#langfield

Pros:

Chloe: My favorite part of this game was Chloe. Not even her and Max's relationship, but Chloe herself. It's so rewarding to see her older, wiser, and more healed at 30 years old. I was most struck by how much more responsible she is now. During the Mabon party scene, I love that the writers acknowledged that yes, Chloe was the one who left Max, and yes, she needs to own up to that! Chloe says, "I'm sorry... I should've told you every day that we would make it. But I didn't. And then we didn't," in the Bae timeline, and it's a great line. She happily serves as Max's trip sitter and keeps her safe. She gently but firmly calls out Max's temptation to rewind conversations, but doesn't get angry about it. It's really sweet how quickly Max and Chloe fall back into their old dynamic and how well Chloe predicts Max's needs. She still retains her playful and forceful side, and her stealing Safi's bag (complete with "yoink!" and committing to throwing it in the water like a baseball pitcher) is easily the funniest moment in the game. I'm also really glad Chloe wasn't revealed to have some sort of secret death wish and that she retains her selflessness from the end of LiS1-- when asked, she says she would've sacrificed herself for the greater good, not because she thought her own life was worthless. It's inspiring to see her define her life on her own terms after so much loss and strife. And in the climax, I'm really glad Chloe can have her hero moment by potentially saving Safi. It makes sense that she'd understand the unfairness of fate the most out of everyone. I already loved Chloe in LiS1, but getting to see her in Reunion was really wonderful.

Pricefield: The reason most of us are here. I think overall, their relationship progression over the course of the game was realistically subdued and implicit compared to Rachel and Chloe's whirlwind romance. Most of their development is emotionally connecting through long conversations (this is a very dialogue-heavy game), from hashing out their breakup (including addressing how objectively shitty Chloe dumping Max via letter was), revisiting their lingering feelings, and cementing a new romance. I actually loved the kiss fake-out on the canoe for trolling the players and serving as a really funny and clever callback to Chloe's line "Just admit you macked on me then used your Rewind!" from LiS1. I just wish they got more than one kiss!!! And were more cuddly with each other! The ending montage was really, really sweet, and it makes sense to have a montage of past games in Pricefield's last scene together.

Avoiding cliches: Speaking of Pricefield, LiS: Reunion is solidly a love story, but I'm so glad they avoided those frustrating romantic cliches. There's no big miscommunication or third-act breakup; Max has a good reason to hide Chloe's death from her, and if you reveal it to her, Chloe forgives her in the next scene. There's no stupid love triangle or rivalry between Chloe and Safi/Amanda/Vinh, and it is really nice to see strong friendships between women in this game. Above all, I'm so relieved that Pricefield is guaranteed a happy ending this time, which is really what a lot of LiS1 fans wanted for them. They deserve to rest after all this insanity.

The licensed soundtrack: LiS, thankfully, has had solid soundtracks across the board. I didn't learn until recently that the series has had the same music supervision team, Feel For Music, since 2015, and that there was a team behind the music selection and not the devs themselves. I loved the return of a simple, instrumental main menu theme, and I thought tracks like "A Fitting End" were used really well. "Piano Fire/Spanish Sahara," not so much. It sounded like there were audio mixing issues too, because the sound would shift depending on whether characters were speaking over the song. But overall, I think the shorter soundtrack actually helps the game, because TC and DE felt too bloated with famous artists and commissioned songs that only played over moments of calm with recycled shots, so that the individual songs felt less distinct. I really missed licensed tracks playing over pivotal cutscenes. It's just a shame that they couldn't get Obstacles back, or any of Hannah Telle's original music, for that matter. I've wanted "Hollow Glow" in a LiS game since 2016.

Safi: Love her or hate her, Safi is that complex, morally gray character that I was sorely missing from the newer LiS games. After the way she's set up as Max's new best friend in DE, I'm glad they took her in a more narratively compelling direction as Chloe's foil in Reunion. She is frustrating, but understandable, and I really felt for her as she slowly unraveled in the sheer paranoia and loneliness of being a half-dead paradox while Max put all her support behind Chloe, not her. Objectively, Max is being a shitty friend by focusing on Chloe once she comes back into her life, and I'm glad Safi calls her out for it. I just wish that the outcome if Safi dies had more weight, because the dialogue if she dies is honestly pretty badly written and delivered. Also, I actually disliked the Safield hints in this game, because it feels shitty to tease an alternative sapphic ship if it's going to be one-sided. Either keep it platonic or give Max a chance to turn her down. They should be past that ambiguous homoerotic friendship 😭

