'None of your decisions from the first game matter' Life is Strange: Reunion wants you to have your cake and eat it

Date:
Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:37:43 +0000

Description:
Life is Strange: Reunion is a disappointingly shallow adventure that wholly undermines the story of the first game.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Before
I detail what makes narrative adventure game Life is Strange: Reunion quite
so egregious, I think its important to clarify that I love this series and my issues with the latest instalment are not the result of pure malice, but rather come from a desire to return to the dizzying heights of Life is
Strange and its excellent sequel Life is Strange 2 . Review info Platform reviewed: PC Available on: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC Release date: March 26, 2026 The franchise may now be helmed by a new studio, Deck Nine, (the studio behind the somewhat underwhelming spinoff Life Is Strange: Before the Storm ) rather than original creators Dont Nod (who have since put out the sublime spiritual successor Lost Records: Bloom & Rage ) but the team showed incredible promise with its 2021 entry L ife Is Strange: True Colors . Life
Is Strange: Reunion at Green Man Gaming for 34.99 It wasnt perfect, but it still delivered a well-written, emotional tale with a cast of decently memorable characters and a perfectly realized, beautiful setting.

Given how this standalone story was received, I simply dont understand why Deck Nine wanted to bring back Max Caulfield (the protagonist of the first game) for 2024s disastrous Double Exposure , let alone double down by adding her childhood friend (and lets be honest, practically canon ) love interest, Chloe Price, to this new entry as well. Have your cake (Image credit: Square Enix) If theres one word to describe Reunion , its cowardly. This is nothing short of an embarrassing attempt to make amends with fans after Double Exposure , executed so sloppily that it even managed to annoy me as someone who didnt appreciate the direction that game went in the slightest. The problem is a heavy reliance on retconning, with basically every event in that games latter half being completely undone in minutes.

Reunion starts by asking you to recap some of your choices from Double Exposure , who you chose to date, for example, in addition to some key decisions from Life is Strange 1, like whether you saved Arcadia Bay or
Chloe. What does any of this change, exactly? Practically nothing, as its quickly revealed that you broke up with your chosen love interest off-screen in the handful of months between entries, and the destructive world-altering events of the last games finale have all been forgotten thanks to a
convenient widespread case of what the characters dub storm amnesia.

You may recall that friend-turned-antagonist Safi Llewellyn-Fayyad closed out Double Exposure by vowing to travel the country, creating a team of super-powered individuals like some kind of hipster avengers, but all of this is quickly hand-waved away by the simple explanation that she gave up and
came home after a few weeks. Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from
us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

None of your decisions from the first game matter either, as it turns out
that both possible timelines have merged into one thanks to the supernatural events of the previous entry. Not only is Chloe alive and well, but the whole town of Arcadia Bay and all of its residents are completely intact.

It completely undermines the gravity of one of the most memorable decisions
in not just the series but all of gaming, and the entire reason why many (including me) fell in love with these titles in the first place. I do understand that many fans will likely be pleased by the idea of everyone getting a happy ending but its cheap and, being frank, not the kind of
choice a studio should make for a story that it didnt even originally create. Tinderbox (Image credit: Square Enix) I could forgive much of this if Reunion still had a decent mystery at its core, which sadly isnt the case. The main thrust is that Maxs beloved Caledon University is about to go up in smoke thanks to some kind of arson attack, and it's up to her to use her
timey-wimey powers to travel back in time to fix it.

Of course, her double exposure power from the last game has been completely forgotten, replaced with rewind a la Life is Strange 1. The ability, which lets her rewind time for a short duration, seems like it would be quite
useful for sleuthing, but its hardly used and ultimately feels like an afterthought.

There are multiple moments where it could come in handy, too, like one agonizing sequence that has you distracting a series of characters in order
to sneakily inspect the contents of the folders theyre carrying. There is literally nothing stopping Max from simply grabbing the folders (which are
all just lying on tables) and taking a look before rewinding a few minutes.
In fact, she literally does what Im describing later on to get her hands on someones bag, so I can only assume that the studio either didnt consider the possibility in that instance or just wanted to pad the runtime.

Im leaning towards the latter as padding is a theme elsewhere too; the
mystery progresses at a painfully slow pace right up until Max walks into a room and has the storys most important events literally explained to her (and by extension the player) in a magical sequence of moving images. (Image credit: Square Enix) Theres no joy in exploration either, as environments are lifeless and sterile with ugly lighting that conveys no sense of atmosphere
at all a far cry from the lovely, painterly look of the first two games or even the warm, cozy appearance of True Colors .

Most are ported directly from Double Exposure , so they already feel quite stale, and thats before you even consider that theyve been massively cut down this time around. The university's quad, for instance, now has no accessible buildings adjacent to it (explained as the result of storm damage, though little is visible as that would require changing the models a lot), which really hampers your ability to explore.

