The Life Is Unusual collection involves its supposed finish with Life Is Unusual: Reunion, a quasi-sequel to the 2015 unique, and a full-on sequel to 2024’s Life Is Unusual: Double Publicity. Nevertheless, its dedication to both of these prior video games is somewhat inconsistent, resulting in a disappointingly flat and messy finale.
We’d say that Reunion is mainly the primary correct sequel within the collection, within the sense that you just’ll be fairly confused as to who’s who if you happen to haven’t performed Double Publicity. Choosing up 9 months after that sport’s damaging storm, Max Caulfield is thrown again into some fiery college drama.
Having been off campus for the weekend, Max returns to search out Caledon College in flames. With proof of a mysterious protest and a few of these she holds pricey assembly their crispy ends, Max jumps again in time to attempt to learn how the hearth began and why there was a protest, to hopefully cease all of it from occurring within the first place.
The complicating issue is that Max’s once-dead girlfriend Chloe may be very a lot alive and kicking, weaving in some multiversal strangeness with its fiery central thriller.
So let’s begin with the great: Reunion’s (ahem) reunion is its greatest facet. There’s a palpable sense of chemistry between Max and Chloe, with a tinge of timeline unhappiness too, because the now-alive Chloe has a really completely different recollection of the final decade than Max does.
Like how we loved seeing a grown-up Max in Double Publicity, it’s a delight to see Chloe delivered to life as soon as extra. She’s nonetheless the identical edgy punk, however she’s been softened somewhat with age. It’s very properly accomplished, and Rhianna DeVries does a superb job of constructing Chloe simply as likeable and boisterous as we bear in mind.
Reunion actually hinges on you having that emotional connection to the 2 doomed lovers, so if you happen to’ve both not performed the unique otherwise you haven’t performed it in a very long time like us, that emotional core could also be misplaced somewhat.
That being mentioned, we actually favored the melancholic vibe in Max and Chloe’s scenes, like two lovers given one other probability they cannot fairly imagine, however are at all times scared it is on the verge of being taken away once more. We’re suckers for a misplaced love storyline, so there are a variety of nice scenes there.
The problem is, it by no means fairly feels just like the pure conclusion to the collection in the best way Reunion desires you to imagine it’s, and that is due to the sport’s identification as a sequel to Double Publicity.
A lot of the forged from the final sport return, just like the lovable geek Moses and the dedicated podcaster Loretta. However now with the brand new fiery risk, you’ll be digging into the college’s previous along with your decisions from the final sport influencing your relationships.
Nevertheless, it’s an actual disappointment in the long run as a result of nearly each narrative thread feels prefer it’s been relegated to a aspect story this time round. Large characters from the final sport, like Safi, Amanda, and Yasmin, by no means really feel fairly as central to the story right here. And there’s some dissonance between the actions of the final sport and this, just like the disgraced former lecturer Lucas nonetheless kicking about on the native uni pub.
It is nearly as if there was a sequel right here constructed off the relationships and characters from Double Publicity, however then someplace alongside the best way, it grew to become the Max and Chloe present.
In that sense, Chloe doesn’t actually really feel like an natural a part of this story. And whereas we’d by no means anticipate a Life is Unusual sport to get into the semantics of alternate realities and merging timelines, we have been by no means fairly happy with the reason of how Chloe was there in any respect. It leaves each points of the sport constricted, fairly than giving both one the room to correctly breathe.
For the time-weaving detectives on the market, Max’s rewind talent from the primary sport is again, changing Double Publicity’s two timelines mechanic. It by no means feels fairly as advanced, however getting somewhat data out of somebody, rewinding, after which utilizing that information to make them open up somewhat bit extra is kind of enjoyable.
And now we have to say, there’s a stunning quantity of stuff you can miss to alter the result of the story. You possibly can fail to get data out of somebody, and generally you even miss conversations solely. Come the top of our playthrough, there have been characters concerned within the Caledon catastrophe, and we had no thought how or why.
That can encourage the lovers on the market to provide it one other go and take a look at issues in another way. However if you happen to’re something like us, you’re most likely simply going to search for how issues panned out on YouTube, fairly than going by all of it once more, particularly because the pacing is kind of sluggish.
We performed the sport throughout each PS5 and PS5 Professional, and as you could anticipate, these are nice-looking video games however not precisely technical marvels. There isn’t any Professional Enhanced model, so efficiency is constant throughout each consoles, which means you’ll expertise delicate but constant pop-in and stuttering between adjoining dialogue choices. Sadly, there’s no actual DualSense assist right here.
Conclusion
Life is Unusual: Reunion may have been a full Double Publicity sequel, and it may have been a full Max and Chloe entry. As a substitute, each narratives are squeezed right into a bloated finale with boring pacing and a lacklustre decision. There are sparks of brilliance in there and improbable chemistry between its two leads, however it’s by no means given the love and care to blossom into one thing lovely.
