Life Is Strange: Before The Storm – Chloe takes centre stage

GameCentral talks to the developer creating a prequel to Life Is Strange, and how they handle one of gaming’s angriest protagonists.

Life Is Strange: Before The Storm sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s not by the original creators, it’s a prequel that seems to fill in character information that was already perfectly obvious in the first game, and the developer has no proven track record in the genre. And yet after seeing it briefly at E3, and now again in more detail at Gamescom, we’re fairly confident that it’s actually going to be a very worthwhile addition to the franchise.



Original creators Dontond are working on a proper sequel, but they’ve implied it won’t feature any of the main characters or have the same setting. But according to lead writer Zak Garriss, who we were able to talk to at length in the interview below, fan demand was enough to convince Square Enix to commission a prequel set in the original town of Arcadia Bay.

Since Max only returned to the town at the start of the original game that means that Chloe is now the main playable character. And as was always implied she’s not getting on very well at college, in part thanks to the recent death of her father. There is her friend Rachel though, the disappearance of whom is the main thrust of the original’s story. Rachel is essentially a brand-new character, although we still haven’t seen much of her in any of the footage we’ve seen so far.


At E3 we got to watch Chloe at a music gig that she was clearly too young for, where she also meets drug dealer Frank from the first game. Thanks to a voice actor strike Chloe’s original actress is only a writing consultant this time round, but her replacement (who did the motion capture in the first game) seems an excellent replacement and Chloe comes across as her usual fiery self.

Life Is Strange: Before The Storm – Chloe and college don’t really mix

There are no time travel powers in Before The Storm though, and so both demos merely feature Chloe talking to people and solving simple puzzles. The one in the Gamescom demo revolves around actually getting into the gig, since the bouncer realises her ID is fake. A problem that gives a chance to see one of the game’s major new mechanics: the back talk challenge.

Noticing the fact that the bouncer’s motorbike has flowers stencilled on it, Chloe is able to start ribbing him about it. This in turn starts a verbal tug of war, complete with on-screen indicator, where you have to choose various sarcastic retorts in order to try and win his sympathy. We see the same mechanic being used later against the college principal, as Chloe tries to get out of the fact that she’s clearly just been smoking weed.

For Gamescom Square Enix had set up a natty five-screen display, with each TV showing the outcome of a different choice and how it can go on to affect the rest of the story in both significant and trivial ways. That’s something the original game was particularly good at, and seems to work just as well in this prequel. So our only remaining concern is whether the central story – which we can’t really judge in a quick demo – is strong enough to justify itself.



Before The Storm will be only three episodes long, with the first one due out as early as next week. There’s not a schedule for the other two yet, but if the intention is to create a worthwhile stopgap between now and the full sequel, then Before The Storm looks to be surprisingly successful.

Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC

Publisher: Square Enix

Developer: Deck Nine

Release Date: 31st August 2017 (Episode 1)

GC: So how did your studio get involved in this project? This is not a series I imagined anyone but the original creators working on.

ZG: My studio is Deck Nine, and we’ve been trying to get into narrative adventure games for a while. So about three years ago we developed a toolset that’s pretty cutting edge for crafting interactive narrative. And that toolset is kind of what put us on Square’s radar. Simultaneously, Square was looking at the community that sprung up around the first Life Is Strange. Dontnod announced a few months ago that they were working on development for Life Is Strange 2, and Square were looking for a way to respond to fan demands to go back to Arcadia Bay – since Life Is Strange 2 is not going to be doing that.

So they started looking for the possibility that maybe another partner could handle that. As you can imagine, the bar is pretty high, because the first game is so extraordinary, but we started talking and they asked us questions like, ‘What kind of a story would you tell in the Life Is Strange universe?’ And it kind of spun forward from there.


GC: Whose idea was a prequel? Because I can’t think of any style of storytelling with a less illustrious history. The Godfather Part II was great and then… you could potentially be the second one that was ever any good.

ZG: [laughs] Maybe that’s our ambition!

