Q&A with Kaitlin Tremblay, Author of Life is Strange August 04 2025
The 39th book in our series will be Life is Strange by Kaitlin Tremblay, coming later this year and available for preorder in a new Kickstarter. To celebrate, fellow forthcoming author Charlotte Reber interviews Tremblay about the author's game dev career, Life is Strange as YA, the best choices & consequences in the game, and later games in the series.
Charlotte Reber: Your book examines Life is Strange from both a professional game developer perspective as well as from a very personal perspective. How did those two aspects affect your first experience playing Life is Strange?
Kaitlin Tremblay: It's almost impossible for me to not bring parts of myself to any game that I'm playing, and this is doubly true for a game like Life is Strange, which echoes a lot of my own lived experience as a queer teen coming to terms with myself and the world around me. And in the same way, it's almost impossible for me to not bring the professional parts of myself as a writer to the media I consume. My perspective, the unique confluence of who I am, what I've learned, what my biases are, these all affect how I engage with any media, in terms of what resonates with me, what I bounce off of, and so forth. I recall playing Life is Strange for the first time and confronting these elements, seeing some of my lived experiences echoed in the game, and enjoying that experience. Feeling seen in mainstream games! But I also remember challenging myself on a craft level because of the way they were designing the choices in the game. I think they did a great job building compelling choices with unpredictable consequences (even within the rewind mechanic), and I remember that being really inspiring for me as I was working on a lot more on choice-based games at the time. But even the parts of the game I didn't love ended up becoming important for me. Of course there were also moments in the game that chafed for me personally, which shaped some of my critical relationship with the game, as well as my own professional and craft ideals and techniques.
You told me Life is Strange made a big impression right from its first announcement. What about it was so striking to you, and is that what prompted you to write a book about it?
It was just so unlike other games I was used to seeing in the mainstream games industry! It was contemporary, it focused on a teen girl and her relationships, and it showcased experiences I was familiar with from my own life. I was working primarily in indie at the time, and deeply involved in queer games community organizing, so it's not that I was a stranger to games showcasing queerness and marginalized experiences, but it did feel like an important moment for the mainstream games industry. The scale of it was what caught my eye, not that it was novel necessarily. And the fact that it was a bit polarizing, both for myself and for others! It was that polarization that I found compelling because it shaped a bit of why the game spoke to me, what I connected with in it, but also what frustrated me about it, what hurt me from it. It was those conflicting elements (what I loved about it and what I didn't love about it), as well as the fact that it has spawned a successful IP built around marginalized characters and their unique stories that made me want to write this book on it. There's a lot of smart design and compelling characters in Life is Strange that sit next to creative choices that are deeply frustrating, and it's that complex place that really cemented it as a game that matters a lot to me, enough so that I wanted to explore that space in a personalized close reading of it.
I’m a big fan of Young Adult as a genre, but I’m more familiar with it in books and graphic novels than in games. Tell me more about how Life is Strange fits in!
YA is definitely less of a thing in games, although I see it as being a useful genre term because of the way it prioritizes audiences. Young Adult as a genre is about the audience and the conventions and techniques we use in writing to serve that audience, and I see that at play a lot with how Life is Strange situates Max as a teen girl protagonist, trying to understand who she is, where she fits into the world, and how she has to navigate all of the challenges thrown at her because of her age and gender. It's also a term I like because of the way it prioritizes the audience (teens! and very often teen girls!) and their sensibilities as being a worthy audience.
Is there anything you learned from Life is Strange’s design that you’ve brought into your own work as a game developer?
The relationship between Max and Chloe has always really stuck with me. So the way they love and challenge each other and their sheer earnestness in doing so is something I definitely try to bring into my writing. Also the way the game handled Kate's suicide attempt has fixated itself in my brain, in the way it prioritized treating her as a character first and a game mechanic second. This design felt like it showcased a lot of compassion and care in it, which I've tried to emulate in my own work, especially my early work where I was making games about my mental illness struggles.
Life is Strange has lots of choices that have sometimes unexpected consequences further along in the story. What’s one of your favorite choices in the game, or which had the most interesting repercussions?
Oh, my favourite hands-down involves Victoria Chase. It's a choice you make near the end of the game, and it's a really intense moment, where you can try to warn Victoria that she is Nathan's next victim (or not). In my first playthrough, I successfully warned her that she was in danger, but that success is actually what gets her killed in the game. It stuck with me because of the way it subverted the typical "do the right thing, save the day" mentality I had for making choices in games. I did the right thing, I tried to save her life, but in Life is Strange the consequences to your decisions are at-times unpredictable because the characters are so well developed with their own ideals and behaviours rather than just being pawns for the player. I loved it mechanically and narratively, even if I was sad that I had failed in saving her.
Thoughts on Life is Strange: Double Exposure? [or alternately, about the rest of the series?]
I love the risks and ideas the Life is Strange franchise has been determined to take and explore with their subsequent games. Double Exposure in particular came out at a really interesting time for me. It released while I was finishing up the edits on this book, for starters. But I played it also when I was taking stock of my past trauma and experiences and understanding how they've made me the sort of writer and game developer that I am today. So a lot of my affection for Double Exposure is bound up with how much it felt like the right game at the right time for me, engaging with similar themes and topics that I was also dealing with (trauma, trying to move on from that trauma, understanding how it continues to affect us even almost a decade later). It's what I really love about Double Exposure: how it honoured its past (it's handling of Chloe and Max's trauma) while still forging ahead into becoming something new.