Beyond: Two Souls (2013)

Another poorly written interactive movie from the lads at Quantic Dream that's even worse than their previous title. Rather than leave a proper review here's a mini rant about one of the 'chapters'. Jodie is the main character by the way (played by Hollywood actor Elleniot Page), and Aiden is her ghost pal. I should also point out that whilst the mission below might sound like an exciting bit of stealth action gameplay it mostly involves QTEs and button prompts...

There's this 'mission' you do in some unspecified African country where CIA Jodie has to assassinate someone because of course she does, she's part of the US military industrial complex and America can do what the fuck they want. So anyway you happily stealth/murder your way to this target for some reason (don't ask questions) and partway through she meets up with this kid who she heals and they can't communicate because Americans don't need to know the languages of the countries they invade in order to murder people, but he helps you and then you part ways and go on to murder the target and a bunch of other random guys, and low and behold one of them is the kids dad and he's understandably upset, and Jodie starts to feel bad like she hadn't thought before that maybe killing people you don't know in a foreign country for your government is maybe not a good thing and can have bad consequences, and so now she's sad. But this tiny bit of nuance, of the pretence that this isn't just a section of the game cage wanted because he thought soldier Jodie would look cool, is completely undone when the helicopter that comes in to rescue her guns down a bunch of angry locals. But they saved Jodie so who cares I guess.

AND THEN, GET THIS. On the way back in the helicopter with Jodie's hunky boy CIA handler, Ryan, Jodie is still sad and if you switch on the news there just so happens to be a news report about the guy she assassinated, who it turns out was the democratically elected president and not a warlord, as she had been 'led to believe'. Quick question; does Jodie not own a television. That was retorical, I know she does. Is she not also, as a member of the CIA, expected to know a bit about geopolitics. Was she herself not at all interested in learning the slightest thing about the country she was infiltrating and the man she was going to murder? Is Jodie a fucking moron (retorical again, of course she is). But really this is all just an excuse for David cage's favourite thing; melodrama, as Jodie and Ryan yell at each other like traditional humans; "YOU LIED TO ME", "I TRUSTED YOU", "I UNQUESTIONINGLY MURDERED A SMALL CHILD'S DAD (PLUS DOZENS OF OTHER PEOPLE AND A PRESIDENT) WITHOUT BATTING AN EYELID BECAUSE THIS IS THE ACTION CIA PART OF THE GAME WE CAN STICK IN THE TRAILER. AND I TRUSTED YOU", etc, etc. And then she jumps out of the moving helicopter lol.

Pros

• There are some scenes throughout are really stellar
• The game is visually stunning
• I like the way the story was told through a nonlinear structure
• The story is pretty decent with an interesting character

Cons

• The controlling at times a very frustrating experience for keyboard and mouse
• Some of the emotional bits fell flat

I quite enjoyed Quantic Dream's other releases (Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human) but this one was mostly a slog to get through.

I didn't find the plot particularly compelling, not at all helped by the bizarre jumbled narrative structure that sees the chapters played in a seemingly random order for little discernible reason. The gameplay (never the best thing about any Quantic Dream game) was even more awkward than usual, with a rather unintuitive combat/dodging system and a strange, unwieldy control scheme/interface for the floating spirit character Aiden

The two positives I'll give the game are that one; it looks quite nice, I know not everyone is a fan of the hyper realistic style Quantic Dream always goes for but I think it works here, and two; the actors' performances are very good, particularly the prominently advertised stars Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.

Overall I'd say even if you're a fan of Quantic Dream's other games, as I am, you can safely skip this one.

BTW is halfway between movie and game. Well, maybe a quarter-way. The number of places that have meaningful input from the players is small and this is made worse by the fact that the number of options for the player is limited. In most games, players have plenty of inputs - where to go, when to jump, who to shoot and how, so the usually limited high-level path is forgiven. In BTW, there are few places to interact, and most of those are fake "click X to proceed with movie" type of thing, or choosing whether to walk to a door in a straight line, or in a slight curve. In addition, there are quite a few quick-time events that can be overcome or failed with little effect on whatever's going on in the game (especially combat scenes).

There are choices to be made in every chapter, but their seclusion is magnified by how the game stresses them out at the end of each chapter, perhaps to encourage replays (34% of players chose not to read this review).

All in all, the good parts about this game are the movie parts - the facial capture, the voice work, some of the dialogues - and the weaker parts are the gamey ones. I suggest you just watch a video of someone familiar with the game playing, so that you can enjoy the story with messing about with the controls.

