Beyond: Two Souls

For all the time, effort and hype that went behind Quantic Dream’s latest, for all the high profile casting, and for every staked claim that Beyond: Two Souls is a very different experience from Heavy Rain, the question after my eight-hour journey was still the same: Is this a game?

Let’s take each point in the above paragraph and examine it objectively. The time and effort that has gone behind Beyond: Two Souls is obvious from the get-go. This is the story of Jodie and Aiden, a girl and a disembodied spirit connected to each other since the day Jodie was born. Jodie is the only person able to communicate with Aiden, and his presence complicates her life severely from a very young age. Eventually, her parents are not able to cope with the special nature of their daughter, and leave her in the care of Dr Nathan Dawkins of the Department of Paranormal Activity.

Every scene has been created and rendered in painstaking detail and beautiful visuals.

Through the journey that has you play as Jodie when she was a scared, eight year-old child to 24 year-old jaded ex-CIA operative, you go across a wide variety of landscapes that range from urban and sub-urban environments to a war-torn city to the scorching desert and a secret facility deep under water. Every scene has been created and rendered in painstaking detail and beautiful visuals, and minimalistic HUD really lends to the immersion straight from the get-go.

The performances, especially by the lead actors Ellen Page and William Dafoe skyrocket the narrative quality into the stratosphere. I would assume it must have been quite a challenging task, because certain scenes required the actor to react to player inputs. So when Dr Dawkins (played by Dafoe) has to tell Jodie that they must part ways, the player controlling Jodie has the option to react with anger, desperation or sarcasm. The task fell upon the actors to perform each of these responses in context, and the solid voice-acting all around coupled with the superb motion capture makes every interaction flawlessly believable.

The story jumps between Jodie’s childhood and adulthood, and through her various experiences with Aiden and other entities from beyond, comes to a powerful conclusion.

As a narrative, Beyond: Two Souls is an emphatic success. It deftly puts a human touch on a decidedly paranormal affair. As a player, you’d be as invested in discovering the nature of Aiden and the link he shares with Jodie, as you would be moved by some of the game’s more touching moments, such as one where Jodie helps a young homeless woman give birth to a child. The story jumps between Jodie’s childhood and adulthood, and through her various experiences with Aiden and other entities from beyond, comes to a powerful conclusion.

But let’s address the elephant experiencing the full spectrum of emotions in the room. How much does Beyond: Two Souls add to the predominantly QTE-based experience of Heavy Rain?

Most of the scenes are limited in their scope, which comes as a prerequisite to the tight narrative.

To be honest, Two Souls feels like a step back from Heavy Rain, where the presence of four protagonists gave the sense of the player having a greater impact on the story through their interactions and fates. Interactivity, unfortunately, is a largely scripted affair, where variations in actions often led to the same outcome. The controls are still quick-time events, though they have been dressed up in a different manner. In most of the fight/chase scenes, the events slow down at predetermined points to give players a window to move the right analog stick in the direction of Jodie’s movement. It is definitely more intuitive than button prompts (and there are plenty of those as well), but it still didn’t invest me in the action on screen as much as I would have liked.

A lot of it had to do with the fact that you’d have to seriously mess up in order to face any major consequences, and in a game like this, it is very hard to seriously mess up. Most of the scenes are limited in their scope as well, which comes as a prerequisite to the tight narrative. It is understandable, but running into invisible walls in a game that puts immersion on top of its priorities is still jarring.

Severely limited is, in fact, the feeling I took away from Beyond: Two Souls. It makes me question its place among video games.

That said, the gameplay as Aiden is the most gratifying part of the experience, and is more conventional in terms of a gaming experience. The player can take control of Aiden at the press of a button, and he is free to move around the environment as long as he doesn’t move too far away from Jodie. Aiden also has the ability to move certain (not all) objects in the environment, which comes in handy when you want to spook people. A scene involving a bunch of mean kids locking Jodie up in a cupboard and then Aiden taking revenge on them is decidedly Carrie-like and immensely satiating. You can use Aiden to kill certain people, or even occupy them to accomplish tasks for you. These tasks, however, are still in the context of the scene and are severely limited.

Severely limited is, in fact, the feeling I took away from Beyond: Two Souls. It makes me question its place among video games. It feels far too scripted, barring a couple of missions such as the one shown in pre-release videos where Jodie infiltrates enemy territory to eliminate a key leader. I respect David Cage’s ambition to use video games as a medium for more immersive storytelling, but games like Ico and, more recently, The Last of Us have combined mature storytelling and emotional investment without taking away a very key ingredient that a player experiences in video games: the sense of charting one’s own course through the game.

For a tale so focused on deep, meaningful connections and with some genuinely interesting characters, it is perhaps ironic that I could not connect well with any of them.