Life is Strange Prequel Devs Discuss Deleted Scenes While Getting Real About the Romantic Relationship Between Chloe and Rachel

When Life is Strange first hit the gaming scene, the incredible adventure instantly became a hit with many gamers around the world despite the episodic genre being somewhat niche. The insane twists of the story, the close ties between the characters, the phenomenal music – there was a lot to love. When the Life is Strange prequel then came out, Before the Storm, to dive even deeper into some of those relationships … well, needless to say we wanted more. And more we have, thanks to a recent interview with the lead writer from Deck Nine.

One of the things that immediately stood out to fans about the prequel was the closely intertwined relationship between Rachel Amber and Chloe Price. We saw a glimpse into it with the first title, but the prequel dove right in. The romantic ties between these two characters were very compelling. The lead writer on the project, Zak Garriss, recently sat down with Game Informer to talk about the important themes in the title, as well as what it meant to make their love more organic and relatable to players. When asked how much research went into building the dynamic between Rachel and Chloe, Garriss said:

“A lot. I think when you’re writing anything, research is important. Anytime you’re talking about experiences not your own, and I’m speaking about myself in this, research is absolutely vital. Research and humility. But I do think there’s a gentleness that’s required and a recognition of boundaries, perspectives, and biases. I’m not a 16-year-old girl – I’ve never struggled with those experiences or my sexuality in that particular way. So, I’m writing from a place of immense ignorance in that. But we have a writer’s room. I’m not the only writer – there are four of us. Half of us are female and there are members of the room and of the studio as a whole that identify within the LGBT community. We leaned on their perspectives and insight. We read a number of things online and just thought really carefully.

We chose not to tell a coming out story, and we did that for a lot of reasons. One of the most consistent pieces of feedback I got about this was people really wanted to see gay characters, queer characters, whose queerness was the least interesting thing about them. There’s a story we could have told about that, absolutely, and that could be a really fruitful story but that’s not the story we were going to tell. We were going to treat queerness as incidental, as matter-of-fact. Not casually and not disregarding the intricacies, but we let that not be the most important thing going on. When they kiss, it’s just going to be a romantic kiss. And we set it up to be as lovely and as crazy and awesome as it could be and just not care about the fact that it’s two girls. That resonated with fans and members of the community in a way that we’re all just really grateful for. We wanted to tell a story, we wanted to find the boundaries of where games are intersecting with these communities and really push them. And anytime you do that, there’s a risk of insensitivity, there’s a risk of a mistake, there are all sorts of risks. And I think that’s okay – we should take these risks.”

He also mentioned that looking back on the experience, he wouldn’t do anything differently and that the story played out exactly how they wanted to and the team is very proud of the emotional response they’ve heard from players.

When bringing up the mention that the final episode for the prequel seemed a bit rush, Garriss admitted that the development process was very hectic towards the end and that meant a lot of unfortunate cuts, including consideration towards actually showing how Chloe and Rachel “fell out”:

“Yeah, we did consider that. We considered all sorts of moments in their lives. Ultimately, we decided to confine it to this very specific few days. And yeah, things always get cut, things always get chopped. Production is frenetic and insane. There’s always darlings that don’t quite make it. I’ll share one that we never really talked about. We had a backtalk scene where Chloe was backtalking herself in the mirror to really explore the vulnerability she was feeling and the self-doubt, and how we can be our own worst critics and our cruelest opponents. Just for production reasons, we had to cut it, but it was one of our favorite pieces of content. It would have been really beautiful and interesting.”

The interview was incredibly in-depth! To learn more about the prequel including that dream sequence, you can check out the full interview right here!