The game's fifth chapter, "Time Eleven", was influenced by developer Dave Gilbert's background as a life-long New York City resident who witnessed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center firsthand. According to Gilbert, he refrained from actually depicting the attacks out of personal discretion, believing that he wouldn't be able to retell the events in a sufficiently respectful manner. Instead, he drew from his emotional response to the attacks, such as having Yvonne quote his initial mental description of the burning Twin Towers as "giant, flaming cigarettes." The detached perspective the main cast have on the attacks was influenced by retrospective assessments of other past tragedies, comparing it to the way contemporary audiences would perceive the 1937 Hindenberg explosion and the 1912 sinking of the Titanic as "ancient history." Gilbert noted that the end result was vastly different from the kind of rumination on the September 11 attacks that he had expected going in, describing it as "a love story with the backdrop of 9/11."