When people criticize games developed by Quantic Dream, there are a few common threads; at its best, the writing is amateurish, the voice acting is wooden, the controls are clunky, and decisions made in the game often carry little to no weight. In the latest game from the studio, Beyond: Two Souls, two of these common criticisms can be put to bed. The game features the acting talents of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, who give mostly fine performances, and the contextual control scheme has been refined for a more elegantly playing game. That said, if you were not a fan of Quantic Dream’s previous titles, Beyond: Two Souls won’t be the title that sways you to their style of gaming.
Like Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain before it, Beyond: Two Souls is a cinematic adventure game. Unlike those titles though, Beyond: Two Souls is told non-linearly, jumping along the lifeline of the main character Jodie (Ellen Page). As the game starts out, we get a look at Jodie the fugitive. Unknown as to who she is, why she is on the run, and what exactly is going on, the game’s narrative quickly sets up an intriguing premise. We quickly find out that Jodie, born linked with a supernatural entity, has lived a very unique life, and Beyond is the exploration of that life.
Jodie’s entity, named Aiden, gives her special powers that make her unlike normal people. These special powers have landed her in a government laboratory where a subsection of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Paranormal Activity, monitors her and Aiden as they grow. Under the care of Doctor Nathan Dawkins (Willem Dafoe), who serves as something of a father figure, Jodie learns how to utilize Aiden’s power while the government learns more and more about the nether realm where others like Aiden exist. And as with anything government related in a story of this kind, the CIA has plans to exploit her and her “power” for their own gain, in the process possibly causing the destruction of mankind as we know it.
While the exploration of the nether realm is a key focal point of the Beyond narrative that comes in and out of play at various points in the story, the game is really about Jodie, her relationship with Aiden, and the twists and turns her life takes based on her decisions. Unlike Heavy Rain, Beyond has a set path to follow, and Jodie is the primary protagonist throughout. While there certainly are tangents that will allow for different experiences for each player, Beyond has a story it wants to tell you and a certain way it wants to tell it to you. Very few player decisions will impact things globally; instead, they are used to shape the Jodie and Aiden that players see locally. As such, even though we end up in the same place, based on the decisions I make, my Jodie could be a very different character than someone else’s.
Quantic Dream chose a very different approach to delivering the narrative to Beyond: Two Souls than it has done previously. Because of this for much of the game I wasn’t sure that it was going to pay off. Presented in a disjointed style, the timeline for the game jumps all over the place. For example, one early memory sees Jody on her first mission for the CIA, while the next sees her as a teenager at a birthday party. These memories, which are the game’s levels, may seem randomly delivered at first but as the game progresses and we learn more about Jodie and Aiden, their delivery begins to make sense and the payoff at the end made it all worthwhile.
The unique delivery of the narrative allowed Quantic Dream to approach its gameplay in a different way as well. Early on, each level introduces the player to the game’s different game systems. One mission will see Jodie learning how to utilize Aiden to do things within the game environment, while the next will see those learned skills put into practical use. And this happens throughout the game in regards to the other game systems, like hand-to-hand combat, gunplay and stealth maneuvering, but while this can often run the risk of feeling too much like a tutorial on how to play the game, Beyond actually makes it feel natural due to the way it is introduced via the game’s narrative.
Players of Quantic Dream’s past game, Heavy Rain, will feel right at home with the way the game controls. Contextual button presses will appear when you expect them to but unlike in Heavy Rain, these prompts didn’t distract me in the same way that Heavy Rain did. Additionally, for the hand-to-hand combat sequences the game actually trains you to do them without button prompts with everything being tied to the momentum of Jodie’s body. If her arm is moving to the right, a swipe to the right is in order, if she is ducking under an incoming blow, a swipe down, and so on. It is an elegant system that makes those sequences more thrilling and fun to navigate. A complaint that one’s input in these sequences means little in the grand scheme of the game is valid from a certain cynical standpoint, but upon finishing each of these sequences, I felt like I had put Jodie through a true battle, and if I did poorly, she seemed to come out worse for wear, and because of this, I think the game succeeds in what it was trying to do with those sequences.
However, while I feel the control of the game is much improved from its predecessors, it succeeds even more in another key way. Because Jodie and Aiden are the only two characters you control in the game, they feel far more fleshed out than anyone in Heavy Rain. Much like in The Walking Dead, where players embodied Lee, Beyond has you embody Jodie. Her decisions, at least those you have impact over, shape her personality. Is she honest? Is she opportunistic? What are her morals? Who is she? The game allows you to answer these question, and many others, in the simplest of ways. My Jodie was honest, had a moral code that she wouldn’t cross in the darkest of times, wanted to see the best in others, possibly to the point of naivety, and most importantly, longed for normalcy. Like The Walking Dead, few of the choices I made in the game had an impact on where the story goes, but in the end, it was my story. Unlike The Walking Dead, though, it never tried to justify those choices as part of a plot device. They were just choices made as part of one’s life, and because of that, I found the game far more effective in the long run than The Walking Dead.
For as much as I enjoyed Beyond: Two Souls, it has its issues that reel it back a bit. The music, despite being composed by the great Hans Zimmer, is mostly forgettable. The level design is inconsistent, with certain levels feeling like lived-in places while others are devoid of personality. The same can mostly be said about the writing, with certain characters and situations feeling real and true to life, while others seem cartoonish and out of place. Sometimes these inconsistencies can even happen in the same scene. The most notable of these instances was when Jodie goes to a birthday party, and the other partygoers absurdly turn on her for no apparent reason. None of these issues are big, but they can at times take you out of the experience, and for a game that is focused on creating a cohesive experience, dropping out for any reason is a downfall.
In many ways Beyond: Two Souls is an evolution of Quantic Dream’s game making philosophy, refining the mechanics to be more immersive and telling a more character-focused story. Even so, this type of game still won’t be for everyone. If you value risk taking in games and want to experience something that in many ways goes against the status quo of the industry, Beyond: Two Souls might be just what you are looking for.
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