Beyond Two souls Review
Developer Quantic Dreams
Publisher Sony
Platform PS3
Release Date October 2013
Big budget, big acting talent and big expectations all await this latest story written and directed by Quantic Dreams David Cage. The new project from the Heavy Rain creators has many similarities in terms of gameplay techniques but it has much less in common in terms of story. This is a completely different project and one that is much stronger and engaging (and somewhat simpler to follow).
The game focusses on Jodie (Ellen Page) in various stages of her life, essentially from birth but mainly it spans a 15 year period from young child to young woman. The vast majority of which is spent in sinister institutions.
The game starts out with a prologue to set the game in motion and then jumps wildly back and forth throughout this 15 year timeline giving you fleeting glimpses into Jodie’s upbringing, her powers and her struggles with being different and trying to find her own place in a world very different from that of a normal teenager. As each chapter unfolds you learn a bit more about Jodie (Page), about Aiden (the entity linked to her) and Dr. Dawkins (Dafoe)
In terms of gameplay if you have played Heavy Rain then you will know what to expect, this is less a game and more an interactive experience with lots of quick time events and interacting with various objects within the scene. The game does flow though, thankfully even if you get the QTE’s wrong it doesn’t make you repeat them and the game continues along (the path just shifts slightly). Sometimes I even let them fail as it adds to the tension in a particularly dramatic moment.
Visually Beyond: Two Souls is amazing, easily the best looking game of this generation and I was left more often than not wondering if I was still playing on a “last gen” machine as it matched what I have seen of the “next gen” in many areas. This is not just the amazing facial texturing that has been achieved. This is extended to backgrounds, clothing, weather (especially the rain) and day and night time cycles. There is one chase scene in a forest at nighttime that will make you stop in your tracks.
The game and story itself can jump from the mundane to the absurd. Tasks such as cleaning your room or cooking dinner are positioned next to all out action packed shoot outs. It is quite strange when the game jumps from a moment when you are a dangerous trained killer back to being a 6 year old girl scarred of the dark but overall it is handled quite well.
Since this is mainly story driven we will skip over it for fear of spoiling anything. Beyond Two Souls has some parts that will leave your breathless and other parts that will leave you wondering what they were thinking about at all. Overall the story is very well written and pulled together. Be warned this is a paranormal story so it does sail close to the border of what is normal.
David Cage does a solid job with his writing and directing, the more tense emotional scenes are engaging but he could do with some help in the action sequences in regards to timing. Getting near the end of the game some action packed sections felt a little rushed and I was left thinking I wish they had added 20 more seconds here instead of in that cooking scene. Some might knock the writing or try too hard to compare it to a movie but this is unfair writing for a 15 hour long game with many different plot lines and outcomes depending on the users input is far more challenging than writing a 2 hour long movie where everything is rigidly in place.
Overall: I really enjoyed Heavy Rain because it was so different, Beyond Two Souls does not have that same unique feeling but it is a much more impressive overall experience. It far exceeds everything they did achieve previously and is for the most part is a well-crafted, well delivered and incredibly enjoyable experience. We did not have a chance to test the dual co-op controls but do plan on revisiting the game to test them out in the next week which says a lot about how engaging it was.
SCORE 4.5/5
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