OK, I’m gonna be honest. I haven’t played any of the games, but I have watched full play throughs as well as skipped through to see different choices play out.
I think that the ending of Reunion is perfect in every possible result.
If Chloe decides to burn the photo, then she is choosing to stop all of this time uncertainty because she knows that as long as Max doesn’t know about the photo, she’ll be happy being alive. The end.
If Chloe shows Max the photo, then it’s up to max. In both endings Max assures chloe that she wouldn’t want to lose the time they have together.
However, the post credits photos show some uncertainty in Max. Depending on how many people ended up dying in the Caledon fire, and if Max was able to save everyone, max (or the player) may feel guilty and want to rewind and fix things.
And while the end of the game is left open, it doesn’t have to be over for the player. You can rewind by simply restarting the game and although Max has to relearn who is behind the fire, the player already knows and can lead Max to protecting more people.
Max (and you, the player) can spend forever rewinding, reliving, and retrying to stop the fire and save everyone, but just like the storm in the first game, the fire is inevitable, and who is saved is determined by choices.
So the story of the game stops the player from “rewinding” because we know no matter how many times we play, and if we manage to find every reason why, Caledon will always end up a pile of ashes. You can still play again to have a different amount of casualties, but you can’t change the fact the fire will happen.
But Max doesn’t know this. She could go back 50,000 times and fall in a viscous cycle. Of trying to make everything right. Or she could live in the moment with Chloe.