Life is Strange: Reunion - Hands-on Preview
Against all odds, the impending release of Life is Strange: Reunion means that Max and Chloe are back again for another (presumably traumatic) adventure. As a long-time fan of the series, I’ve had some doubts about whether or not this game is a good idea, and concerns about what it might mean for the impact of the choices made during early series entries. But, thanks to Square Enix, I got to play a few hours of the game last week, and I have to say, it’s very easy to fall back in love with the idea of spending even just a little more time with my favourite doomed couple.
Like its predecessor Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Life is Strange: Reunion takes place at Caledon University, where Max Caulfield continues in her position as an art professor. With the events of the past game clearly still fresh, Max is clearly still caught up in trying to figure out what’s going on with her friend, Safi, who played a pivotal role in Max’s most recent trauma. I’m trying to be purposefully vague here, because from what I played, it seems like knowledge of both Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Double Exposure is going to be key to your enjoyment of this game – so if you haven’t played those yet, stop reading now, and go and do that instead, because it seems like Reunion is going to be one big combo of a lot of things that came before – mechanics and story points included.
Playing Reunion, at least the short section I experienced, feels very much like playing Double Exposure – Max is back in familiar locations like the campus bar, university grounds, and her cute little academic housing lodge, with familiar faces also returning to the familiar haunts. Lovable nerd Moses, along with past love interests Amanda and Vinh seem primed to once again be allies (or more?) for Awkward Disaster Max, and based on the marketing it seems like players will be asked to indicate whether or not they romanced one of these options in the past game, so I’m sure there’s room for some awkward conversations with both of them at the very least. The preview build didn’t allow for this choice, but it was good to see them nonetheless – how the story will handle their presence is perhaps one of my biggest remaining questions.
But then, of course, there’s Chloe. After experiencing visions that show the Caledon campus on fire, Max is already on a path to alter the future once again when the biggest ghost (perhaps literally) from her past arrives in the form of Chloe Price. Whether she’s back from the dead or simply the one that got away, Chloe’s been seeing things too – flashes from what seem like an alternate reality – and she needs Max’s help to understand why. For my preview, I chose a file where the end of Life is Strange had seen Chloe and Max leave together and the town of Arcadia Bay destroyed, so the reunion between the two was more ‘ex first loves with a whole lot of baggage reunited’ than ‘Max seeing the ghost of her former best friend-turned-lover’, and the game did a largely graceful job of handling the implications of that dynamic.
The explanation for the largest problem with the existence of this game (how can Chloe be both alive and dead) is that both realities are true – when Max merged realities at the end of Double Exposure, she merged all realities – so now it seems like everyone is… alive again? What’s unclear from the preview is exactly how much destruction and grief remains in the past of each character involved, because initial impressions seem to suggest that a lot of the ‘bad’ has been conveniently undone. Decisions I agonised and cried over no longer seem to matter, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. Good, I guess? I’m glad Chloe and Max can be together again? But at the same time, the thesis statement of this series is ‘this choice will have consequences’, and I’m not entirely sure that Reunion isn’t in direct opposition to that idea.
But there’s also an alternate possibility, which this preview did a surprisingly good job of convincing me might be true – that in fact, everything has been building to this. The return of Chloe and this merging of realities does somehow feel like a logical continuation from where Double Exposure left off, and one that can make sense in the strange reality that Max and Chloe live in. I bought into Double Exposure’s themes of grief and consequence, and the different ideas of what trauma can look like and how that can affect relationships, and I think Deck Nine are delving back into those themes here. Though Chloe doesn’t remember either a reality where she or her loved ones died, Max clearly does – so I’m curious to see where that disconnect takes their relationship, and how they both process those feelings as they figure out what’s still real.
Playing as Chloe also brings back her backtalk mechanic, previously only seen in the prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm. Chloe is as abrasive as she’s ever been, and her dialogue is as cringey as it’s ever been, and that flips between being endearing and wildly irritating. Her innate ability to get herself into trouble makes her both an extremely frustrating and chaotically fun character to embody, and I’m interested to see more about how the flow of the game is affected when her on-the-fly tactics are matched with Max’s retroactive rewind ability. The game has already mixed together some of their dialogue choices, allowing you to make choices for both throughout the same conversation, which goes a way to making them feel like a team, and I’m sure will help to highlight their very clear differences.
In short – I don’t know. I’m cautiously optimistic. I can’t deny that I’m happy to get to spend some time with Max and Chloe together, even though I still have a lot of questions about what this will all mean for the series overall. Either way, I’m definitely excited to play the full game when it comes out next month, and ready to embrace (and cry about) whatever may come.
Life is Strange: Reunion will release on March 26th on PlayStation 5, PC and Xbox Series S|X.
