Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, the latest game in the narrative-driven adventure game series, ended on a cliffhanger in 2024. It’s little surprise, then, that despite some strife at developer Deck Nine Games, it seems–based on a leaked PEGI rating that has been since yoinked off the rating board’s official site–to be getting a sequel. Despite Square Enix’s efforts to plug the leak, the internet remembers all, so we know the game is apparently going to be called Life Is Strange: Reunion, and we also know a bit about the game’s premise thanks to an accompanying synopsis. Some folks are probably celebrating what Reunion might entail, but I have questions.
The full summary that was removed from the PEGI site reads as follows:
Chloe Price was Max Caulfield’s partner in time… Losing her is Max’s greatest regret. Now Chloe has come to Caledon University. Haunted by nightmares and impossible memories, Chloe needs Max’s help. But Max is already in crisis: in three days, a deadly inferno will destroy the campus.
So there’s a lot to unpack in these few sentences, but to get the obvious out of the way, the “reunion” the game’s title seems to refer to is one between Max and Chloe, the two leads of the original Life Is Strange. At the end of that game, you make a choice that either sees Chloe die or sees the two ride off to an unknown future together, though if you choose the latter, the events of Double Exposure find the two characters taking some time apart. The decision was unpopular with long-time fans, but Double Exposure did suggest that the two may reunite down the line, and even if I was bummed that Chloe wasn’t in the game, I admired Double Exposure’s commitment to respecting both endings of the original. Now, however, it sounds like Chloe will be part of Reunion, perhaps regardless of whatever the player did in the 2015 original?
The fact that Deck Nine had players import the Chloe choice into Double Exposure through an early dialogue option makes me hopeful the team isn’t just throwing away the possibility that Chloe died at the end of the first game in reaction to the backlash it got for omitting Max’s foul-mouthed, punk rock best (girl)friend. The line in the synopsis about Chloe being “haunted by nightmares and impossible memories” makes me wonder if some time travel nonsense could be used to make Chloe show up in Reunion even if you did choose the ending in which she dies. Perhaps these “impossible memories” are ones involving both versions of events? Double Exposure has a lot of timeline jumping; maybe this could have affected Chloe as a character existing in many quantum states due to Max’s time traveling?
Whatever the case, games that undermine player choice are a pet peeve of mine, which is a big reason why I’m anxious about Mass Effect 5. There are a lot of fans who would be content if BioWare just declared one of the original trilogy’s final decisions canon and picked it up from there, so it seems like a real possibility, but I’m not one of them. It was encouraging to see Deck Nine make a big hoopla of maintaining Life Is Strange’s continuity in Double Exposure, and I hope the team has put in the effort to carry it through to Reunion as well. Hopefully we don’t have to wait too long to find out more about this game. The thought of speculating about this for several months is already making my head hurt.
