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 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.