Note: This review contains spoilers.
In fact, I would even say it made me like Ellen Page even more, though unfortunately it has pretty much nothing to do with the game itself. Beyond: Two Souls is a mess of ideas, half starts, and interesting premises, dragged down by the fact that it never really commits to anything. If it were a book, with an actual substantive editor, that editor would say, “Find your focus.” But it’s a video game, and apparently no one was there to tell David Cage “no,” so none of that happened, and so we are left with a game that has easily been the most critically divisive of the year.
I’m not going to talk about whether or not Beyond: Two Souls would have been better as a movie. While it clearly does want to be a cinematic experience, it’s not, and the “what is a game?” argument is frankly pretty tiresome at this point. First, I want to talk about what the game gets right, because it did have some elements that I liked, or at least didn’t completely hate. Quantic’s signature control system, for the most part, works much better than in their past games. This is not a game you can just jump into at any point and understand how the controls work, however. You have to play from the beginning, or you have no idea what to do. Not that it’s perfect, or even…good. There is a huge learning curve in figuring out which direction Jodie is moving and then toggling the opposite way in order to land a block or punch. When it works, fighting sequences are great. When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t even matter because it is impossible to fail. There is no way to die in this game unless you’re supposed to, and so there are literally no stakes. No stakes basically translates to sequences where you’re susposed to be frightened or in suspense, but since the game vwill wait however long for it to take you to figure it out (which is often a really long time because prompts are almost never clear), instead of say, having an actual three minute timer on a bomb, or having the SWAT team catch you if you take too long to figure out how to take them out. You know, like you would in any other game.
Maybe this is because I like spying on people, but playing as a ghost is really fun, especially when you get to go all out with ghostly mayhem. However, you really only get to really indulge in this maybe once or twice, so it’s kind of a wasted mechanic about…80% of the time. Most of the action scenes you see in the trailers for this game are not really an accurate representation of how much you’ll actually get to do. Like, at all.
I also really liked the portrayal of Jodie herself. Ellen Page’s performance is, naturally, really great (she is, after all, an Academy Award nominated actress, and she gives as great a performance here as she does in any of her films), and Jodie is probably the best female game character from a game that’s come out this year. I was worried that she would be lacking in autonomy in favour of Aiden’s ghost powers, but Aiden is actually the sidekick here, and Jodie is a badass in her own right (at least later in the game, which makes sense, because she is a kid for most of it). Unlike a lot of female video game characters, she felt like a real girl, behaved how a real girl would act, and was allowed to be vulnerable. I often find that in games, especially where you can pick being a man or woman, the female characters are maybe…too tough, if that makes sense. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with women crying during emotionally fraught moments, for instance, but if the game can be either gender, then it almost always defaults to the stoic, male reaction, which I don’t find realistic. Yes, this game has two gratuitous shower scenes, and one attempted rape, which is not great, but Jodie is still a way better character than Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider reboot.
Now, onto the major missteps. And they are pretty major. The biggest, and most obvious being the fact that this game doesn’t occur in chronological order. This wouldn’t necessarily be so bad if the flashback scenes had any connection to the scenes proceeding it. And in the few instances where this actually is the case, it works well. But for the most part breaking up the game into a series of non-chronological scenes not only makes what little story there is hard to follow, but also made every new chapter feel kind of like a demo, or tutorial. It also means that in a game where the controls are not the norm, you forget how to do say, the stealth sequences, because the CIA training memory was like, five memories ago (this actually happens, and it is stupid). It also means that every time you get to do something fun, the memory ends, and you pretty much never get to do that thing you enjoyed again (for me, it was the motorcycle chase, taking out a million SWAT guys in a fit of poltergeist destruction, and riding the horse).
Breaking the game up into non-chronological bits also completely kills player immersion. There actually is kind of a romance component to this game, but David Cage clearly does not understand how they work or what makes them compelling for players. For one thing, you only spend about five minutes with your prospective beaus. They also both start out as total assholes. There is really not enough time given to really make you like them and want to be with them. In the case of Ryan, Jodie’s CIA handler, you literally go from him ripping you away from the only home you’ve known to go work for the CIA, to Jodie wanting to make out with him. You get the sense that Jodie likes him, for some reason I could never understand because the game never showed it, but it never gives the player any reason to. The worst part is, he’s obviously the canon ship, because the game keeps trying to force Jodie to be with him. Easily three times you’re given the option to accept his advances, even if you keep saying no. Needless to say, I enjoyed stomping Ryan’s heart into little tiny pieces every chance I got. While yelling, “EW NO!!” at my TV. I may have almost threw the controller at it once, because when you get to pick your ending, and you don’t pick Ryan, he actually says,”I’ll wait as long as I have to,” which is SO GROSS. Ugh, he is the worst. But you spend just as little time with any of the other people you can choose to spend your ending with, so it’s not like they’re much better.
Narratively, this game is completely schizophrenic. Some sequences are the sad, sheltered experiement girl narrative, what I like to call “Nancy Drew, spirit detective,” paranormal military spy thriller, something like the escaped con narrative. Now, I don’t really care about genre, and I’m not saying this a genre problem. But there isn’t really an over-reaching arc in this game, which is impossible to do anyway with the way they chose to structure it, and the story really suffers for that. The funniest part for me was, I got to the closing shot, and was like, “why couldn’t I have been playing that game this whole time?” The writers have no idea what’s interesting though, and it also suffers from a lot of really boring sequences, which should be impossible given that this is a game about a girl with a poltergeist. Beyond: Two Souls is essentially a super long, boring prologue to a game that could actually be interesting and fun to play.
This is also the second AAA title I’ve played this year that made me murder a shitload of black people for no reason. The only difference is that in this game, Jodie at least loses her shit when she finds out. Soo….progess? I’m not even going to get started on “Navajo,” although it winds up being slightly less racist than I was expecting.
So in conclusion: skip this one, or buy it on sale, people. It is, to use the technical critics term, a “hot mess.” A small part of me does want to play Beyond: Two Souls 2, but only if BioWare gets to make it.
Disclosure: This review was made using a personal copy of the game that the author bought herself. It reflects only the opinions of the author, and not those of Quantic Dreams or Sony.
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