Life Is Strange: True Colors

Life Is Strange: True Colors is an upcoming graphic adventure video game developed by Deck Nine and published by Square Enix's European subsidiary. It will be released in its entirety on 10 September 2021 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Stadia. It is the fifth installment in the Life Is Strange series, and the third mainline game, succeeding Life Is Strange 2. The plot focuses on Alex Chen, a young woman who can experience the emotions of others, as she tries to solve the mystery behind her brother's death.

Gameplay

Life Is Strange: True Colors is a graphic adventure played from a third-person view. The player can explore various locations in the fictional setting of Haven Springs and communicate with non-playable characters through the conversation system based on dialogue trees.

Development

Deck Nine, which had previously developed the first game's prequel Before the Storm, began work on True Colors in 2017. On 18 March 2021, Square Enix revealed the game as part of a live digital presentation, along the announcement of remastered versions of the original Life Is Strange and Before the Storm to be released later in 2021.

A common theme of the Life is Strange series has been based on characters with a type of super-human ability, though not like superheroes, that the developers can then provide "meditations on real experiences that regular people go through", according to Felice Kuan, senior writer at Deck Nine. For True Colors, they had determined early on they wanted their protagonist to be based on a power around empathy, not only to be able to sense what others were experiencing but to be vulnerable herself and would be able to grow past this as the story progressed, "giving her a path to greater self-acceptance and greater trust in her own abilities" according to Kuan. This led to creating the story around Alex losing her brother early in the game as a driver for her to explore her empathy powers and reveal more about her past as she uses them. Erika Mori portrays Alex through full performance capture, which Mori said was 

"instrumental in successfully creating this game about empathy because it allowed us to get really high-fidelity facial expressions that were organically connected to whatever was going on with my voice and body in a particular scene."

In a 2019 interview, Dontnod Entertainment, the developer of the previous two main games in the series, expressed interest in the future of the franchise while noting they would opt for new characters again, but explained that the rights belong to Square Enix and that decisions on the future of the franchise lay with them. With the announcement of True Colors, Eurogamer claimed that Dontnod's time with the franchise was over and that the Life Is Strange series have been passed to Deck Nine.

The game's soundtrack contains a cover of Radiohead's "Creep" by mxmtoon, who also provides the singing voice of Alex. Other featured artists include Novo Amor, Angus & Julia Stone, Phoebe Bridgers, and Gabrielle Aplin.