What happens in Beyond when you develop extraordinary abilities? Skills that scare you and your parents? What impact does that have on your life?
Interactivity in Beyond Souls
Beyond: Two Souls picks up on a vision long held by writer and creative director David Cage and his team at Quantic Dream. They see interactive drama as a way to get players conditioned to meaningless violence to feel something deep in their souls. Beyond is a game where the player feels like a passive participant.
The work Beyond
Beyond is a work packed with so much action that it feels like Cage has indulged his whims and desires in a single project. Special focuses on Jodie Holmes, the game's tragic heroine. She is a character beautifully portrayed by actress Ellen Page who proves to be a great salvation for Beyond.
The story of Jodie
Jodie's story is told in chapters without chronological order, spanning 15 years of her life. The game dances between these chapters: Jodie as a little girl, Jodie as a stubborn teenager, Jodie as a young woman, Jodie as a little girl again, and so on. Her plight is fueled by an unwanted attachment to a poltergeist-like spirit she names Aiden, which you can also control depending on the circumstances. This darting back and forth through multiple eras of Jodie's life presents some problems. It gives Beyond a schizophrenic, alienating feel and has you constantly trying to keep up with the progression of the narrative. Next to something like Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, this experiment with chronology feels unfocused; You are often thrust into deeply dramatic scenes that scratch your tear ducts far too early, before you have a chance to fully engage with the characters and their circumstances.
A leap through genre
The story takes us from horror to drama, action and SF. It's riddled with evil government conspiracies, supernatural enemies and cackling villains from far-flung climates. Cage has said in interviews that switching between genres and tone was a conscious decision. But that's not real life. This is a story about a girl and her mind, and there's a reason filmmakers tend to stick to one genre or another: to create a cohesive narrative.
The plot
Occasionally the storyline is riddled with moments that compel you to keep playing. Cage's best work comes through in the quieter, more human moments of his stories. Helping a teenage girl Jodie rack her brains about what music to choose at a party is one such moment. Playing guitar on the street in the middle of a bitter winter to earn enough money to buy food is another.
Jodie's character
In these scenes, Ellen Page has a chance to really spark your interest in Jodie. Page is a supremely likeable and capable actress who bravely embraces Cage's wacky twists and turns and delivers her lines with nothing short of utter sincerity. The rest of the cast don't always give him the same favors, often slipping into big theatrics because the script allows them that luxury. Page - and yes, Willem Dafoe, although he's just doing his Norman Osborne routine here - knows when to downplay the crazy and emphasize the smaller moments. It is mainly thanks to her.
The game
What's missing then is the actual game built around that story. The system that allows us to interact with Jodie's world uses action buttons for the most part. The game does not use quick time events. They're replaced with more intuitive contextual interactions on the right thumbstick or iPhone touchscreen if you want to play with an even more simplified control scheme. Everything you can interact with in the world is represented by a white dot. Move the right stick in whatever direction feels natural, and Jodie will do the predictable: pick up a doll, shower, sit in a chair. There are occasional instances of quick time events in moments of high tension, although they are relatively unobtrusive and feel natural in that context.
Aiden
Navigating Aiden is also easy. You can switch to him if Jodie needs help, and a press of the triangle button puts you in first-person with a satisfying woosh. In its form, you can walk through walls and ceilings to occupy specific enemies. You can do that with some, but not all. Aiden is able to kill certain enemies, move certain objects, and occasionally provide Jodie flashbacks via a telepathic link so she knows how to progress. The system has little coherence as Aiden's usefulness is contextually determined by Quantic. Rarely did I feel like I was using Aiden to move forward based solely on my own intuition. When needed, Jodie uses one of a few verbal prompts: "Help me, Aiden," "Get rid of her, Aiden," and so on. His goals are usually clearly signposted - a character to cast just to the left, an interactive hunk of ghost dust in the room above. Also, you can't always switch to him. It seems that Aiden is a stubborn spirit. This simplified gameplay and limitations of Aiden are disappointing, especially considering the potential for dynamic interaction between Jodie and Aiden as they solve puzzles in co-op.
The combat system
Combat is the weakest aspect of Quantic's new control scheme. Time slows down during physical combat, and you must move the right stick in the same direction as Jodie's body to block, punch, or kick. Your body isn't always easy to read — and you only have a few seconds to do it. Jodie can be stabbed, beaten, or pushed off the side of a building. In some circumstances, like if she gets shot - Aiden will just heal her. This constant back-and-forth between your feeling that you're influencing the story and the story itself has always been at the heart of everything David Cage has created, but it's examples like these that show how passive Beyond feels.
choices
Of course, there are choices: you can choose at Quantic's whim how Jodie reacts to a conversation, whether or not she dances at a party, or get revenge on someone who has wronged her. Beyond's decisions feel small, and the story will go on no matter how it's played, never pausing to present you with a difficult moral dilemma to change direction in any way that feels significant. It's disappointingly unadaptable.
Conclusion
Scene after scene, Beyond: Two Souls is compelling enough, thanks largely to a remarkable performance from Ellen Page. But unfortunately you feel like a passive participant in a video game in the game. Your choices and actions have little impact. Playing Beyond is a memorable experience, but a good video game isn't. Basically, it's nothing more than an interactive film.
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