GC: You could be an average quality prequel and still only be slightly above The Phantom Menace.

ZG: [laughs] To be honest though, we never really thought about it like a prequel. There’s a definition of a prequel that the end of a prequel is the beginning of the original, or really close. We never wanted to do that. We wanted to tell a story that’s so far back that the daylight between them is significant. We’re not attempting to answer immediate plot questions about what was preceding Life Is Strange.

GC: That’s my problem with this, and prequels in general: I didn’t feel there were any questions to answer. I got who Chloe was, and the things I imagined had happened to her are pretty much exactly what this game seems to be showing. So where did you find the story to tell?

ZG: What you just said nails it I think, actually. We’re not striving to answer questions relating to the first game. We’re looking at Chloe as a character, and the potential for telling a new story about her life and about how she became who she was. But even within the narrative of Life Is Strange 1, there is some mystery around Rachel Amber and who she was. And why Chloe felt the way she did about her. And some of the history between Rachel and Chloe, and between Rachel and Frank – we saw a lot of potential there.


GC: It was more subtle, but I think it was still pretty clear what Chloe and Rachel’s relationship was. And… this is a difficult subject, because you don’t want to discourage diversity in any way, but there’s an increasingly common cliché in narrative-driven video games where if there are two prominent female characters there’s now a very good chance they’ll end up with at least the option for a lesbian relationship. And yet that almost never happens with male characters, to the point where you begin to wonder whether it’s put in more for titillation than fair representation.

ZG: I don’t think that’s a cliché yet. I feel like if it’s a stereotype the LBGT community would be like, ‘OK, enough! We’re represented too much in this one way!’

GC: Like I said, you don’t want to have less representation in general. But it does seem one-sided.

ZG: I think that is true. I think that’s unfortunately true. I think the answer to that is to just keep telling more stories and just create more opportunities that way.

GC: The other thing, and this may just be me, but I didn’t really like Chloe in the first game. She was a very distinct character, that was necessary for the plot, but unlike Max she just didn’t seem like a particularly nice person. Which is not a problem per se, but it does make your job more difficult.

ZG: I think that’s true. I think my ambition – we identified, it’s not being slightly above The Phantom Menace.

GC: [laughs] It could be worse, you could be the equivalent of Attack of the Clones.

ZG: [laughs] But in all seriousness though, I think it’s precisely that response to Chloe – the kind of friction some players had with her… her brittleness, her anger, her negativity… it made her really interesting to us. Our hope with the story is to – and we’re asking players to take a leap of faith with us for this – but it’s to take a character who’s very, very broken and to go back in time and to look at another chapter of her life where, through walking in her shoes, we’ll see her interior world in a way we couldn’t in the first game. That’ll inform how she became the person she is in number one.

And we’re going to see her being funny, we’re going to see her being gentle, we’re going to see her being vulnerable. Not just that one note of anger, but to have a lot more versatility. More humanity. I think, I hope, that fans will play that and get a much deeper appreciation for why she became the way she is. And for people who have gone through things that are similar, they’ll connect to her, I think, on a personal level. And we can kind of make a game that’s normalising flaws.

It’s saying it’s okay to be broken. It’s okay to have really bad days sometimes, especially when you’re 16. That’s perfectly fine, maybe that’s even normal.

GC: Okay, that’s very good. And I like that you mention putting yourself in another person’s shoes, because I’m always frustrated that’s something games never do. You’re almost always playing as either a generic white male or just a blank canvas. Characters are also usually really unpleasant and angry, which is another reason I didn’t really like Chloe.

ZG: I think if we succeed at what we’re doing we’re lifting the lid on her anger, but also all the other aspects of what’s going on inside of her. Many of which are positive things, if we can shed light on them. I think the highest thing that drama can do is to create sympathy, and that’s really what we’re striving to do with Chloe. And I’d also point out, and you said this a second ago, giving players a chance to step into a character’s shoes is something games… we’re learning how to do better. But it’s something we can do better than any other media, right?

GC: Definitely. That’s why I’d like to see more games take advantage of the fact.