A real mystery: I was pleasantly surprised that there was an honest-to-god investigation that you have to solve in this game! Even if it was kind of easy, you can still get it wrong. In LiS1, there's a big puzzle in ep4 but it's a foregone conclusion because Rachel is already dead, while in TC, the "investigation" is so easy that you can click on everything in the flash drive and the characters will solve it on their own. Here, you actually have to pay attention and suspect the right people, and there are variations on whether you guess correctly as Max, Chloe, both, or neither. I didn't think the fire was a necessary plot point because Chloe's visions and the implication that she was slowly disappearing from reality due to being a paradox could've been the main plot, but I'm glad they actually integrated the fire mystery into the gameplay.

Cinematography: The slow-motion scene of Chloe getting thrown off the roof of the Observatory and Max saving her was genuinely thrilling and heartstopping. The slo-mo, the eerie ambient track, the lighting of the fire, the bait-and-switch with Rewind only for Max to save her? Immaculate. It was only afterward that I thought, "Wait, what just happened?" Because why couldn't Max just rewind the ladder back up? How did she make it down the building if it was burning? If Chloe fell into the truck bed with leaves, why did Max have to go down to meet her there, unless she managed to keep rewinding while moving the truck to the right place?? Idk, maybe this is another "don't think about it too hard bro" moment from D9.

The voice acting: Obviously!!! I cannot say anything bad about Hannah Telle, she is Max and always will be. I adore how much you can hear Max's growth in Hannah's tone and delivery, especially in scenes such as Max telling off Vinh. As for Rhianna, they give a commendable performance as older Chloe. I think they actually work really well as older Chloe because they don't have to pitch their voice to sound a certain age, making for a more natural delivery. I don't think that Hannah and Rhianna have as much chemistry as Hannah and Ashly cause they'll always be iconic, but I really enjoyed both of their performances.

Cons:

The inconsistent character arcs and Pricefield's future: By far, my biggest problem with Reunion is the "Don't save everyone/Give Max the photo" ending for how wildly OOC it is. I wrote more here, but basically, it is insane to me that Max would ever willingly leave Chloe to try and stop the fire again. It feels like a complete regression of her character arc from LiS1, where her 18-year-old self was so decisive that she willingly tore up the butterfly photo and doomed her hometown to save Chloe. Now, we're supposed to believe that 29-year-old Max would seriously leave Chloe to save a random college town than finally live with her decisions? It's basically ragebait and another instance of D9's brand of hastily added tragedy, like the shot of Rachel's phone in the dark room at the end of BtS. Then along with that, I really wished we got some progression with Pricefield with them talking more seriously about their future, since they are 29-30 now. They basically end up right where they were post-LiS1, which makes their whole breakup look even more unnecessary.

Length and replayability: Unfortunately, this is probably the shortest main LiS game outside of the DLCs and doesn't offer a lot of replay value. There's no meaningful differences between the Bae/Bay cutscenes; I feel like one of the few people who prefers the Bae gameplay, because Max seemed way too nonchalant at dead Chloe walking back into her life. In reality, especially if Max romanced Chloe in LiS1, Max would've been unbelievably happy and super touchy with Chloe if she'd been dead for the last decade. To me, Pricefield's melancholy and physical and emotional distance makes more sense when they're sad exes slowly reconciling.

Shallow supplemental materials: Max doesn't have Crosstalk anymore and the in-game explanation is just a cover-up for "We didn't have time to write new social media posts." Max and Chloe wear the same outfit for the entire game (much like LiS1 again), and their overall outfits and silhouettes look too similar. They couldn't even reuse Max's outfits from DE? The journals still look bad and don't give us as much insight into the characters, compared to how Max's LiS1 journal gave us more insights on her feelings for Chloe and Warren and the events of the game. Chloe only has three contacts on her phone and her overall life outside of Max feels extremely shallow, which is disappointing.

