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If you watched any of the major conferences this year, you must have caught an inkling of Beyond: Two Souls, the spiritual follow up to Heavy Rain. Developed by French developer Quantic Dream, this interactive drama action-adventure single player title stars the actor Ellen Page (Juno, Inception) and Willem Dafoe (The English Patient, Spider-Man). I managed to get some hands on time with the game; check out my thoughts below.
As expected with this crew behind it, this title is heavily story driven. Born with a connection to an entity with incredible powers, Jodie (Page) faces extraordinary challenges, danger and loss in an effort to find out who she is. Which if the preview demo at gamescom was anything to go by, involves running from and killing the police and FBI a lot.
The story orientated nature of this game will really make or break if you like it or not. In the 20 minute demo that I played there was no obvious opportunity to make a choice, making the game feel more akin to a movie where you have to keep prompting the action to continue. The extent of your involvement to drive the action on is to push the left joystick in the direction that the main character was going to go anyway, and the right joystick to finish throwing her blocks and punches. Failure is an option, but the action cycles back to the point where you had something to do for another go, so it feels like you’ll get to the end no matter how awful you are. In contrast, there are pauses in the action where players aren’t directed to do anything, which leads to a feeling of aimlessly wandering around. That said, the story is extremely compelling.
Of course this being “Two Souls”, you also get control of the other soul, a bodiless entity named Aiden. I found this character quite hard to control (as did others I saw play) because his movement is in 3 directions without respect for walls or other solid objects, which leads the moments you’re forced into playing him to be quite frustrating. Aiden can also only interact with certain objects which can be hard to find; these two things combined left me dreading the moments I’d have to control him.
The graphics in this game are stunning, and you can tell that everything is motion captured with Ellen Page being on top form. However, the animations can feel quite jerky at times and don’t flow together well at all. This is especially true when you fail at some part of the game (ie you don’t move the joystick in the right direction) as the game stumbles to progress the characters in a realistic way so that you can have another go. An example of this is where Jodie is climbing a wall to escape from the police. Players are prompted to use R1/R2/L1/L2 to help her climb – get one of these wrong and she falls a bit, then recovers and climbs to where she was before so you can have another go. It ends up giving the impression that she’s drunk rather than extremely capable (which she obviously is).
Overall I found Jodie’s character to be extremely compelling as a female gamer. She’s obviously attractive without being portrayed in a sexual manner, capable while being able to ask for help from Aiden, independent whilst being always accompanied. It’s nice to see a female character in extra-ordinary circumstances that isn’t exaggerated.
This will be a game that either you love for the genre or you’ll be a bit bored with because of the lack of obvious choice. While I’m part of the latter crowd, I still want to find out what happens so for this is one I’ll be finding a “Let’s Play”-er to explore Jodie's life with.
Beyond: Two Souls is released on Playstation 3 on October 8th in the USA and October 9th in Europe and Australia.
