New Review: The depressingly low budget Life is Strange: Reunion brings back two iconic characters but strands them in a low-stakes narrative that never pays off

 

It’s sad to say, but the Life is Strange series, in its current iteration, might be about ready to be put to rest. I say this as someone who, ever since the series debuted in 2015, fell in love with its warm vibes, likable characters, indie soundtracks, and often compelling stories shaped by choice that each installment has provided.

Originally created by DontNod Entertainment, who developed Life is Strange and Life is Strange 2, the series has been in the hands of Deck Nine Games ever since, who made the perfectly solid prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm, and then the truly fantastic Life is Strange: True Colors.

Unfortunately however, Deck Nine has fallen on some pretty hard times over the years; the rounds of layoffs and turnover was really felt with 2024’s Life is Strange: Double Exposure, which brought back original main character Max Caulfield (though not Chloe) but otherwise failed to do anything particularly exciting with either its gameplay, its new setting, or its narrative. It wasn’t especially well-received among the fans, and in many ways Life is Strange: Reunion seems as if Deck Nine’s attempting a do-over, continuing within Double Exposure’s universe but this time bringing back Chloe Price.

The results, sadly, are more of the same. The way in which Chloe returns (a merging of realities that’s too convoluted to get into and never really fully explains itself) is almost beside the point; her presence proves to be a welcome addition to Max’s story at Caledon University, which is otherwise largely populated with the same bland cast from the previous installment, and many of the same locations.

Long story short; While Max is away for the weekend, a fire erupts at the university, burning the place down and killing many people. Horrified, Max realizes that she’s able to reawaken her time travel abilities, and returns to the start of the weekend, hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery of the fire and to stop it before it’s too late.

From the beginning, the plot just never manages to take hold. There aren’t enough characters at the university that Max is close with for any of this to really matter, with the same obnoxious Abraxas fraternity from Double Exposure taking up most of your investigative time, along with some completely forgettable students and unlikable university officials. It’s a far cry from Life is Strange 1’s Blackwell Academy, a boarding school that felt truly alive, with real characters you got to know from your interactions with them, and who you got to care about. It had a ton to explore, from its expansive grounds and facilities to dorm buildings, classrooms, and even other locations in town.

Caledon University, by comparison, features a courtyard, a small hallway with a couple of empty classrooms and offices, and two or three off campus houses. You barely get to see any of it, and you barely get to know anyone there. The one location in Life is Strange: Reunion that radiates with any sort of life is the off-campus bar The Snapping Turtle, which features great music, vibrant art on its walls, and fun interactions with the other students, including the bartender Amanda, one of the only likable characters at Caledon. But even my experiences there were a little less special, because I’d of course visited The Snapping Turtle already in the last game, and it’s very much the same here.

 As with all Life is Strange games, the majority of your time playing is spent interacting with the environments and talking to other characters, your dialogue choices supposedly making differences in the overall storyline, though in Reunion your choices seem to matter less than ever before. On a positive note, the dialogue here is better than it was in Double Exposure, (though the overall storyline is a lot less involving) and there are several nice moments between Max and Chloe. Having both be playable in the same game adds a bit of variety to the formula, and even in a game that just doesn’t feel like it has it anymore, the Life is Strange formula remains genuinely comforting. When you’re in the bustling and colorful Snapping Turtle trying to get information out of the students, and the warm music on the bar’s soundtrack washes over you, and you step outside onto the back porch and look out at the lake, it’s hard not to feel at home, even when everything else about Life is Strange: Reunion is such a letdown. It isn’t that this is a bad game, it’s just an incredibly forgettable one, and especially considering what incredible experiences previous Life is Strange games have been, it’s sad to see that what may very well be the last game in the series is ending things on such a whimper.

In between Life is Strange: Double Exposure and Life is Strange: Reunion, series creators DontNod released their own narrative-driven adventure game called Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. It not only felt like a Life is Strange game in everything but name, but it took the genre forward, had a real vision, and genuinely felt alive. By comparison, Life is Strange: Reunion feels like an uninspired effort from a defeated Deck Nine Games, who I worry just might not have it in them anymore to make something like Life is Strange: True Colors or even Before the Storm again.

I don’t see much of a way for this series to continue short of a complete reboot, and I’m worried that this studio doesn’t have the resources or the inspiration to pull it off. I don’t see much of a way for this series to continue short of a complete reboot, and I’m worried that this studio doesn’t have the resources or the inspiration to pull it off. I'd love to be proven wrong, but for now, I can only recommend Life is Strange: Reunion to the fans who have stuck around, and only so they can see how things wrap up with Max and Chloe. Newcomers would be much better off playing the first few installments or Lost Records instead. 

2.5/5