Further thoughts before "Life is Strange: Reunion"

In the unlikely event that you're a regular visitor to this blog, I apologise that so much of what I've posted about over the last couple of years has just been about Life is Strange. I really care about the original game and its characters, so it seems to be one of the only things I feel passionate enough about to write about much regularly. 

So now that Life is Strange: Reunion has been properly announced, what do I think? I find myself sorting elements of the announcement into three categories.

Things I liked:

• I mostly like Chloe's design. While I think they played it a bit safe with her hairstyle, at least they gave her the green hair from the Life is Strange 2 photo rather than doing something incredibly safe like keeping it blue. I also think the structure of her face largely resembles that from the first game.
• I like that you play as both Max and Chloe. This makes sense to me; if you're going to bring both characters back, have them both be playable. This is new for the series and provides the opportunity for interactions you wouldn't get if you were restricted to just controlling Max.

Things I didn't like:

• Rewind being back. I feel like Rewind had a very specific purpose in the original game, namely to function as a metaphor for Max's struggle with indecision. It also functioned as an interrogation of the whole notion of "choice based gaming". As I've mentioned in an earlier post, there's an interpretation of the powers in these games as representing unhealthy coping mechanisms, and if Rewind just becomes something Max uses to solve mysteries or whatever it feels less like it means something about human experience and more just like a gimmick.
• Backtalk being back. Likewise, while I don't hate the Backtalk mechanic from Before the Storm, and I understand it was inspired by the dialogue tree puzzles in traditional adventure games (I think insult sword fighting from The Secret of Monkey Island was cited back then as a specific influence), I don't know that a mechanic born of Chloe being an argumentative teenager needs to be reprised now that she's in her early thirties. I've always liked the somewhat generous view of Backtalk in Before the Storm that it didn't really persuade anyone and that characters mostly just let Chloe have her way because they get sick of arguing with her, but again that makes more sense when she's a rebellious teenager. I'd honestly prefer if in this game neither of them had powers or special abilities.

Things I'm nonplussed about:

• I find that I just don't care about Caledon or the returning characters from Double Exposure except maybe Amanda. As a whole, however, none of them were that strong in my opinion and if the game asks me to choose between them or Chloe it's not going to be a very difficult choice. I'm kind of interested to see the university in a different season but that's about it. We spent way too much time in the Snapping Turtle bar in the previous game so seeing it in this footage again did the opposite to exciting me. Likewise, some of the "cute" references to other things from the series, like Chloe being the manager of Steph's old band from True Colors, I find kind of naff and make the Life is Strange world feel small.
• As expected, Rihanna DeVries is playing Chloe. I completely expected this and I'm fine with it. Nonetheless, there were rumours that Hannah Telle and Rihanna DeVries didn't have much onset "chemistry" with each other and it's hard not to wonder about that watching the somewhat stilted, autocue-driven presentation they had to give to promote the game. Like I said before, this can't really be a true reunion without the original writers and without Ashly Burch. I'm sure what the game does depict will be fine, but I think it'll just be fine. I don't think it's going to get that spark we might have had if, in some vastly different series of events, we'd gotten another game with both of the original actors. I also found a bit of unfortunate humour in the fact that, unlike the Double Exposure presentation, which heavily involved that game's development staff, so many people who actually worked on this game at Deck Nine have left or been let go at this point that the cast were the only ones who were available to deliver the big marketing spiel about the new game.

