Life is Strange - Michel Koch Gamescom 2014 Interview
Gamereactor Interview
On August 21st, 2014, Bengt Lemne published an article about Life Is Strange on the Gamereactor website.
Article
Rewind power in Life is Strange is "a great story telling tool"
We chat with Dontnod's Michel Koch about their episodic coming of age story.
Dontnod's Life is Strange was one of the more intriguing announcements of Gamescom and we sat down with the co-game director and art director Michel Koch to learn more about this "coming of age story" set to play out over five episodes.
The interview took place in a mock up version of the bedroom of one of the main characters (Chloe).
"At Dontnod we really like to explore different ideas," says Koch. "We made an action-adventure with our first game, that's something we love. But we are also huge fans of other sorts of games. When we were finishing working on Remember Me we had some smaller team dedicated to thinking of another project. And there was those memory remixes in Remember Me where we were already dealing a bit with rewind and memories and we thought that 'okay, maybe we could explore some of these ideas but in a brand new different project' and then we started working on the story, on the characters, and we knew that we wanted to tell this coming of age story. And things started to work on top of that and we decided on our characters, we thought that 'okay, a teenage story might be the best setting for those choice and consequences', because this is really a period in your life where you're deciding who you'll be as an adult and having the rewind power on top of that really [makes] for a great story telling tool, because you can change anything. You can always try another option."
Life is Strange is taking a page out of Telltale's book in terms of structure as it looks to deliver five episodes of about 2 hours worth of gameplay with each episode hitting about 3-4 weeks after the last one. However, there's no firm date when the first episode is due to arrive.