Overview:
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For my money, the original Life is Strange is the greatest adventure game of all time. With the alleged final game, Life is Strange: Reunion, out now, it’s time to look back on the six-game series.
When the first episode dropped in 2015, the genre was going through an incredible renaissance after several years of being something mostly aimed at children. Tell Tale’s The Walking Dead Season 1 redefined adventure games as something capable of prestige television-level narrative arcs rather than a bunch of silly jokes and environmental puzzles. Dear Esther, Gone Home, and the games of David Cage further elevated the adventure game. It was cool, cinematic, and a refuge for players who were sick of endless on-rails jingoistic military shooters.
Then along comes this perfect distillation of millennial angst and trepidation about growing up mixed with Lynchian weirdness. Part Twin Peaks, part Donnie Darko, the story of Max Caulfield and her attempts to save her best friend/girlfriend Chloe Price through a set of mysterious time travel powers became an instant, if minor, hit. On Steam, Life is Strange was the 10th best selling game of the year.
I chalk the success up to four things. One, as I said, players were looking for alternatives to the glut of big shooter franchises. Queer players, especially, found representation in Max and Chloe’s relationship. Two, it was just the right amount of cringe. The game’s reliance on Buffyspeak and Daria-esque quips was both cause for secondhand embarrassment and its own private language. I still say “go fuck your selfie.”
Three, the game offered a true evolution of the adventure game formula. Max’s rewind powers meant solving situations weren’t just a matter of finding every highlighted object in the environment and combining it with every other highlightable object until you progressed. A brilliant meta-commentary on save-scumming, exploring as Max invited players to think about the limits of choice in both gaming and life. Even with godlike power, there was only so much Max could do to save the day.
Which brings us to four: it’s a high stakes game. Life is Strange pulled no punches. Save Chloe’s dad from a fatal car crash; doom Chloe to a slow death from injuries in an accident later. Fail to learn enough about Kate Marsh and you can’t talk her off a ledge before she jumps to her death. The ending is a simple binary: kill Chloe or let the entire town be destroyed. There’s no tally of how you played involved, no hidden score. Life is Strange simply says, “you played the game, now tell us how it ends for you.”
There’s a reason the credits end with “thanks for crying.”
Developer Don’t Nod stuck the landing with the game, but that came with a cost. Publisher Square Enix wanted more. How do you follow up a genre-defining title? Unfortunately, you don’t. Not really.
In achieving such a pitch perfect meditation on choice and morality, Life is Strange painted itself into a corner. Don’t Nod created these brilliant characters everyone wanted more of and no real way to supply that. If they set a future game with either ending as canon, they were inherently invalidating the choices their players made, a cardinal sin considering the themes.
It’s easy to see why Don’t Nod seemed reticent to continue Life is Strange despite its hit status. Square Enix handed a prequel starring Chloe to Deck Nine to produce Before the Storm. This one follows Chloe as she meets Rachel Amber, whose mysterious disappearance before the start of the first game is a major point driving the plot.
Before the Storm is not a bad game, but it’s also not really Life is Strange. Chloe has no powers, making her a more stock standard adventure game protagonist. There are some delightfully bananas segments, such as Chloe and Rachel improvising some fantastic flirtatious dialogue during a performance of the Tempest and Chloe playing a TTRPG with some friends, but it’s just mechanically a step backwards.
I think we were all willing to accept the compromise because, hey, it’s Chloe. The desire to spend more time with the character could smooth over a lot of rough edges. As a prequel, a lack of meaningful choices that radically affected the ending was already a given. Surely whatever happened in the future would be better.
Life is Strange 2 felt like Don’t Nod was made to develop it at gunpoint. The game followed Sean and Daniel Diaz, two immigrant kids who find themselves on the run when Daniel’s telekinetic powers result in the murder of a cop who shot their dad. Set in the second year of the first Trump Administration, it was timely in the way few games are. Even Trump’s stupid border wall makes an appearance.
And yet, it was also arguably the worst game in the series. The characters were all pure Life is Strange, but you never directly control Daniel or his powers. Either ending of the first game is accounted for in a few lines of differing dialogue, which solved the canonicity problem but greatly reduced the impact of either choice. Life is Strange 2 also did away with the binary choice for the ending, instead relying on an opaque morality system that was stale and unrewarding.