Like I said with my previous post, while I'm curious about this I just can't get too excited. It simply feels too much like fanfiction and not an authentic continuation of Max and Chloe's story. It might be fun and I'm interested to see how it plays out, but Deck Nine's games just feel too distant from Dontnod's. It's the presentation, the way the characters and story are written, everything. I feel like the thing I'm going to be comparing it to the most isn't Dontnod's games but rather the comics, which a few years ago felt like the thing you "had" to buy if you wanted more Max and Chloe, because the idea of them ever having another game together seemed absurd. Those also brought back the storm, separated Max and Chloe only to reunite them later, and had Max moving between parallel timelines, as well as having her only using Rewind years after swearing off it under desperate circumstances. It seems really odd (or strange, if you will) that no one seems to be able to come up with a continuation of the original game that does something different, not that it ever needed one. I'd be more curious than anything else to know what Dontnod would have done if for some reason they'd made a direct sequel, but that was probably never going to happen and will certainly never happen now. I don't know. I think in my head there's this half dream of "the perfect sequel to Life is Strange" that never came to be. Reunion isn't going to be it. I just hope it makes me feel something.

Thoughts before "Life is Strange: Reunion"

Back in 2024, a very wise person (i.e. me) stated regarding the Life is Strange series that "the only thing I can think that could possibly salvage Life is Strange at this point would be to bring back Chloe; I just can't see what else would get jaded fans to return to the series at this point." Well, lo and behold, it's 2026 and to the surprise of no one who had been paying much attention throughout 2025 a new Life is Strange game, Reunion, has been announced and it is indeed bringing back Chloe. Now, in all seriousness, I can't claim to be alone in having predicted this, nor was I anywhere near the first, and it's obvious even from within Life is Strange: Double Exposure itself the writers had left themselves room to bring Chloe back. However, given the strength of the backlash to the previous game, coupled with its (as far as we know) disappointing sales figures, it's difficult not to see this as anything other than a cynical and calculated move, which of course it is.

Information about forthcoming Life is Strange games has been leaking like a sieve from developer Deck Nine since before True Colors came out, and the tide has not remotely been stemmed after those concerning Double Exposure and the return of Max were proven to be true. It was subsequently stated that a followup game was part and parcel with that one, that it was always going to happen, and that it had almost certainly been in development at the same time as Double Exposure. People had also been keeping an eye on Deck Nine's projects and hirings, the resume of Chloe's actor since Before the Storm and of course the numerous surveys and focus group sessions that were conducted in the aftermath of Double Exposure's release. I myself managed to get my hands on one of those survey links and tried to give as constructive a piece of feedback as I could, not stating anything I hadn't really said in my posts about the game: that it was great to have Max and Hannah Telle back, and that the game looked nice and had nice music, but that the story felt messy, the new characters were a bit thinly written, and that from a marketing and PR perspective the developer and publisher had handled Chloe's absence in a manner contrary to their own interests in producing a financially successful product.

I'm sure they received a lot more feedback to this effect, much of which was probably expressed in stronger and less reasonable terms. Thus I've no doubt that Square Enix's big takeaway from all this was "we have to bring Chloe back", perhaps regardless of how or why. As a result, when a listing for the new game was accidentally released on various official classification websites early in 2026, I was not remotely surprised by the synopsis's revelation that Chloe was back and its focus on her return. There's been a huge amount of back and forth on Double Exposure since its release, but Chloe's absence and how that game handled her and Max's relationship has, rightly or wrongly, always dominated that conversation. For my part, as I said in previous posts, I mostly see the handling of Chloe in that game as a misfire from a business perspective. Don't get me wrong; I'm a "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" guy: I love the Max and Chloe team or relationship or however one chooses to play it in the first game, but I didn't need Chloe to be in Double Exposure, nor did it upset me that much that they took the route of her and Max having broken up. It was sad, but I don't think the concept in itself was implausible, even if the way it was handled in the actual game was very clunky. Of course part of me secretly hoped that there would be a way for them to still be together, but that was obviously unlikely from the beginning of the marketing push for the game, and I'm at the age and place in my life where I no longer get so irrationally attached to the lives and stories of fictional characters that I can't handle this kind of narrative choice. That doesn't change the fact, however, that Square Enix and Deck Nine didn't "read the room" concerning Chloe during the development of Double Exposure or during its marketing, and managed to just upset a lot of people and hurt their own bottom line when it came to producing a sequel to a beloved game with an extremely passionate and devoted fanbase.

