Review: Life Is Strange: Reunion (PS5) – Twee Mystery Finale Falls Flat

The Life Is Unusual collection involves its supposed finish with Life Is Unusual: Reunion, a quasi-sequel to the 2015 authentic, and a full-on sequel to 2024’s Life Is Unusual: Double Publicity. Nonetheless, its dedication to both of these prior video games is slightly inconsistent, resulting in a disappointingly flat and messy finale.
We’d say that Reunion is principally the primary correct sequel within the collection, within the sense that you simply’ll be fairly confused as to who’s who for those who haven’t performed Double Publicity. Selecting up 9 months after that sport’s damaging storm, Max Caulfield is thrown again into some fiery college drama.
Having been off campus for the weekend, Max returns to seek out Caledon College in flames. With proof of a mysterious protest and a few of these she holds pricey assembly their crispy ends, Max jumps again in time to attempt to learn the way the fireplace began and why there was a protest, to hopefully cease all of it from occurring within the first place.

The complicating issue is that Max’s once-dead girlfriend Chloe could be very a lot alive and kicking, weaving in some multiversal strangeness with its fiery central thriller.
So let’s begin with the nice: Reunion’s (ahem) reunion is its finest side. There’s a palpable sense of chemistry between Max and Chloe, with a tinge of timeline unhappiness too, because the now-alive Chloe has a really totally different recollection of the final decade than Max does.
Like how we loved seeing a grown-up Max in Double Publicity, it’s a delight to see Chloe dropped at life as soon as extra. She’s nonetheless the identical edgy punk, however she’s been softened slightly with age. It’s very properly finished, and Rhianna DeVries does a wonderful job of constructing Chloe simply as likeable and boisterous as we keep in mind.

Reunion actually hinges on you having that emotional connection to the 2 doomed lovers, so for those who’ve both not performed the unique otherwise you haven’t performed it in a very long time like us, that emotional core could also be misplaced slightly.
That being mentioned, we actually appreciated the melancholic vibe in Max and Chloe’s scenes, like two lovers given one other probability they can not fairly imagine, however are all the time scared it is on the verge of being taken away once more. We’re suckers for a misplaced love storyline, so there are a variety of nice scenes there.
The difficulty is, it by no means fairly feels just like the pure conclusion to the collection in the way in which Reunion desires you to imagine it’s, and that is due to the sport’s identification as a sequel to Double Publicity.
A lot of the forged from the final sport return, just like the lovable geek Moses and the dedicated podcaster Loretta. However now with the brand new fiery risk, you’ll be digging into the college’s previous along with your selections from the final sport influencing your relationships.

Nonetheless, it’s an actual disappointment in the long run as a result of nearly each narrative thread feels prefer it’s been relegated to a aspect story this time round. Huge characters from the final sport, like Safi, Amanda, and Yasmin, by no means really feel fairly as central to the story right here. And there’s some dissonance between the actions of the final sport and this, just like the disgraced former lecturer Lucas nonetheless kicking about on the native uni pub.
It is nearly as if there was a sequel right here constructed off the relationships and characters from Double Publicity, however then someplace alongside the way in which, it turned the Max and Chloe present.
In that sense, Chloe doesn’t actually really feel like an natural a part of this story. And whereas we’d by no means anticipate a Life is Unusual sport to get into the semantics of alternate realities and merging timelines, we had been by no means fairly happy with the reason of how Chloe was there in any respect. It leaves each features of the sport constricted, reasonably than giving both one the room to correctly breathe.

For the time-weaving detectives on the market, Max’s rewind talent from the primary sport is again, changing Double Publicity’s two timelines mechanic. It by no means feels fairly as advanced, however getting slightly info out of somebody, rewinding, after which utilizing that data to make them open up slightly bit extra is kind of enjoyable.
And we’ve to say, there’s a shocking quantity of stuff you can miss to vary the result of the story. You may fail to get info out of somebody, and generally you even miss conversations solely. Come the top of our playthrough, there have been characters concerned within the Caledon catastrophe, and we had no thought how or why.
That may encourage the lovers on the market to present it one other go and take a look at issues in a different way. However for those who’re something like us, you’re in all probability simply going to lookup how issues panned out on YouTube, reasonably than going by way of all of it once more, particularly because the pacing is kind of sluggish.

We performed the sport throughout each PS5 and PS5 Professional, and as chances are you’ll anticipate, these are nice-looking video games however not precisely technical marvels. There isn’t a Professional Enhanced model, so efficiency is constant throughout each consoles, which means you’ll expertise delicate but constant pop-in and stuttering between adjoining dialogue choices. Sadly, there’s no actual DualSense assist right here.
Conclusion
Life is Unusual: Reunion might have been a full Double Publicity sequel, and it might have been a full Max and Chloe entry. As an alternative, each narratives are squeezed right into a bloated finale with boring pacing and a lacklustre decision. There are sparks of brilliance in there and incredible chemistry between its two leads, however it’s by no means given the love and care to blossom into one thing lovely.



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