Tuesday 19 August, 2014

I really enjoyed Heavy Rain (despite being the only one, apparently). I've even written a few academic articles on the game. Needless to say, I was quite interested in Beyond: Two Souls when it came out.

I've already played the first 5 or 6 'scenes' and I've enjoyed how they are organized with respect to each other. You're basically jumping back and forth in the narrative, with each new scene filling in blanks and question you may have from the earlier ones. It works quite well for me and has kept me intrigued so far.

It's also clear how the experiments with the interface and interactions have evolved. I'm not sure that they've gone in a 'good' direction - mostly because everything seems a lot simpler. By simpler I mean fewer choices. On the other hand, some of the 'obvious' interactions have been simplified so you don't need any complicated sequences to follow. You mostly just flick one of the analog sticks and you're done.

What has surprised me is that the game seems markedly more linear than Heavy Rain. At most times I get the feeling that there is only one correct way to address a problem, but I'll admit that I could be incorrect about this. I look forward to, once I've finished the game, exploring some of the scenes using alternate strategies. Actually, there's only one that seems amenable to that approach: the embassy scene. I suspect the rest are either linear (only one choice) or binary (make a choice, but not really any impact).

Will be interested to hear how you get along with this. I also was very impressed with Heavy Rain. I played BTS for a few hours for a friend's study and also found it incredibly simplified gameplay-wise. For me, that made it very boring to play, as I think a lot of the story is painful to listen to. So playing through it is worse. I felt I had no control over anything, and characters routinely said and did things that I thought were silly.

Anyway, I've been watching a Let's Play (without commentary) and am probably 2/3 through the game. I'm enjoying not actually playing it because I feel it's only a tiny amount of interactivity I'm missing out on, especially considering that I can imagine I'm moving the controller to perform actions. But the story I still think has some painfully bad parts and so it's not a very good movie either!

LOL, I see what you mean. :-)

Maybe I haven't gotten to the really bad parts yet? At this point I'm mostly interested in seeing how all the little bits and pieces fit together. For example, how does she wind up working for the government? Why does it all go south? But you're right - the interactivity part is a lot thinner/more scarce than in Heavy Rain.