Talking about the game itself -- there's so much melodrama in this series. It could easily get campy, but Before the Storm skirts that line really well. How did you manage to match the emotional tone established by Dontnod?

A big part of it is trying to remember what it feels like to be a teenager. Maybe reconstruct that experience, and I think that's where a lot of the inherent drama and maybe melodrama comes from. And, of course, Chloe at her heart, her story at this particular time is extremely dramatic and emotional. And she has that particular character, that real personality that's kind of brash and a little bit difficult and argumentative sometimes. That adds a lot of that teenage angst.

But I think we also then try to balance it out with some kind of true-to-life lessons that we've taken away from studying the process of grief. In Chloe's case, that's really relevant, having lost parents. What is that like, how do people react to that? If you don't have someone to share it with -- like Chloe doesn't have Max with her during this period of her life -- we try to examine that in a very true-to life-way and work some of those elements in there. I think that's what kind of tempers this from feeling like just a soap opera.

I think our writers have just done a really, really good job doing their research on that front and trying to be honest with that experience.

The team researched the grieving process?

Yeah, definitely. The writers, in particular, looked at memoirs written about the grieving process and they looked at some psychological research on that as well. I can say things like William appearing in dreams, for instance, is an experience that they ran across in researching the lives of people going through grief. And how they kind of relate to their lost love ones in the ways that they can, the way those people still live with them and are never really gone in their minds.

Was there an outline for Chloe and Rachel Amber's personalities, or is that all Deck Nine?

We were pretty much just going off of what you hear Chloe say and other characters say about Rachel from the original game. Which, as I say, didn't have a lot of details. So, that was great. That was part of the appeal because we knew this was a character coming into another character's life and just changing it radically.

You got to create Rachel Amber however you wanted. I've been calling her, in my head, a "manic pixie nightmare girl." Not a manic pixie dream girl -- she's a little darker than that.

That's an interesting twist. Yeah, I think that's fair. We did really want to make sure -- because we knew how much Chloe loved her -- that she was lovable. Extremely lovable, especially as we're seeing her through Chloe's eyes. And yet, we also know a lot of troubling things about her from season one. So we had to include a touch of that as well.

There's still one episode left in Before the Storm. How's the pressure now?

We're anxious because we know a lot of people are very invested in it, a lot of storylines for us to kind of touch on and tie up. But, I think we feel pretty confident in the ending of the story as we have it. We really think that we're going to really do justice to this relationship between Chloe and Rachel. We think fans are gonna love it.