After Square Enix prevented the game from being reviewed before launch, a passionate fan of Life Is Strange gives her opinion of what may be the last entry in the series.

It’s a strange cosmic space to occupy, being both a Pricefielder, who sacrificed Arcadia Bay in the first game to stay with Chloe and a gamer largely unsatisfied with the frictionless writing of Reunion, the game expected to be the death knell of the franchise for Square Enix and developer Deck Nine.

After the critical flop of Double Exposure, insider gossip suggests that Deck Nine shifted their plans for Reunion. So perhaps we will never truly know how much of Chloe’s return was planned and why Square Enix previously took such a hard line approach to shutting down fan criticism of her absence in Double Exposure.

What the rumours also suggest is that many of Deck Nine’s developers were laid off as the project wrapped up. The combination of a short development schedule (Double Exposure was only 2024), reduced staff, and a possible story pivot has led to a game that would have perhaps been better suited as an apology DLC, à la Mass Effect 3’s Citadel DLC.

The studio (and/or Square Enix) has made the decision that this curtain call should be a love letter to Max and Chloe – the heroines and potential lovers from the original game – while hoping that nostalgia will make up for the disappointments of Double Exposure. Chloe’s return is certainly a welcome change from the Avengers style team-up that the ending of Double Exposure seemed to be hinting at. Although retconning the ending of Double Exposure as Max’s ‘Storm Amnesia’ is a bad way of doing it.

If you’ve ever been in a lesbian situationship, you will be familiar with elongated conversations about each other’s feelings and extended, longing handholding. Rest assured, the title delivers firmly on this premise. There’re also some fun Easter eggs available via Max’s time-rewinding superpower, which makes for a fun touch of extra detail.

The game shines when you get to play as Chloe, who is as outspoken as ever, but now with a decade of extra lived experiences, leading to some funny interactions with pre-established characters in the town of Lakeview.

However, Deck Nine’s attempt to fix the damage caused by Double Exposure unfortunately doesn’t change the fact that the game is still its sequel, so it continues to struggle with many of the same problems.

An average playthrough takes around nine hours and is missing the chapter structure Life is Strange fans will be accustomed to. The reduction in scope plays out across the limited mechanics, with very few proper quick time events, let alone any action sequences that aren’t pre-rendered cinematics. I established very early on that you could walk away from the controller without fear of messing up a quick time event or interrupting the flow of a scene.

Chloe’s much advertised backtalk feature, where she’s able to bamboozle antagonists and talk her way out of trouble, appears a mere three times and is a shadow of what could have been. It’s lovely to return to Max’s rewind powers, even if their use is a little limited in places, but it does lead to some narrative inconsistencies.

Locations in-game are incredibly limited and are mostly sections of locations already seen in Double Exposure. There’s a lot of those moments throughout the game, where we are given an off-screen hint at things that would have been really cool to see play out on a grander scale.

The game does shine when it is allowed to do things without reference to Double Exposure. The Abraxus house section is certainly the most well-designed section of the game, feeling like a return to form for the franchise. The game is at its darkest here, and the split perspective between Max and Chloe works well, despite the continued issue of a lack of player agency.

Reuniting Chloe and Max is the game’s saving grace. However, I can only wonder whether any of this was even necessary. In my playthrough of the original game I left Chloe and Max racing off into the sunset together – having to piece back together their lives in the fallout of Max’s decision, rightly or wrongly, to sacrifice the Bay.

Unfortunately, having also played the version where Chloe died in the school bathroom, I can say that the story here is weak – Max’s reactions are noticeably reduced to the bare minimum that can be reused across both timelines.

The game’s retconning of the core ideas and lessons of the original is its biggest crime. In Life is Strange, regardless of your final choice, we learn, alongside Max, that even superpowers cannot fix everything. Grappling with the topic of evil and moral choices is what made it so compelling, leading to the continued debate between Arcadia Bay-ers and Ba-ers over the last 10 years of fandom.

But now there is no debate, because Max can have her cake and eat it.

Reunion’s writing establishes a universe where anything is theoretically possible. Could Max simply jump into a childhood photo and save Rachel? The consequences of her time travel and the butterfly effect seems to have been solved and sidelined in Reunion. The way to prevent the collapse of the space/time continuum is to merely think it away.

The merging of timelines creates a paradox, so that Chloe and Safi both simultaneously exist and don’t exist. It’s established that merely thinking about this causes the two to be transported into the Overlight – a dream place where they blink out of existence for a few seconds. The fact that this is solved by the power of ‘not thinking about it’ may feel a little unsatisfying.

Meanwhile, Safi is reduced to a strange pantomime villain role, no longer on her mission to find other people with superpowers, but popping up periodically to confuse Max. Her pressing concern is that she believes herself to be half-dead, revelling in the nihilism of her semi-existence and attempting to bring down Chloe with her. Unfortunately, I found myself agreeing with her at many points in the game.

I’m not sure if it was a deliberate message by an upset developer, or divine intervention, but Safi is the character that sums it all up, late on in the game, lamenting that ‘All of us have the seeds of our deaths planted inside of us. But I’m trying not to focus on mine while I still have a life left to live.’

Unfortunately for the Life Is Strange franchise, the seeds of its death were sown long, before this final entry, and this attempted quick fix, to get things back on track, isn’t nearly good enough to achieve that goal.

Whilst ultimately an underdeveloped entry, it does make for a loving send off for Max Caulfield. Unfortunately, being another weak entry, it may also play that role for the franchise itself.

Score: 5/10

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £44.99
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Deck Nine
Release Date: 26th March 2026
Age Rating: 16

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