Quantic Dream’s studio space literally has the word “EMOTION” emblazoned upon the wall in huge, embossed letters. They were put there by co-founder Guillaume de Fondaumière the day they moved into these Paris offices. It’s hardly the most subtle mission statement in the world, but then subtlety isn’t a world that immediately springs to mind when you think about Quantic Dreams’ games. They paint their narrative vision in broad, clear strokes; it’s usually apparent how these games want you to feel, and they’re very good at making you respond in the intended way. With something like Journey, its themes are all implied or inferred, and the emotional connection that you make with it depends on what you’re willing to read into it. Heavy Rain – and Beyond, the studio’s latest – wear their hearts on their sleeves.
Beyond’s two central characters are linked by an unbreakable bond, a literal tether that keeps them close to one another for a lifetime. Jodie Holmes, the young woman whose life story Beyond aims to tell, grows from nervous child to self-reliant young adult over the fifteen-year narrative arc. Aiden is an invisible presence, a spiritual entity that veers between violent anger and fierce protectiveness. You control both characters at all times, able to switch between them as will, guiding Jodie through the physical world and Aiden through the spiritual as you fly around in first-person. The interplay between these two characters is the core of both Beyond’s narrative and its play-style.
As a girl aged just 8, Jodie – as an eerily accurate-looking child-version of Ellen Page – is brought into a paranormal investigation facility when her parents become alarmed that her invisible friend seems to be causing strange things to happen around her. Willem Defoe plays kindly researcher Nathan, one of the few constant presences in Jodie’s life. Here, you’re taught how to use Jodie and Aiden together effectively.
The interplay between these two characters is the core of both Beyond’s narrative and its play-style.
After guiding tiny Jodie through to the testing chamber – picking up toys as she goes – switching to Aiden lets you float through walls to see a card held up by a women in the adjacent room so that Jodie can pick it out from the selection in front of her. You can also pass through the one-way glass to hear what her evaluators are saying. But the scene quickly escalates; Aiden’s power seems to grow with fear and chaos, and after our Quantic Dream demonstrator knocks a few things off the woman’s desk, she starts freaking out. From there he flips the table with a blast of supernatural energy, shatters the glass, temporarily possesses one of the staff and tries to choke the woman before the scene is interrupted, as Nathan envelops a crying Jodie in his arms.
Choice and consequence, as you’d expect, are still a fundamental part of Beyond. Quantic Dream has already begun playtesting, and has found that people’s immediate instinct when given poltergeist powers is to cause absolute chaos – but both Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière, acting as executive producer on the title, assures me that like Heavy Rain, Beyond accommodates however you decide to play. Behave less aggressively with Aiden and the narrative will work itself around that. Like Heavy Rain, there are no obvious signs indicating when a choice you’ve made has altered the course that the story will take.
Beyond controls less awkwardly than Heavy Rain, and its interaction feels less contrived. Movement is on the left stick, and all those QTE prompts have been replaced by contextual interactions on the right stick. Anything you can interact with has an unobtrusive white dot floating above it; move the analogue towards the object and Jodie picks it up, opens it, or does whatever else you would naturally expect her to do. That said, despite Quantic Dream’s apparent eagerness to downplay them, those prompts do show up from time to time – repeated taps of the X button and finger-bending button combinations make frequent appearances alongside the new contextual actions in what I’ve seen and played so far.
It shows Jodie at her lowest point: on the run, with no family, no money and very little hope.
Fight scenes, meanwhile, look a little less intuitive. During punch-ups, the game slows to bullet-time and you have to move the right stick in a direction to block or punch back, but it looked tricky to read. Both the new control system and switching between Aiden and Jodie felt natural in the scene I played, which was essentially a short walk through a burning research centre apparently devastated by supernatural beings. Short two-character puzzles make Beyond feel more traditionally game-like than some of Quantic's previous work, though the emphasis is still firmly the characters’ performances and pushing the story forward. The game’s effectiveness really hinges on how much you care about Jodie, and on whether the game’s narrative manages to evoke anything for you.
Indelicate games, books and movies with these kind of aspirations try to brute-force a connection by essentially throwing emotionally-charged themes at you - fading youth, birth, death, suicide, depression, loss, family – in quick succession in the hope that one of them might strike a chord, a strategy that is exactly as ineffective as it sounds. Heavy Rain hurdled this pitfall for the most part by keeping its themes consistent – love and redemption – and its pacing sedate until you had time to form a bond with its characters. By contrast, seeing one of Beyond’s most full-on scenes out of context was a little overwhelming.
Beyond’s Homeless scene – the most fulsome section of the game that has been shown so far – rolls out a procession of emotional touchpoints and action scenes. It shows Jodie at her lowest point: on the run from government incarceration, with no family, no friends, no money and very little hope, at the edge of her will to keep on living, taken in by a small community of other homeless people living under a bridge. This scene is more than 40 minutes long, and in that time there’s a suicide attempt, a burning building escape, a robbery, a couple of fights and an actual live birth mixed in with an undeniably depressing portrayal of life on the streets that touches – very briefly – on depression and addiction. It was exhausting to watch.
Characters are startlingly realistic, so much so that you almost can’t help but empathise with them.
What it highlighted, though, was the exceptional quality of Beyond’s performances – not just Page in the leading role, but the supporting characters too. Beyond’s effectiveness comes more from these performances than from the dialogue. It’s easier to make the silences count when you have performance capture technology this arrestingly impressive; Beyond’s engine is more advanced than Heavy Rain’s, an only slightly scaled-down version of the technology that Quantic Dream has developed for the PlayStation 4. Characters are startlingly realistic, so much so that you almost can’t help but empathise with them; there are nuances of feeling in their faces that I have never seen in virtual characters before. Only LA Noire has even come close.
Beyond luxuriates in this amazing level of detail. The camera lingers on characters’ faces, and pans slowly across snowy scenes in the evening light. The Homeless scene’s introductory shot focuses on a melting snowman glistening as a car’s headlights pass over it before panning to a shivering, desperate looking Jodie stumbling across the pavement. And the game’s new trailer hints at a much broader scope than any other Quantic Dream game – we see Jodie riding a horse across a desert, working on a farm, taking part in CIA combat training.
Beyond is Quantic Dream’s most ambitious game, an attempt at an expansive drama where Heavy Rain was a tight thriller. It’s going for grand, dramatic gestures rather than quiet, undemonstrative emotion. Its biggest themes seem to be how life’s events shape a person and the love-hate nature of close personal connection – but it’s also about angry ghosts, entrapment and possibly an evil government agency.
There's always a danger that Beyond will overreach, and it's impossible to know for sure how successful it's going to be until we experience its scenes in context. Even in isolation, though, they are undeniably impressive, and Heavy Rain inspires faith that this is a studio that confident in its own abilities. There's nobody else out there is doing what Quantic Dream does.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
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