Dontnod developers didn’t make it a point to infuse Life is Strange 2 with a message about gun violence. Instead, the ever-present threat is a result of their research. The team traveled for two weeks across the United States talking to drifters, hitchhikers and everyday folks, and then rolled those stories into the game. Guns are simply a part of the real world, so they’re also in the game’s reality.

“After just talking with them, hearing some of their stories, we knew that it was important for us to talk about some of the things they told us just because it felt real,” Koch said. “It was important for us to somehow talk about those people that were maybe not represented enough in video games.”

Guns are a staple of the video game industry. Shooting is by far the most popular mechanic around, especially when it comes to multi-million-dollar AAA games. Best-selling franchises like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter-Strike, Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are built around the idea of shooting enemies and customizing an arsenal of high-powered firearms. In any given year, it’s far easier to list the games that don’t feature guns than the ones that do.

“We also don’t want to be the French guy who gives lessons to everyone.”
– Cano

Life is Strange is a narrative-driven series, offering players decisions and dialogue options as the story plays out. The first game focuses on Max and Chloe, two high school girls navigating a complicated friendship while supernatural forces invade their seaside town. This isn’t a pew-pew kind of franchise, but guns are a factor in both games.

“When a gun was involved or even, for example, the death of someone in Life is Strange 1, it’s rare compared to Life is Strange 2,” Koch said. “This is a lot of discussion we had, to not trivialize the presence of guns and violence links to them. And yeah, to show that it has some consequences.”

In Life is Strange 2, guns are a shortcut to high-stakes drama. They’re a known factor, something that developers can add to the story and instantly create tension or force a gut decision out of players.

“It’s about making a game and telling good stories,” Cano said. “But this difficult stuff happened to people in real life, so we really took care to talk about this subject very consciously. We have done a lot of research to be as accurate as possible. We also don’t want to be the French guy who gives lessons to everyone.”

The fifth and final episode of Life is Strange 2 landed in December, and no matter which ending players receive, it tells a sensational, heartbreaking story. Part of its power stems from its foundation in real-world crises, tackling subjects like family separation, police brutality and violent racism. Though the franchise may rely on guns to manufacture tension like other titles, it tells stories often overlooked by the video game industry. Stories about young women coming of age and discovering their power, or that of two young brothers traversing the US on their own, relying only on each other to survive.

Cano, Koch and series co-director Raoul Barbet don’t have any concrete plans for the next installment of Life is Strange, but they’re brainstorming new game ideas now. Whatever they choose, it’ll likely be character-driven, highly emotional and tied to the real world in a tangible way. It might also include guns — but that could apply to basically any game.

Before long, you’ll have some flower friends, a waddling nose and a tiny acorn that can sprout into a giant tree provided everyone else holds hands and dances around in a circle. To progress further, you’ll need to frequently switch characters and use their unique abilities to make other people happy. The aforementioned tree, for instance, can gobble characters up and turn them into strawberries, pork chops and broccoli. The mouth, meanwhile, can turn food into poop and the balloon can float higher than anybody else. Every interaction is utterly bizarre but, through Takahashi’s trademark art direction, logical and endearing.

Completing tasks will eventually unlock larger objects — tables, chairs and giant inflatable ducks — that can ferry smaller characters between biomes. The floating pasture, it turns out, is called Spring and you’ll need to work through Summer, Fall and Winter before the end credits roll. Along the way, you’ll discover the origins of this strange but merry world and why the characters were scattered about in the first place. It’s a simple tale with a timeless message that players young and old should be able to appreciate.

“We are human beings living on the same planet,” Takahasi told me at E3 earlier this year. “Why do we have to fight each other? I just wanted to try making something that somehow means we can get over our differences. In a funny way, though, which is colorful explosions for me.” A perfect antidote, in short, to the madness of 2019.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

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Like a lot of people, I decided to revisit The Witcher games after watching Netflix’s adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novel series. But rather than starting a new playthrough of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I instead opted to check out Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales.

Chances are, even if you’re a fan of The Witcher universe, you may not be familiar with Thronebreaker. Despite its ties to CD Projekt Red’s masterpiece, it wasn’t a financial success, failing to meet the studio’s sales expectations when it came out last year. That’s a shame since it’s almost every good as The Witcher 3.

The simplest way to describe Thronebreaker is that it’s a combination of Gwent, the collectible card game (CCG) CD Projekt Red introduced in The Witcher 3, and a visual novel. You play as Meve, the queen of one of the kingdoms that makes up the world of The Witcher. While technically a prequel, as the player you have a lot of control over how the story takes shape thanks to the decisions you make as events unfold. What makes those choices difficult and compelling is that the characters they involve are often messy. For example, partway through the game, you have to decide the fate of a general who ordered the massacre of a village. That choice is made more complicated when you learn he did so out grief for a murdered son.

Gameplay is also fun thanks to the ways in which CD Projekt Red found to keep the Gwent formula fresh. To get some of the best cards in Thronebreaker, you’ll need to solve clever challenges that give you a limited set of cards and a specific win condition. These puzzle challenges do a lot to break up the usual battles. Even if you’re not a fan of CCGs, Thronebreaker is well worth checking out for its compelling story and characters.

Both editions will be available in Europe on December 3rd, 2019, just in time for the holidays — those in the Americas will have to wait until February 4th, 2020. In the announcement posted on the official Life is Strange blog, the team behind the game explained that “different countries have different requirements when it comes to rating the content on the discs,” and they chose to release at different times instead of rolling the game out to all regions in February.

Take note, though, that while the Square Enix listing says the physical disc contains the “Complete Season,” it actually only contains Episodes 1 to 4. “Episode 5 will be supplied as a download on all platforms,” the announcement reads. It’s not entirely clear if that means you’ve already paid for it when you purchase the physical disc and can download it for free, but you can get the last episode on December 3rd regardless of your location. The physical editions are now available for pre-order from Square Enix’s website.