Following on from yesterday’s article revealing Eden Star as W1ngman’s pick of the best game at the Eurogamer Expo 2013, it’s now time for P-Diddy to unveil his choice.

Out of all the big-hitters due later this year including Call of Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield 4, the most exciting published game due has to be Beyond: Two Souls by Quantic Dream. I still enjoyed Heavy Rain back in 2010 even though it felt like the entire game was full of quick-time-events and quite linear.

At this year’s Expo we were lucky enough to get into the presentation by Quantic Dream’s CEO David Cage, where he went into detail about Beyond’s production process and gameplay design. I managed to get my hands on the demo back in August at the Virgin Media Game Space and I was immediately impressed by the quality of the title and how realistic the main characters looked compared to the actors themselves.

One concern most gamers have with Heavy Rain and the upcoming Beyond: Two Souls is that the gameplay is mostly made up of quick-time events (QTEs), and the story feels linear despite being advertised as having branching paths. Cage explained that he has eliminated QTEs in his current project by using bullet-time instead, where the player must complete Jodie’s (Ellen Page) actions by moving the thumbsticks in motion with her movements. Unfortunately, to me this still feels just like a QTE because the title sends you down a path that you must complete by pressing the correct button or, in this case, moving the stick in the correct direction.

That’s not to say that I think this game is going to fail because it’s all about the story of Jodie, her supernatural entity Aiden, and their journey through life partly as a government experiment. While playing the demo I found it to be extremely linear apart from sandbox-style moments where you could decide what to do. However, in the presentation it was revealed that these sections have entirely different outcomes depending on your actions. Cage explained that a group of players who shared their experiences of the demo together quickly realised that they had each found different outcomes, which he demonstrated with a short video.

Hopefully, after watching the presentation above you’ll agree with me that Beyond: Two Souls is looking to be quite an experience. Because of the light gameplay and heavy story elements, it’s a game that is a welcome relief from the army of first-person-shooters due very shortly and one last triple-A PlayStation 3 exclusive before the next generation of consoles arrive in November.

Beyond: Two Souls is due for release next week, 08 October 2013.