55:50 "Piano Fire" got copyright struck, apologies for the muted audio here!
Also, I completely forgot - at the very end, there is a third variant of what song plays in the closing montage. If you chose to burn the photo, it plays "A Fitting End" by Lanterns on the Lake 🎶

"Deck Nine just can't help themselves" is a very apt description of the way they develop games, I think.

max using her rewinds to dunk on lucas as much as possible is really giving frank and his beans. i couldn’t be happier.

this whole game couldve been solved if max just called in a bomb threat

Bro. This is not just a review of Reunion. It's a complete history of the thing.
Bloody well done.

everytime chloe describes the genre of drugstore makeup it changes😭 it gets me so bad

Oh thank god, I was about to actually do my job 😩

It's so heartbreaking that they wrote the perfect song for the scene where they come back together, and it gets lost in the "license free music" setting

I thought I was the only one who was thinking "what changes are they talking about, the photo looks the same!' It actually was something that drove me crazy while playing; I felt like I was being gaslit 😭

8:30 If the studio somehow survives, the next game is gonna be done by the remaining skeleton crew, their emotional support cat and their janitor.
Hurts so much to see how they beat this IP to death slowly but surely. Double Exposure was a big mistake that Reunion just cant fix, asking fans what to do better after the damage is done was too little too late.

So glad you made this video! As a long time LiS fan, I just couldn't get myself to play this. I'm glad it seemed to stick some emotional landing, but I just couldn't get myself to even try to care about anything set in the Caledon location. I was watching a friend play the first hour of this, and I just was so baffled that we were back in those boooring halls. I think you nailed it with the talks of budgetary issues, etc. It sucks that a beautiful little Max and Chloe story has to be mashed in with Double Exposure lore.

I'm sat. Love your long form stuff.

i have to say, max and chloe’s actresses are really good and have a great connection, but safi’s actress blows me away anytime she’s on screen. she pulls me in and manages me forget i’m playing a video game😭 she wasn’t even given that much, but it makes me really wish they used her even more, especially with all the romantic undertones with what she says to max, i don’t think the game even needed max liking her back as an option but it would’ve been an even more interesting dynamic to explore!

something feels so so uncanny about their faces in this game and despite this being like their fourth game. it feels like their face models are frozen to be one expression and whenever they talk their mouth and eyes can only barely expand to the limits of that particular expression

I was obsessed with LIS back in 2016, I was bawling during both endings, I replayed the games over and over. As a massive Bae ending fan I should be overjoyed by Reunion. But when I finally finished it I only thought "huh, so that's how it ends". I don't know if it's the lower quality of writing or me being in different place in my life than 10 years ago but the magic was gone.

I absolutely love your long-form content and your commentary style! I found your channel through your Life is Strange videos, and because of you I discovered other amazing games like Tell Me Why and What Remains of Edith Finch. Thank you for all the time and effort you put into your videos.

Holy shit, the third song option for the Chloe reappearance works so much better. It even looks like the animation syncs up better with it, so I would fully believe your theory that the other songs were afterthoughts.

My favorite kind of video, a deep-dive longer than most movies 😆 I'm sat

I PLAYED THE WHOLE MABON SCENE WITH THAT GLITCH😭😭😭TWICE😭😭

So the laziest reason I can think of for the green fireflies in RE is there's a blue butterfly in the first game and they needed a helpful insect that's related to the current color of Chloe's hair. The insane moon logic version is a witch did it: Gretchen Something, founder of the Abraxis society dabbled in witchcraft, and Max's actual birthday coincides with Ren's father's death in a pagan ritual, on Mabon. This could have been her guiding Max, who's a powerful, magical being, created because of a human sacrifice, to right a wrong. In Double Exposure Max can examine Gretchen's bust in the library and remark on how she feels like an old friend, and in that PAX West interview one of the game devs hinted that there'd be "another spoke in the wheel" to the origin of the powered characters' powers and the fact they manifested around Halloween was significant. I feel like if DE didn't get the reception it did they would've leaned into this way harder. Shoutout to Reddit for pointing out the Max/witch connection. If you mentioned any of this forgive me, it's like 1:30 AM now