David Cage, creator of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, has stressed that Quantic Dream’s next project, Beyond: Two Souls, is all about the choices made by the player and that multiple playthroughs will defeat the meaning and the consequence of the initial overall decision process. In an interview with VideoGamer, Cage notes:
It’s the same approach as for Heavy Rain: Play it once and then don’t replay it. You can if you want, but I think the best way to experience the game is really to make choices and then never know what would have happened if you’d made a different choice. Because life is like this, and Beyond is the life of Jodie Holmes.
He also talked about the story, with the theme of death seeming to dominate his comment:
Death is something really strange. I mean, you have the concept of death when no-one around you has died, and you understand that it’s very sad. But when you lose someone close, you have a totally different approach to it. Suddenly it takes on a whole different light.
I have never been very interested in religions, I just say that they are nice theories. And one day I was thinking about what death could be, without religions, without God sitting on a cloud, or whatever. Can we have another explanation for that? This is what drove me to write Beyond.
Death is an interesting concept to explore. It will follow Jodie everywhere in the form of Aiden. If death interests Cage, then Aiden’s death may help establish major plot points within the story. The world won’t know for sure until 2013, which is when Beyond: Two Souls is due for release.