E3 2012 has come and gone. Just like we did last year at Pointless
Side Quest, except this time actually in the same month as the show itself,
it's time to take a look back at what this year's Electronic
Entertainment Exposition had to offer.
Beyond: Two Souls
The debut trailer video, starts off in a small town police station
where a police officer has brought a young girl with a shaved head,
who was found unconscious by the road. She's silent and seems almost
catatonic, and he's trying in vain to get her to talk when a cup of
coffee sitting on the desk rises into the air and hurls itself across
the room. Then the cop goes into the other room while the girl starts
talking to a hovering POV camera and says “They're coming,” a
heavily armed SWAT team shows up, and... Well, the screen goes black
and leaves us on a cliffhanger, but based on past precedent in the
eternal struggle between spooky young females with psychokinesis and
squads of heavily armed paramilitaries I'm guessing most of that SWAT
team will be going home in Ziploc bags.
My
initial hope upon seeing a mentally disturbed bald female who
seemingly has telekinetic powers was that this was some sort of Young
Jack Chronicles
prequel spinoff of Mass
Effect,
but no. Instead, it's a game from Quantic Dreams called
Beyond: Two Souls,
about a woman named Jodie Holmes who's on the run while accompanied
by some sort of supernatural entity called “Aiden.” Jodie Holmes
is voiced by actress Ellen Page, whose name I'd never heard of before
but is apparently an actress from the talkies that the kids are into
nowadays.
(Actually, having looked up her film credits, I have seen her at
least once before when she played Shadowcat in X3: The Last Stand.
Her performance as a girl in black leather being chased by a huge guy
with a giant flower pot on his head was one of the high points of the
film. If I was talking about the first two X-Men movies that would be
a joke, but... )
It's not clear from the trailer exactly what Aiden is- aside from not
being a big coffee drinker, presumably- but the game will involve
using his supernatural powers to protect Jodie from her pursuers,
controlling both characters at different points. Said powers include
telekinesis, which scales up from merely rudely refusing beverages to
stuff like throwing cars around, what looks like some sort of mind
control- or whatever unpleasantness a dude's eyes rolling back in his
head after being touched by an eerie glow signifies- and protective
force fields, among other things.
It looks like it could be pretty cool. On the other hand, it's made
by the same developers who did Heavy Rain, which didn't
interest me; I'm not a fan of the sort of PC-style adventure games
that seem to be Heavy Rain's closest analogue and am generally
skeptical of the idea that games ought to mimic other media. On the
third hand, what we've seen and been told about the game so far seems
to suggest that Beyond will be more conventionally game-y and
less of an interactive movie/mundane daily task simulator, which has
more appeal to me. On the fourth hand, that's exactly what I would
expect people trying to promote the game to say.
Yet, on the fifth hand, I think my negative feelings towards Heavy
Rain probably stem in large part from the more obnoxious elements
of the game's boosters rather than the game itself, which is hardly
fair to the people at Quantic Dreams. It's not as if David Cage is
the one pontificating about how I'm a subnormal philistine ruining
the gaming industry because I don't want to use quicktime events to
simulate carrying out dull, everyday tasks when I can already do
those dull, everyday tasks in real life and gain the added bonus of
actually getting them done, after all. So I'll try to keep an open
mind on this.
