Life Is Strange
Life Is Strange is a series of narrative adventure games published by Square Enix's External Studios. Created by Dontnod Entertainment, the series debuted with the eponymous first installment, which was released in five episodes throughout 2015. It was followed by a prequel, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, which was developed by Deck Nine and released in three episodes throughout 2017, with a downloadable content (DLC) bonus episode released in early 2018. The sequel Life Is Strange 2 and its spin-off The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit were developed by Dontnod and released between 2018 and 2019. A third main installment, Life Is Strange: True Colors, was released in its entirety on 10 September 2021. Additionally, a remastered collection of the original game and its prequel was released in February 2022. The series has spawned a comic series set after one of the original game's possible endings, and in-universe books. History Following the critical and commercial failure of their 2013 action-adventure game Remember Me, French game developer Dontnod Entertainment was forced to restructure and reinvent themselves. Dontnod CEO Oskar Guilbert explained "Before, what we wanted to do was make big games with large teams and long production cycles... So we had to change that, do something smaller with smaller teams. We didn’t want to do just a small game; we also wanted to bring something new to the market." Life Is Strange was conceived around the rewind mechanic, a concept which had already been briefly explored in Remember Me. Life Is Stranges protagonist Max Caulfield was created with the ability to rewind time to supplement this mechanism. Development began in April 2013 with a team of 15 people, with further people added as the collaboration with Square Enix began. Before signing with Square Enix, Dontnod imagined Life Is Strange as a full-length video game similar to Remember Me that Dontnod would self-publish; however, Square Enix realised it would be more successful as an episodic title, both for creative reasons, financial restrictions and marketing purposes. This allowed them to tell the story at a slower pace. Development began under the working title What If, before being retitled to avoid confusion with the film of the same name. It was Dontnod's second title with a female protagonist, and most prospective publishers were unwilling to publish a game unless it had a male protagonist. Guilbert also challenged the idea at the start. Dontnod creative director Jean-Maxime Moris explained that Square Enix was the only publisher with no intention to change this. "Square [Enix] is basically the only publisher who didn't want to change anything about the game... we had other publishers telling us to make it a male lead character, and Square didn't even question that once." The Pacific Northwest was chosen for the setting to convey a nostalgic and autumnal feel, with the team eventually settling on Oregon as the location of the fictional town of Arcadia Bay. It was decided early on that most of the budget be spent on the