Optional evidence is one of those systems that Life Is Strange: Reunion never explains directly. The game just quietly rewards players who slow down and look at everything, and punishes those who rush through with fewer dialogue options when it matters most. This guide covers every known piece of optional evidence, where to find it, and the one choice that trips up nearly every trophy hunter.
What is optional evidence in Life Is Strange: Reunion?
Optional evidence refers to photos, documents, and environmental details that Max can examine during free-exploration segments. None of this is tracked on-screen with a checklist or counter. The game registers what you've looked at in the background, and those inspections feed directly into your available dialogue options during Backtalk sequences.
Think of it as prep work. Go into a Backtalk scene with full context and you'll have multiple strong arguments available. Miss half the room and your options narrow significantly.
Abraxas whiteboard evidence slots
How does optional evidence affect Backtalk?
Backtalk is Reunion's conversation challenge system. Having optional evidence doesn't automatically win these sequences for you, but it gives you access to stronger, more specific dialogue choices. Without the relevant evidence, certain response options simply don't appear.
The Major Gumshoe trophy requires finding every piece of optional Abraxas evidence in a single playthrough. The trophy pops during the Lightshow scene where the four evidence boards appear. The trophy is genuinely one of the harder ones to get blind because nothing in the UI tells you what you've missed.
Where to find all optional evidence
Campus and outdoor areas
During any free-roam section on campus, treat every interactable object as potentially important. Confirmed evidence sources in these areas include:
- Posters and flyers on bulletin boards and walls
- Notes left on benches or outdoor tables
- Reggie's book in the park (multiple players confirmed missing this on their first run)
- Any object with an interaction prompt that doesn't advance the story
info
If the game isn't pushing you toward an objective marker, that's your cue to examine everything in the current area before moving on. Leaving a zone almost always locks out anything you missed.
Interior locations: offices and classrooms
Buildings are where most players miss critical evidence. Key items confirmed by the community include:
- Safi's Journal (missed by multiple players on first playthroughs, confirmed necessary for the trophy)
- Barry's Boom Shack receipt (one of the trickier items to locate via Scene Select)
- Documents and written materials in offices
The basement blueprint: the most missable piece
This is the one that catches nearly everyone. To fill the bottom-left slot on the Abraxas whiteboard, you need a blueprint that only drops from the guard in the basement. Here's the catch: you have to attack him rather than distract him. Choosing the distraction option means the blueprint never appears.
This is a choice-dependent evidence piece, which makes it especially easy to miss on a completionist run where you might instinctively pick the non-confrontational option.
warning
If you distracted the basement guard instead of attacking him, you cannot obtain the blueprint in that playthrough. You'll need to replay the relevant scene via Scene Select or start a new run.
Can you use Scene Select to fix missed evidence?
Partially. The main menu tracks photos and drawings, so those are easy to audit. Optional environmental evidence is a different story. Scene Select lets you replay individual sections, but some evidence (including the Barry's Boom Shack receipt) is difficult to locate even when replaying scenes specifically to find it.
If you're going for the Major Gumshoe trophy and you know you missed something, replaying the relevant scene is your best option. If you're not sure what you missed, a full second playthrough with deliberate exploration of every room before advancing is the safer route, which is how several community members finally earned the trophy.
How to approach each area to get everything
The method that works:
- Enter a new area and immediately ignore the objective marker.
- Walk the perimeter of the space and check every wall, surface, and corner.
- Interact with anything that shows a prompt, even if it seems minor.
- Check character-specific items (journals, books, personal belongings) before leaving.
- Only advance the story once you've exhausted every interaction in the current zone.
This approach takes maybe two to three extra minutes per area but eliminates the risk of locking yourself out of evidence that can't be recovered later in the same playthrough.
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