Rewind: fans are transported back to 2015 with newest Life is Strange game
Life is Strange: Reunion (2026) offers fans one last timeline and one last adventure
Photo courtesy of Zack Tartufo/Wikimedia Commons
Beloved by fans, characters Chloe Price and Max Caulfield are making a comeback into gamers’ lives in the newest addition to the Life is Strange franchise. Life is Strange: Reunion (2026) was released late last month on Mar. 26, as per SQUARE ENIX, the game’s publisher.
The official Life is Strange WikiFandom page documents Life is Strange: Reunion (2026) as the newest installment in the game series dating all the way back to Jan. 29, 2015, with the release of the first episode which started it all: Life is Strange (2015). Life is Strange: Reunion (2026) is also subsequent to—in chronological order—Life is Strange: Before the Storm (2017), The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (2018), Life is Strange 2 (2018), Life is Strange: True Colors (2021), and Life is Strange: Double Exposure (2024).
While the main character Max Caulfield’s time-controlling power has taken her as far back into the past as to when she was a little girl as well as into the future in several different timelines, fans have managed to build a close relationship with her in this timeline since only 2015. However, this did not dull any enthusiasm for their reunion with the characters. One user on Medium, a public opinion-sharing and journalism platform, went as far as to say that the reunion between herself and the game’s main characters “ruined [her] life in the best way possible, and [she would] do it all over again.”
The Life is Strange series began with the original Life is Strange (2015) game, which guides players through the story of “An awkward photography student named Max Caulfield [who] discovers her ability to rewind time and reunites with her estranged best friend Chloe Price to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a local girl,” as summarized by IMDb. While this story unfolds, players get to choose how to explore the world and make truly impactful choices which change how the plot develops, as explained by fans on GameFAQs. Life is Strange: Reunion (2026) operates with the same modes of gameplay, where players get to make interactive choices. This time, however, players get to control both Max’s and Chloe’s words and actions, whereas in previous games in the series, they made choices for one character.
Steam, the popular video game platform, introduces this new game as putting “The saga of Max and Chloe, and the fate of Caledon”—the fictional university where Max works as a “photographer and Artist in Residence,” as per the Life is Strange WikiFandom page—into players’ hands. In Life is Strange: Reunion (2026), as further reported by Steam, a “fire will force Max and Chloe to make devastating decisions. Can they find a future together…Before everything burns?”
The newest installment of the Life is Strange series serves as the final game for Max and Chloe, and gives a conclusion to their life- and time- changing story, as per Variety Magazine. Fans, however, are not the only ones saying goodbye to the lovable – yet complex – characters. Max’s voice actor, Hannah Telle, told Variety, “It’s hard to let her go and to understand I gave everything that I had and put all my life experience and personal trauma and pain and love and joy. Everything I experienced in my own life, I put into relating to her life and portraying her story as best as I could. So I just focus on how thankful I am that I got to do it at all in the first place.”
Fans also bid adieu to Max and Chloe with some happy tears. Fan reviews of the game on Steam include sentiments such as “the return of Chloe Price after 10 years is the cherry on top [of the entire story],” “God I’m so… happy for this… as usual it was an absolute blast,” and “Reunion did it RIGHT… [with] something emotional [and] familiar on the eyes.”
Still, even though this will be the last video game reunion of Max Caulfield and Chloe Price, fans may not have to say goodbye to the characters entirely. Game Informer has announced that streaming service “Amazon Prime greenlit a Life is Strange live-action TV series based on the original 2015 game.” Although no release date has been determined for the TV series yet, the show is seemingly set to follow the plot of Life is Strange (2015), with Chloe and Max working together to navigate Max’s newfound time-control power to search for Chloe’s lost childhood best friend, and uncover their own dark secrets, eventually “mak[ing] an impossible life or death choice that will impact them forever,” as Game Informer further documents.