ZG: Well, a lot of games are mechanics-driven. And with Life Is Strange, although the mechanics are important, I think it was character-driven. And that’s why its story worked.

Life Is Strange: Before The Storm – what you do with that money will have consequences

GC: And yet the dialogue often didn’t seem very authentic, so how are you going to approach that problem now that you have to write all the dialogue yourself? Since I notice you’re not a teenage girl.

ZG: [laughs] It’s a good question, it’s a complex answer. Part of it is you don’t write for teenage girls. You’re not striving to say, ‘This is the 16-year-old experience’ or ‘This is the 16-year-old female experience’. You’re striving to say, ‘This is Chloe’s experience’. Adolescence is something we’ve all gone through. She’s grieving, it’s a major theme of our game – she lost her father. There’s a universality to grief that I think gives us a lot to work with that will resonate with anyone’s age, anyone’s gender identity. If you’ve lost someone, spend some time with Chloe and you’re gonna see some of that in what’s going on in her life, for sure.

But the other answer to that is that I’m not the only writer, thankfully. [laughs] We have a writer’s room and we run it like a TV show. So I’m the oldest writer, I’m 35. We have four writers on the project, I’m the head writer, but we have two men, two women, and our youngest writer is a 20-year-old woman who’s still in college. So we do have that diversity in the room, and we have a culture of very open criticism about the work. We write a bunch of stuff and we look at it, and we say, ‘Does this feel right, does this feel authentic to Chloe? To a girl at this time in her life?’ I’ll have my opinion about that, but I’m really going to listen to Mallory, who’s 20 and a girl.

GC: Is she advising on the use of the word ‘hella’?

ZG: [laughs] It comes up, and you’ll see we’ll play with it. We’ll look at where it came from in Chloe’s life. Why did she start using that word? We’ll look at that a little bit.

GC: I was going to ask about the graphics next, but I don’t want to keep knocking the original. Because none of that stuff really matters. There were so many problems with the original, but I don’t think I’ve played another game that felt like it was so much more than the sum of its parts. I think the excellent voiceovers saved a lot of it…

ZG: They were fantastic. And I think there’s an authenticity to what it’s striving to do as a whole. Nothing has been what Life Is Strange was.

GC: There’s an honesty to it.

ZG: Yeah, exactly. There’s a kind of visceral newness to it as well. And for me, I played the game for just an hour and it hit me that the people who worked on the game loved it. This was not a mercenary production. This was not something they were doing just to get a paycheck, this was a labour of love. This was something they were passionately creating and I think it was that passion that kind of bleeds off the screen. And the cinematography, the lighting, the dialogue… at times it’s rather more like choreography as opposed to actual movement.

I mean, the dialogue in Life Is Strange is very satirical. It’s an attempt to explore teenagerhood in a way that isn’t necessarily literal. It’s trying to do more metaphorical things. There was a lot of effort going on, a lot of movement in that game that was really inspiring and interesting. And whether in a given instant it was hitting the mark or not as a whole it was all of that energy and all of that passion that made me think, ‘I’m falling in love with what’s going on in this game right now, just as much as the devs were’.

That’s what we’ve tried to channel for Before The Storm, because we love story-driven games so much, we love Life Is Strange so much. The chance to work within this world and work with the team at Square that made the first game… it’s been a huge privilege.

GC: So you’ve been in contact with Dontnod?

ZG: The core team at Square Enix, the designers and producers who worked on the first Life Is Strange, they’re our partners on this. But we have spoken to Dontnod. We haven’t worked together, we haven’t collaborated, but we have shared Episode 1 with them. I went out to Paris to see them a few weeks ago.

GC: Do you know what they’re doing with their new game?

ZG: A little bit, yeah. That’s not something I can talk about here.

GC: No, I expect not. But it’s interesting to know that you know.

ZG: [laughs]

GC: Well, it’s been great to speak to you. You make a very convincing pitch for the game.

ZG: Thanks, thanks. It was nice to meet you.

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