World-building is a major problem in general. Nothing about the story feels genuine, with awkward interactions that verge on almost Lynchian at times. Nobody ever really discusses anything beyond that which is immediately relevant to Maxs understanding of the main mystery which, combined with the dire facial animation and some worryingly unfinished looking moments where
the camera fades to black or pans away in order to avoid having to show what would be some rather complex scenes, gives the impression of a world
populated by malfunctioning animatronics rather than real people. Missing persons (Image credit: Square Enix) Deck Nine clearly wants to distance
itself from Double Exposure , though given how many of that games major characters still appear here, the handful of absences are painfully obvious. Noteworthy undergraduate student Diamond Washington is completely missing in action, as is Maxs friend and fellow educator, Gwen Hunter.

Having been hounded out of her university job thanks to a misunderstanding in the previous game, not bringing Hunter back in an entry so slavishly devoted to creating the perfect happy ending is a massive missed opportunity, and especially stings given the real-world parallels with transgender women being bullied out of academia.

Then theres Chloe. I cant pretend that part of me wasnt glad when she burst through Maxs door on the hunt for answers about the strange visions shes been having, quickly sinking into her former (girl)friends embrace. Its like she never left, and therein lies the rub. Still a punk rock rebel with a stick it to the man attitude at the age of nearly 30, this doesnt come across like an authentic adult Chloe but rather an insincere facsimile of her child self.

Are we really expected to believe that her traumatic past and years out on
the open road have barely changed her after more than a decade?

Contrast this with the way that Lost Records: Bloom & Rage engages with the idea of aging to great effect, particularly with its presentation of Nora, a similarly cool character as a teenager and many players primary love interest in that game. Its uncomfortable when the adult Nora arrives and turns out to be something of a facile conformist, but this entirely believable evolution forces you to re-evaluate your relationship with her and shines a new light
on both your past and future interactions. (Image credit: Square Enix) Im not arguing that Chloe should have come back unrecognizable by any means, but a scrap of development to gesture to an existence outside of this series plot would have gone a very long way to make her more believable.

The segments where you actually get to play as Chloe are underwhelming in the grand scheme of things, too. Her ability to backtalk, first introduced in Before the Storm , has been stripped down massively. Originally a way of outsmarting opponents with witty comebacks by carefully considering whatever they had just said, it now involves selecting the right option using information that was invariably shown to you immediately beforehand.

The mechanics treatment is honestly emblematic of this entire affair: a shallow imitation of things taken wholesale from much better games. If your entire enjoyment of a new Life is Strange game boils down to seeing your favorite characters unconvincingly thrown around like action figures, then youre going to be right at home here. For those of us who fell in love with the games for their narratives, Im hoping that whatever the studio has
planned next represents the new beginning this series now so desperately needs. Should I play Life is Strange: Reunion? Play it if... You're simply desperate to see Chloe again If your one wish is to see Chloe Price show up
in a game again, with no regard to how it affects the story of other entries, then Life is Strange: Reunion is probably good enough for you. Don't play it if... You're expecting a decent mystery The mystery at the heart of Life is Strange: Reunion is poorly paced and sloppy. There are many better mysteries to discover in the rest of the series or other narrative adventure games. You're after a true sequel This doesn't feel like a true sequel to any of the other Life is Strange games, thanks to a huge amount of awkward retconning. Describing it as more like fan fiction would be an insult to AO3 authors. You need high production values This is by far the worst-looking game in the franchise, with many scenes spoiled by cheap animations and awkward dialogue. Accessibility features Life is Strange: Reunion has an admirably expansive suite of accessibility options.

This includes a range of pre-sets for low vision, low motor, low audio, or
low sensory profiles, plus a huge number of individual settings. Key options include the ability to enable longer decision times for important choices (though there are quite a few of those in the game), highlight key objects
and items that can be interacted with in the world, and even skip gameplay sequences if desired.

Subtitles are featured throughout the game and can be altered to your liking in the UI menu. There are multiple font styles, text size options, and the ability to enable a subtitle background to make them easier to read.

The game also offers a range of toggleable trigger warning screens, which can alert you to death, blood, suicide, violence, intense effects, drug use, sex, and high brightness scenes. A separate warning for loud sounds can also be enabled. How I reviewed Life is Strange: Reunion I completed Life is Strange: Reunion in roughly 12 hours on my PC, which is a 5070 Ti-powered model from retailer Scan. It has a compact Corsair 2000d RGB Airflow case, Asus ROG
Strix B860-I motherboard, Intel Core Ultra 7 265K processor, a 2TB WD Black SN770 SSD, 32GB of DDR5 Corsair Vengeance RAM, and an Asus Nvidia 5070 Ti graphics card.

This allowed me to play the game smoothly on its highest graphics preset at 1080p, though it still didn't look too great. I played using my usual Razer DeathAdder V4 Pro mouse and Cherry XTRFY K5V2 keyboard, plus Logitech desktop speakers for audio.

First reviewed March 2026 Life Is Strange: Reunion: Price Comparison 34.99 View No price information Check Amazon We check over 250 million products every day for the best prices powered by



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