I will start off on some good things. The sound and visuals were amazing. Over-all story was pretty good and took off into some interesting topics about life and death. Voice acting was strong and believable. I also liked the whole dynamic with Jodie and Aiden. That's about it.

I knew what I was getting myself into, being so heavily story driven and the type of control scheme. That being said, I found myself in both extremes of annoyance and just boredom in certain parts of the game. The controls, while different and interesting, presented a few convoluted button combinations for such simple tasks, while also providing simple one button presses for moments that were just not necessary. Also had an issue with some of the pacing in the game, with you wishing you could speed up the walking of the main character. There was also some very basic combat in the game, that I would have liked to have seen more refined and expanded.

Over-all, its basically a pretty good Sci-fi movie with required chores for you to complete in order to progress the story. The game had its ups and downs, but at the end, I was just glad its over and probably wont ever play it again, despite the multiple endings.

A major flaw with video games - and other entertainment mediums as well - is their attempt to be a medium that they are not. It's inherently a bad idea to try to make a TV show like a movie, or a book like a film, or in the case of Beyond: Two Souls, making a game like a movie. Beyond: Two Souls came out four months after The Last of Us, a game that excels because it knows how to tell a story in the medium that has been chosen, and use the pros and cons of that type of storytelling. With Beyond: Two Souls, the game's director and writer David Cage does everything he can to make the game as close to an interactive movie as he can make. The result is mixed at best.

The strange problem with Beyond: Two Souls is that I generally liked it. I appreciated the story of Jodie and was curious to see how it would play out. However, this is hardly a game. Controlling the character is mostly an opportunity to give the viewer something to do, and even making mistakes hardly ever serve a purpose. This is also probably a good thing, since the controls and the inputs it wants you to make at the drop of a hat are often confusing to figure out. Whenever the game goes into slow motion, you're supposed to move the character in some direction. It leaves this up to the player, yet it's often insanely hard to figure out what you're actually supposed to be doing. But again, making or missing these moments don't really matter. For example, at one point, Jodie is sent to a war-torn country to assassinate a person in power. During a part where I had to actively avoid gunfire, I failed. But instead of the game ending and making me try the area again, I healed myself quickly and that was it. My involvement did not matter in the slightest.

In comparison to other Quantic Dream games, this might be the weakest because of that. While Cage likes to pretend that his games are about your choice and the world evolving around that, the truth is that 90% of the game's choices couldn't matter less, and your only real choice that matters comes when the game makes it explicitly obvious that your choice finally matters. Cage is leading the game, it's you who ends the story however you see fit, which also feels like a gigantic cop out. Because this is Cage's game, there are so many barriers that are set up so you can't fail. Like I said earlier, you're almost guaranteed success, and even when you're hurt, there is something to fix you up.

The illusion that you're making your own choices is also thrown away pretty quickly, as the game is told in a non-linear way. Chapters are told in a random order, which means no matter what you do, these chapters are still going to occur largely unchanged. If this were at least in narrative order, it would be easy to pretend that you were actually making a difference in this world.

I did quite appreciate the relationship between Jodie and Nathan, that is until it goes full David Cage near the end and shifts the characters in a disappointing and weird way. And again, I appreciate Cage's story, despite how ridiculous it can get (that emo Jodie chapter? WOOF), but it doesn't seem like a video game is the right place to tell this story, especially when there's hardly any choice, despite how much Cage wants to pretend there is. I hope in the future, Cage and Quantic Dream embrace the positives of interactive storytelling, instead of trying to make a game into a movie.

The most I can muster for this game is a pretty deep eye roll. It’s a gorgeous game that makes exceptional use of both visual technologies and its quality cast, but it delivers a script built upon a solid foundation of cliché. It’s not bad per set, it’s just narratively shallow and predictable. It’s like Cage had a checklist of Hollywood tropes that he followed when making the game. I know the game has its following, and it can be entertaining if you don’t take the story too seriously. It’s the quintessential blockbuster, and like blockbuster films it aims to please a wide audience with spectacle layered upon an easily digestible story. And it succeeds at that quite well, providing visuals and a story that hit all the right beats to capture an audience. Just don’t count me among that audience.

