“We wanted to do something different”, said Life is Strange 2’s co-director Michel Koch at Square Enix’s official Gamescom reveal on Monday night. “Something original. We wanted to push the concept we created in the first season."

"Life is Strange is not just Max and Chloe, or Arcadia Bay.”

Life is Strange 2 jumps from the original’s high school setting to the empty roads of the American West Coast. You play as teenager Sean, the older brother of Daniel, both fleeing their suburban USA town after three bodies are left on the ground following an explosive encounter with a neighbour and the half-glimpsed revelation that Daniel is capable of telekinesis. Life is Strange 2 is a road trip that sees Sean coming of age as he tries to look after his brother, who is deeply impressionable and potentially unaware of the power that lurks within.

Sitting down with Dontnod’s Koch, co-director Raoul Barbet and returning lead writer Jean-Luc Cano after the presentation, I ask them what defines a Life is Strange game, if it’s not Max and Chloe. “It’s a question we asked ourselves at the beginning,” said Barbet. “Is it Max and Chloe, Arcadia Bay? No it’s about everyday characters, relatable characters with stories you can involve yourself in, because it reflects your own experiences. With some supernatural stuff on the top.”

‘Social themes’ is a phrase that comes up a lot during our chat. Cano says that it’s important for the team to tackle stories not usually found in video games. “For us it's really important to talk about social themes that we think are sometimes not maybe shown enough in video games and it was also important for us to start a new story with brand new characters, so we could also tackle different things,” he says.

With that said, the original Life is Strange - and its prequel Before the Storm - has a huge queer fanbase, specifically because of the relationships between its three lead characters, Max, Chloe, and Rachel. Was it hard to make the decision to end their stories and move on to something completely different?

“Everyone loved Max, Chloe, Rachel from Before The Storm. But [their story]...it's done," says Koch. "We three have nothing more to tell. We don't want to. Other people will do it, and it's okay. There is a lot of fan fiction and that's perfect. When the audience appropriates those characters, it's the most wonderful thing when you create something, it's perfect. But for us, we have nothing more to do. Take [them] and do whatever you want.”

“It was really difficult,” says Cano, “because yeah, we had the pressure not to disappoint fans. Not to make something, we didn't want to disappoint fans but we also want to... I think about a lot of stuff. You know Joss Whedon? He had this really good quote. "Give the audience what they need, not what they want."

The kernel of an idea that became Sean and Michael was born from the photography of Mike Brodie, who spent years freighthopping across the USA taking photos of drifters on the road. There was one series of photos in particular that stuck in Dontnod’s minds: a young couple who gave birth to a child that subsequently grew up on the road. “It inspired these ideas of how those people are outside and living on the outskirts of society,” says Barbet. “How it can be interesting in a way to confront the player and the audience to the reality of the world. Because when you are being outside society, you have really strong sight on how society actually is.”

The idea that Sean and Daniel live on the outskirts of society opens up a bunch of moral quandaries for you to navigate. In the demo we saw, Sean had to make the choice to steal a candy bar out of an abandoned car for Daniel, or take the moral high ground and leave it. “When you’re an everyday kid” says Koch, “you have to deal with everyday problems. And don’t steal, Don’t lie, those are the basic rules. But when you are a runaway, when you have the police is chasing you, you have to say, "okay, these rules, I can break them, because for the own good of my little brother.”

The basic foundations of Life is Strange 2 are mostly clear, then, aside from the aforementioned ‘supernatural element’. Daniel’s telekinesis is hinted at in a burst of fury, but Dontnod aren’t lauding it as a fundamental gameplay feature yet. “The supernatural element depends on the story you want to tell,” Koch says. “So, for Life is Strange 1, the rewind power was a perfect element for Maxine, for her story and the fact that she has to become an adult.

"But in this case, we want players to discover [the supernatural element] by themselves, for sure. We wanted to have this supernatural element linked to the characters and it will, I think, present some interesting questions and difficult questions.”

Lucy O'Brien is Games & Entertainment Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her on Twitter.