This is where Don’t Nod left the series to Deck Nine and Square Enix. They went on to make games that were much more Life is Strange than Life is Strange had become like Tell Me Why and Lost Records: Bloom and Rage.
Back in the driver’s seat, Deck Nine put out Life is Strange: True Colors in 2021. This time, the hero is Alex Chen, who has been recently released from the foster system and moves to a small mining town in Colorado to live with her brother. When her brother is killed in a mysterious accident, Alex uses her empathy and mood altering powers to investigate.
Alex just never caught on the way Max did. Her power usage was little better than gaslighting other characters, the town of Haven Springs felt more like a hipster theme park than an actual location, and some of the coincidences were just too far fetched to be believable, even in a series about superpowers. It’s also worth noting that both True Colors and 2 fumbled the romance options badly. All of Sean’s choices just plain suck, and Ryan in True Colors feels like he walked off the cover of Okay Guy Quarterly. Even Steph, our manic pixie dream girl drummer and DJ, just feels like Chloe if someone took her to the vet so she wouldn’t chase the other puppies anymore.
While all this was going on, Max and Chloe were actually doing pretty well. In 2018, Titan started their Life is Strange comic series, which followed one of the timelines where Chloe lived and their town was destroyed. The series quickly grew beyond a miniseries into an epic, introducing a new powered individual (Tristan) and exploring Max’s powers in trippy detail. While fans were failing to connect with Alex and the Diaz Brothers, there was still a hunger for the original duo.
In 2024, Deck Nine brought Max back in Life is Strange: Double Exposure, which became a duology with Reunion‘s release last month. An older Max is now the artist-in-residence at Vermont’s Caledon University and hasn’t used her powers since the first game. When her best friend, Safi, is murdered, Max discovers she can move back and forth between realities to solve the case and maybe prevent the killing in the first place.
Double Exposure is the best game since the first. Safi was a gift of a character that invited players to ask “what if the person you saved was actually kind of terrible?” Mechnically, it let powers actually matter again, creating as satisfying a game loop as the first title.
And yet, the impossible choice hung over the whole thing like a storm cloud. The game accounted for both endings. In fact, if you choose to save Chloe, she and Max break up off screen over all the trauma they never fully reckon with. I found this charmingly realistic if, admittedly, sad. The thing about Double Exposure is that it felt grown-up. Max is no longer a lost teen.
By now, Life is Strange was a long way from where it started. The games were still full of gripping characters and exciting, weird stories, but the impact of choice was a distant memory. Desperate to have its cake and eat it, too, the series refused to close the door on what happened to Chloe Price.
In some ways, Life is Strange: Reunion feels like a surrender. By now, Square Enix and Deck Nine know that fans are showing up to get the next chapter of Max and Chloe, even if no one can agree on how how the first chapter ended. Reunion abandons all pretention of meaningful choice. Almost nothing you do really matters, at least not the same way it did in 2015. Every character introduced in Double Exposure fades into the background to focus on Max and Chloe coming to terms with what their strange existence means to them.
Reunion is moving the way Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was moving. I played the game deep into the night searching for a happy resolution. Deck Nine proved on multiple occasions that they still understood what it meant to make Max’s time travel a meaningful mechanical experience. The scene in the canoe where the game teases you about a kiss option before taking it away because even time travel can’t overcome some people’s awkwardness was both frustrating and hilarious.
This is where it needs to end, though. It’s time for Deck Nine and Square Enix to admit what Don’t Nod saw years ago: there is no making a sequel to Life is Strange. That unique lightning in a bottle was simply un-reproducible. All that followed was a standard adventure game series that allowed us a little more time in the world. Reunion was an interactive life support system for the Max and Chloe ship.
That’s not a bad thing. The end of the narrative belonged in a game rather than a book, comic, or movie. When I was moving through the dialogue tree as Max and Chloe carefully navigated the minefield of their past trauma and feelings, I was sweating like it was a boss fight in Silksong.
It was a good time. I will always be glad that I could see Max and Chloe through to as happy an ending as you can get in a broken world. However, an underlying message in the first game was that eventually you have to move on and actually pick a future. You can put it off, but one day it has to be tomorrow.
For a decade, Life is Strange has been avoiding the exact thing the first game tried to teach us through Max: this choice will have consequences, and you just got to live with them. Each subsequent adventure has been one long arrested development, though it’s one I will always treasure.
