In 2015, Life Is Strange stood out for two reasons: its female protagonists, a depressingly rare feature at the time, and its unique brand of millennial cringe. The thirtysomething Frenchmen who created this series may not have had the best grasp of the 2010s teen lexicon, but they did have a good gauge on what’s important about any coming-of-age story, and that’s the relationships between the characters. Max Caulfield, the shy, time-travelling wannabe photographer, and Chloe Price, the traumatised, punk-rock tearaway, had a memorably intense friendship. It was the heart and soul of that game, and now, 11 years later, they are reunited as adults in this final chapter of their story.
For a lot of players, Max and Chloe felt like more than best friends. The game’s original developers were not brave enough to make this explicit in 2015, but newer custodians Deck Nine retconned a romantic relationship between Max and Chloe into 2024’s Life Is Strange: Double Exposure. You can still play Reunion as if the two really were just friends, resulting in some awkward ambiguity in some scenes. Whichever way you slice it, though, this is a game about first love, and how it always stays with you, even when its object does not. And damned if it didn’t make me feel something.
Another disaster is threatening Max’s new home, liberal-arts haven Caledon University in Vermont, where she has lucked her way into a position as a photography professor. Actually, two disasters: one is a deadly, all-consuming fire that will destroy the campus and claim the lives of several of her friends, and the other is a new president who hates the arts and wants to turn Caledon into MIT. Having witnessed the blaze, Max uses her time-travelling powers to return to the past and try to prevent it, interrogating students and faculty to unmask the future arsonist. And that’s when Chloe turns up.
Depending on the choice that you made at the end of 2014’s Life Is Strange, Chloe is supposed to be either dead or estranged from Max. Either way, her appearance is unexpected. Almost immediately, the rather bland detective drama gives way to a rekindled love story between two people who could never quite let each other go.
Max and Chloe’s story has always been about how far you’d go to protect the people you love, and the impossibility of avoiding the pain of loss. Even time travellers can’t protect themselves from that. Reunion does rather undermine this theme by giving Max the opportunity to make everything OK: by giving her a second chance with Chloe, and with Safi, the best friend who drove the plot of Double Exposure. The threat of the fire never felt all that real to me. It’s possible to screw things up by rushing through the story without collecting enough evidence, or by making the wrong narrative choices. But the deduction here is very light, and Max’s time-rewinding powers are never exactly stretched.
We are a kaleidoscope of all of the choices we make and all the people we could be, says Max, in one of her impassioned monologues. Life Is Strange has been many things over the years, good and bad, but Reunion zeroes in on the best things about this series. The most convincing and likable characters are all here, such as Amanda the hot, sharp-witted bartender and Moses the gentle nerd, where the weaker ones from Double Exposure have been banished or relegated to bit-parts. Instead of saddling Max with extra powers, the game lets her loose with the ability to rewind time, replaying conversations to mess with people or dig up information. The plot is simple, but also free of narrative lacunae. At the centre of it all is Chloe: less of a screw-up now that she’s a grownup, but still smart, unpredictable and magnetic. I’m almost as delighted as Max is to see her again.
If Life Is Strange were a Netflix series, I would probably have stopped watching it a few episodes in. Instead, it’s a game I’ve been playing for more than a decade, and I care about these characters. (I also appreciate that more than a smidge of the original’s millennial cringe remains: a Foals song plays over the credits.) Life Is Strange has always been corny but it has also always been earnest, grounded in friendship and feelings. Max and Chloe deserved this chance to end their story – and so did we.
