Chloe’s original adventure, and I feel would have lessened the urgency of trying to solve this arson if it were more drawn out.

Life is Strange: Reunion is a fantastic sendoff for these two heroines, even if the story is ending on a bittersweet note with Ashly Burch not coming back one last time for the main role (Rhianna DeVries reprised the role of Chloe, leaving the character with an unusual lineage of leapfrogging voice actors as Ashly did come back for a few lines in a bonus episode for Life is Strange: Before the Storm). While it’s not a mystery I’m keen on replaying again any time soon, the opportunity to see the magnetism in these two characters was worth the ten-hour playthrough.

[Editor's Note: Life is Strange: Reunion was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. Review code was provided by the publisher.]

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