Author's Introduction

Please do not read this if you haven't played the game yet but are planning to play it. SPOILERS!

I only recently played this game for the first time. I'd heard that it was good, and it had been recommended to me. I'd successfully managed to keep away from any reviews, spoilers, anything. I knew nothing about the game. So when I started playing, I knew the moment Max left the classroom for the first time, and the music kicked in, that I was in for something special.

But how special? I had no idea what was in store for me. The next five episodes, played over the space of just over a week, was nothing short of an emotional rollercoaster. I have never before become so emotionally invested in the characters on the screen that I was laughing with them, crying with them (lots of crying), and making decisions, not rationally, not thinking about it, but making them because my heart refused to let me do anything else.

Then it ended. I was a wreck, a total and utter emotional wreck. I continued the story with HawtDawgMan's excellent piece 'All That Remains', a really sweet continuation of the story past Episode 5, and that, and the game, inspired me to begin this complete novelisation of the events of the game. I've never written a fanfic before, so I hope I can do it justice.

So, to this work. I really should point out that there will be major spoilers throughout this story.

Somewhat unusually, I would also ask some people not to read this. Well, not yet, anyway. If you haven't played the game all the way through and are planning to, then please don't read this until you've played it. Reading this before playing the game will spoil the game for you, and I really don't want to do that. Once you've played it, then please do come back and read my take on the game.

This will be a novelisation of the events of the game. I'm not planning to re-invent the wheel here, so please don't expect any new characters or new plotlines. This will basically follow the events as they happen in the game.

That said, I'm not planning on blindly and slavishly sticking to the game script. I felt that some of the dialogue seemed a bit stilted, forced, unrealistic and sometimes just too short. So my plan is to expand on the conversations, flesh out some of the characters a bit more than in the game, change the order of some of the events (but not change the actual events). I will also look at adding in some new conversations and overall try and make the decisions more grounded. Also, each episode will have some chapters from other characters' points of view. In the game, things happen to other characters and you never really find out the background to them, why they did what they did, what was going through their mind. Well, in this novelisation, I try to get into the heads of people like Chloe, Kate, Warren, Victoria and others. Find out how they tick.

I would really appreciate your comments, reviews, criticisms (constructive please) as I work through this (probably) long process. Also, if any of you notice glaring omissions, continuity errors, or things that just basically wouldn't happen, please let me know – I'll certainly consider revising any mistakes.

Catboiler. 24th February 2016.

UPDATE: I am grateful for the reviews and messages I've received, some of you with some questions or some excellent points. I will endeavour to answer each message and review, but to prevent any break in the flow of the story, I'll put any author's notes at the end, where I'll go into some detail of my thinking behind some of the decisions I made, why I wrote the characters the way I did, and the evidence I used when researching how to write the characters. Thanks.