The retcons: Max and Amanda/Vinh break up offscreen, whatever, fine. But the storm amnesia felt like a disappointing and lazy way for the writers to write their way out of DE's end state. It basically resets the entire setting and cast so that they don't know about Max's power again. Worst of all, Diamond isn't even IN the game, we still don't know her powers, and the explanation for the merged timelines was some repressed memory in Max's nightmare. Honestly, I don't think that extra scene where Max saw Chloe in her nightmare too and consciously merging the timelines for her and Safi's sake, and then saying "oh yeah I forgor lol" was necessary. We didn't need to know how or why the timeline merged exactly.

Max on shrooms scene: I know that the blood wine was portrayed as a dangerous drug and Max had a panicked reaction, but I still really disliked this scene. Max still drank something that was spiked without her knowledge, and the game still portrays her high as a joke, both in her inner monologue and Chloe's initial reaction. Max didn't need to be high to act panicky and emotional; she could've just been drunk, or the game could've delved deeper into her trauma and have her be emotionally triggered by something at the party which led her to panic and seek out Chloe. It's just crazy to me that she didn't have a stronger reaction in this game when she was drugged, against her will, multiple times by a predator in LiS1.

Erasing Dontnod's work: This is more of a nitpick, but it sucks that D9 re-recorded lines from LiS1 with Hannah and Rhianna twice now, both in DE and Reunion, and only used the remastered footage in the montage. It also irked me that Max and Chloe also constantly referred to the first game as "that week in high school" when they never actually went to high school together! They're 18 months apart in age and Chloe was a Blackwell dropout already in LiS1! For a game that celebrates the OG's, I wish they respected Dontnod's original material more.

Worse facial animations: I think the team did the best with the resources they had, but the mocap in this game was hit hard compared to D9's previous entries. New side characters like Jeannette look uncanny, and characters overall move way less in cutscenes. Towards the end of the game, such as Safi and Chloe's confrontation in the Observatory (here's a Tiktok with the clip), it looks like they didn't even animate their eyes, which is really distracting when they're saying dramatic lines like "Open your eyes!" and "Fuck you, Safi." It also, tragically, comes at the cost at Max and Chloe not being as physically affectionate as they could have been, because those are so difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to animate. There were so many moments where I was internally yelling at Max and Chloe to hug each other, do something! In the canoe scene for example, much of Max's speech to Chloe is shown in side profile with the same recycled shots where we can't see her lips clearly. In another, Max and Chloe have a phone call instead of talking face-to-face likely to save on lip syncing animation. So many of these Pricefield moments are shot like talking heads and sitting far enough apart to leave room for Jesus.

Neutral:

Max's powers: I'm pretty whatever on Max's Rewind returning and the inconsistencies within it, such as Max staying in the past after photo jumping, or the random psychometry power she develops from the Abraxas photos in the Observatory, mainly because Max's powers were just as inconsistent in the original. Max develops photo jumping out of nowhere in LiS1. The only thing I didn't like was the implications of a multiverse so we would get the "Chloe left behind" ending variant. It's also nice to see characters actually noticing Max "teleporting" when she rewinds too.

Chloe's design: Adult Chloe's design is okay. She's not unrecognizable to me like some people are saying; I'm pretty sure D9 just remodeled her face to better resemble Rhianna DeVries. I'm glad they kept the green hair and blackout tattoo from LiS2, and the new details, like the jeans and whale earrings, are a nice touch. And by now, I'm getting more used to Max's adult design, at least.

The side characters: I'm not really attached to the side characters outside of Safi, so I didn't care as much about the game retconning Max's relationships so her only romance option is Chloe. They do get seriously sidelined compared to DE, but it at least gives more focus to the main four and the villains.

Verdict: It's fine. It's inoffensive. It's safe, as it should be, because D9 can't afford to take risks on the heels of DE's controversy and failure. But, it really pains me that this game would've been far better received if DE and Reunion were all one big game and given more time to be made. Ditch the storm, ditch the fire, DON'T have Pricefield break up, and set it after the Bae ending. Explore the split timeline and paradox theme more deeply with Safi and Chloe, give them all more consistent character arcs, and this could've been another compelling look at Max and Chloe post-LiS1 like the comics. I still would've been skeptical of a LiS1 direct sequel, but at least it wouldn't have been as insulting as an offscreen, OOC Pricefield breakup. Now though, I'm worried that the franchise won't even survive after this, because D9 is a skeleton crew now.

In conclusion... go play Lost Records: Bloom & Rage by Dontnod. It's such a good, atmospheric, thoughtful, richly detailed, wonderfully queer game.