I also unfortunately dislike the control scheme. I know it’s designed to provide immersion, but I think Cage has the idea backward. I feel far more immersed when my actions with a controller are reflex rather than conscious. Games have a phenomenal ability to give the player a strong sense of control which turns into immersion. A good control scheme is invisible. It makes you feel as though you are directly conducting the action. You are the actor. The control scheme in Beyond subverts that, which is a mistake. Every laboured movement in Beyond takes you out of the game, forces you to acknowledge the control and thus the fact that you are playing a game. Now if Cage made games that were designed to make us think critically about the act of playing or controlling a character, a sort of Brechtian employment of distanciation in gaming, then I’d have to agree that this is a job well done. But I don’t think that’s his aim. His aim is to make narratively and immersivley affecting games that show the potential of video games a storytelling medium. And as such, the awkward fumbley controls fail him, the game and the player at every turn.

If I could say nothing else about Beyond Two Souls I would point out that it is wildly ambitious. I’ve not played any of David Cage’s other games but I found this to be fascinating at the very least.

Thematically this game can sometimes feel rich but at other times shallow. It can feel very unique and inspired but also cliched and repetitive. In broad strokes I think Cage is gifted storyteller...though at times the world he has created feels exceedingly silly and false; such as when you can’t help but be annoyed by the unrealistically cheesy pop music playing at a teenage party or the absurdity of the main character winning in a fist fight against a pair of police dogs.

I really enjoyed the ideas that the story throws around but I really think the discontinuous narrative does it no favours. While it does break up the slow bits with action sequences, it also did a lot to confuse me and muddle the choices I made along the way. I also think the silly inconsistent parts of the story are more obvious as a result of this wonky framing (even if the epilogue does give narrative reasons for it to be told this way).

The mechanics of the game are, as I’d often heard, a little boring and often very passive. I didn’t mind this as I’d expected it. Though I found the controlling of Aiden to be sometimes confusing and tiresome. While the unique implementation of quick time events was commendable but often also very confusing and, as such, quite frustrating.

Overall a decent effort and hasn’t put me off checking out Heavy Rain or Detroit: Become Human. It’s just a shame this wasn’t a little better refined as I feel it has the bones of a masterpiece within it.

Beyond: Two Souls, just like its predecessor title Heavy Rain, offers a beautifully rendered world to frame his multilayered characters. Jodie's journey is bumpy, but that makes her exploits even more attractive to follow.

I must admit that Beyond's gameplay is very simplistic and doesn't provide a tough challenge, but maybe that's the point: not every game should be a test of skill. The awe-inspiring motion capture techniques and the disjointed narrative structure used on this title seems to have a deeper purpose than to just tell a story. What i can extract of Quantic Dreams efforts is that what this game really wants you to do is to feel.

I get why this title isn't everyone's cup of tea, but playing it is a experience that i don't regret.

Detta spelet är, utan överdrift, något av det sämsta jag har spelat i hela mitt liv. Faktum är att du inte ens behöver spela det, för det gör Beyond bra själv. Jag vet inte hur många gånger jag startat spelet, ätit frukost och samtidigt passat på att ladda handkontrollen medan en episk strid pågår på skärmen. Det spelar liksom ingen roll ifall du engagerar dig eller inte, för oavsett kommer du att klara dig undan (förutom i slutet då, woow kunde inte sluta skratta åt att ett misslyckande faktiskt kunde ha konsekvenser). Vidare är den brutna kronologin ett ganska stort skämt. Man förstår större delen av tiden inte alls vad som pågår, vilket också bidrar till att man tappar allt intresse för karaktärerna. Dialogerna är dessutom sjukt tråkiga (som det mesta i spelet) eftersom man inte får mycket utrymme till att styra dem dit man vill. Många samtal är även väldigt cheesy och känslosamma, vilket ofta får en sitta där i soffan, med handen för pannan medan man frågar sig själv om de skämtar (jag kan inte ens räkna hur många gånger detta hände). Well, sen har vi gameplayet som också suger. Basically är din uppgift att gå från punkt A till B, susa omkring i luften och förstöra datorer samt dra styrspaken åt höger eller vänster i strider (juste, det sistnämnda är som sagt frivilligt eftersom du alltid vinner oavsett).

Såå ja, beyond är tyvärr inget jag skulle rekomendera till någon. Om Heavy Rain är toppen så är Beyond botten. Dock ger jag spelet 2/5 stjärnor eftersom grafiken och castingen inte lämnar någonting att klaga på.

Och nu hoppas vi bara att Quantic Dreams' nästa spel "Detroit" inte blir en lika stor flopp!