Beyond: Two Souls
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Beyond: Two Souls is an interactive supernatural drama action-adventure video game created by Quantic Dream and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 3 on October 8, 2013. Beyond: Two Souls was later re-released, along with Heavy Rain, in the Quantic Dream Collection for the PlayStation 4. The game will be released on PC in 2019.
Plot
The game centers around Jodie Holmes, who was born with a gift she could not control as a kid, with a mysterious entity named Aiden, who is always in her mind, helping her out in certain situations. However, due to the nature of Jodie's curse, she was unable to control it, and her foster parents put her under the care of two doctors: Nathan Dawkins & Cole Freeman, who then help her control Aiden. As time passes by, Jodie slowly gets control of her curse and Aiden.
Good Qualities
- A great story about what if humans can control entities and ghosts.
- Incredible, photorealistic graphics due to the amazing motion capture, which serves as an improvement over Heavy Rain.
- Excellent voice acting, especially from transgender actor Elliot Page[lower-alpha 1] (who portrayed Vanya/Viktor Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy) and Willem Dafoe.
- Includes two-player co-op where one player plays as Jodie, while the other plays as Aiden, her entity.
- Good, emotionally driven music.
- The story has an intriguing supernatural twist.
- Lots of cool unlockables, including a beautiful 8-minute tech demo short called Kara, that would later be Detroit: Become Human.
- Beautiful soundtrack composed by Lorne Balfe, who later scored one of the movies such as Penguins of Madagascar, The Lego Batman Movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, etc.
- The gameplay is fun despite the frequent lack of interactivity at times.
- Like all Quantic Dream games, almost all your choices matter and affect the story.
- Extremely heartbreaking moments like when Jodie helps Stan reconnect with his dead wife and Jodie sees her mother.
- Some unintentionally funny moments like when Nathan just decides to kill himself and Jodie seemingly brushes it off like it was nothing.
Bad Qualities
- The game is intentionally played out of order, which can cause scenes to lose tension because we already know what happens like when Jodie and her team have to sneak into a base, but the scene prior is Jodie and her team being interrogated. This is something that could've worked since other media like the film Memento did something similar, but the way the game is laid out makes it disjointed and confusing. Fortunately, the PS4 version lets you choose whether you want to play in chronological order or original order.
- Multiplayer is awkward and unnecessary, as one player controls Jodie, and the other controls Aiden, but you have to switch turns like the Single Player version.
- The Party scenario is considered to be the weakest and most mean-spirited.
- The game seemingly promotes the idea that if you wanna get what you want and be happy to die or even kill yourself. This is because there are many instances where the game emphasizes that death leads to paradise. Not helping is Jodie being happy that Nathan is with his family despite killing himself just a mere seconds ago!
- The choices related to Ryan don't matter as Jodie will end up at least trying a relationship with Ryan, and even if you reject him during the finale, the two will kiss, with Ryan saying he will wait for her.
- A lot of the characters are idiots and some are straight-up unlikable.
- Possibly due to poor design, during the "Norah" stage Cole will likely wander in front of the security cameras at the mental institution before Jodie can finish disabling them. No wonder the two of you get caught immediately afterward.
- The entire game is essentially a series of idiotic moments, since every chapter involves some poor fool giving a girl with dangerous psychic powers a reason to want them dead. The only variation is whether or not the poor fool is aware of Jodie's powers, and only a few haven't at least heard about them.
- The writing in this game is terrible and filled with clichés
- The game seems to have trouble settling on one specific genre. Parts of the game are meant to be a horror story, others are a spy thriller, a military thriller, plus whatever sort of genre the homeless section fits into. Very inconsistent tones throughout the game.
Reception
Beyond: Two Souls received polarized reviews upon release. Metacritic described its reception as "mixed". Critics praised Page's character portrayal of Jodie Holmes and Dafoe's performance as Nathan Dawkins, as well as the amount of technical details in the game's animations and graphics. Praise was also generally given toward the elaborate motion capture, interactive storytelling mechanics, emotional soundtrack, and ability to appeal to non-gamers.
Joystiq criticized the game's lack of solid character interaction and its unbelievable, unintentionally silly plot. Destructoid criticized the game's thin character presentation and frequent narrative dead ends, as well as its lack of meaningful interactivity. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation was heavily critical of the game, focusing on the overuse of quick time events, the underuse of the game's central stealth mechanics, and the inconsistent tone and atmosphere, comparing playing the game to "watching any normal film and pressing the pause button every two seconds".
Videos
Notes
- ↑ Credited as Ellen Page