I think the leaked premise of the new game, that Max and Chloe reunite because of "nightmares and impossible memories" (or something to that effect) that Chloe is having, doesn't sound terrible. I'm guessing they'll go with the approach that the timeline merge that happened at the end of Double Exposure also merged Chloe being alive and being dead, such that the Chloe, while alive, has memories of being murdered by Nathan during the events of the first game. [Actually it looks like it's going to be that "Sacrifice Chloe" Chloe is alive but remembers dying, while "Sacrifice Arcadia Bay" Chloe remembers the town being destroyed and her mother dying, but the town's still there and her mother is still alive.] The other side of the story, that Max has three days to try to prevent Caledon University being destroyed by a fire, sounds less interesting and like another unimaginative rehash of the first game with a looming disaster, but whatever; I never exactly had a massive amount of hope that another instalment from Deck Nine was going to be anything particularly groundbreaking. At the same time, it's for this reason that it's difficult to become too excited. This is another Deck Nine game, and none of their instalments in the series have been that good. Sure, they've looked nice and had nice performance capture, graphics and music, but all of them have fairly mediocre stories and few particularly memorable new characters. Now I should qualify this by admitting that I've likewise never replayed original developer Dontnod's Life is Strange 2, but that's not because I think it's a bad game, simply because I found it so gruelling and Sean and Daniel's story so depressing that I've never really wanted to repeat it. Nonetheless, Deck Nine are not the creators of Max and Chloe, and it's hard to feel like this is a "real" Max and Chloe story without writing by the original developers. It's sort of like the comics, which I don't mind, but they feel more like licensed fan fiction than a particularly authentic continuation.

There is, of course, also Chloe's performance. Now it's almost certain that Chloe will be portrayed by Rihanna DeVries, who played her in Before the Storm and provided Chloe's voice for the True Colors DLC and for Double Exposure. I think they're one of the highlights of Before the Storm and have no doubt that in this new game they'll give a fine performance. Nonetheless, I think for many die hard fans of the original game Chloe, and especially "Chloe with Max", is Ashly Burch. Now there's almost no way she's coming back: she's too big of a name these days and she's a union actor and Square Enix hasn't hired union actors for these games since the first one. This doesn't change the fact, however, that assuming this game really is a "Reunion", it's not really a reunion unless it reunites not just Max and Chloe but Hannah Telle and Ashly Burch. For all the issues I have with its contrivances, this was one of the things that made the "Farewell" DLC of Before the Storm so special; not only were we playing as Max again, but both characters were portrayed by their original actors even though Chloe had been played by a different actor in the main episodes. Again, don't get me wrong; I think Rihanna DeVries is really good in Before the Storm, but for me the "Max and Chloe team" is Telle and Burch.

I think it's very likely that this new game will end up being a game that was already in development with a bunch of new Chloe stuff jammed in to try to placate fans, and that, like Double Exposure, it's going to feel messy. I think Square Enix thought, very naively, that they were going to be able to have their cake and eat it too with that game, that they'd be able to bring in existing fans via Max but also soft reboot the series for new players, get them on board with a bunch of new characters like Safi and Amanda, and move the series on from the first game, but that obviously completely backfired. But in that regard they probably also completely screwed themselves by, as it seems, constantly interfering in the creative process at Deck Nine, and that's not even factoring in Deck Nine's own reported internal problems. Thus, it's impossible not to see this as anything other than the cynical course correction it obviously is.

Now all that being said, do I plan to play Reunion? Yeah, of course. Square Enix doesn't deserve my money but I can't help but be curious to see what they do. I'm sure there'll be some money-grubbing ultimate edition and goodness knows what else, but as of time of writing that remains to be seen. I want the game to be good. It almost certainly won't be, but I want to see what they do. If nothing else it might be interesting to talk about.