When Life Is Strange 2 - Episode 2: Ruins was released yesterday, some players lamented the lack of ability to purchase the episode separately. The consensus at the time was that this would be a mistake that would soon be rectified, but Dontnod has now confirmed that it's actually by design. While Dontnod is monitoring the situation, it's not going to be changing anytime soon.
The full statement on the situation appeared on Steam, so while the statement addresses that platform specifically, it can still be applied to PlayStation:
We understand that some of you expected to be able to buy episode 2 individually. We’re sorry to have not responded quicker on this subject but we were spending the time since yesterday's launch reading and absorbing everyone's thoughts and feelings on this matter.
With Life is Strange: Before the Storm, as well as many other episodic games on Steam, the only option was to buy the full season. For Life is Strange 2, we expected the change in main characters to mean some of you would want to try episode 1 before purchasing the full game, so we are offering a plan of a standalone Ep 1, a season pass for eps 2-5 as well as the full season. We tried to make this clear from the store page but we now see that the expectation was that all episodes would be available individually. We appreciate that we could have made this clearer in our communications and we sincerely apologize for that.
Our game and community is based on the trust and understanding we share with you and these pillars are vitally important to us. We understand that this trust may have been unintentionally bruised due to the misunderstanding around Episode 2's release availability. We do want to assure you that we are continuing to monitor the situation and are considering ways to make things right, though there is no fast or easy solution that will please everyone. Please do not ever feel ignored - we are reading, absorbing and learning from everything discussed and will continue to do so throughout the season.
This means that the only options for purchasing Episode 2 are to either buy the full game or to buy the season pass for Episodes 2 to 5. If the situation changes in the future, we'll be sure to let you know.
We've got the full list of Life Is Strange 2 trophies - check the list for guides to unlocking them.