REVIEW: Beyond: Two Souls

When I imagine what it's like sitting in a production meeting for a David Cage game, it's something like this:

"Hey! How about this guy wakes up over a bloodied corpse, with blood on his hands and strange symbols carved into his arm. He has no memory of the last 5 minutes. "

"That's great! What else?"

"Also, we could also have the detectives on the case playable characters too, so there's a conflict of interest in the player."

"Excellent! Then what happens?"

"...Uhh, well I haven't got that far yet, I don't really know how to explain our excellent premise."

"Ancient Mayan rituals and a deus ex machina to wrap it up?"

"Perfect!!!"

This happened with all three of the Quantic Dream games that were the product of David Cage. Fahrenheit - or Indigo Prophecy in North America - had an excellent premise of what I've just described with a silly ending involving Mayans performing Agent Smith moves on a roof. Heavy Rain had a child serial killer where initially the player was unsure who the killer was and there are a few - poorly handled - red herrings to try and throw us off the scent. Unfortunately the actual killer was such a twist ending that it literally did not make sense in the context of the game. 

So finally we come to David Cage's latest project. Beyond: Two Souls. it had a high pedigree of actors: Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe are among my favourite actors working today, alongside some other mediocre players that read the lines they're given with gusto. Unfortunately, for want of a better phrase, Beyond loses its shit almost from the get-go. Unlike Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain which take a while to become silly, Beyond's goes straight into bat-shit bollocks crazy almost immediately, starting with the non-linear way the story is told. I really, really wish people would stop telling stories this way unless it's necessary. It made the story disjointed, I didn't care what happened to Ellen Page's character, Jodie because I simply didn't know enough about her or her situation before or after her current predicaments and so it created a bunch of random scenes barely knitted together by the fact that Jodie is present in them. David Cage is perhaps trying to become a DJ? The sequences seem to be homages or influenced from favourite scenes in other games or movies. like one segment where Jodie is on the run from the police, and they're on a train and they manage to all get on TOP OF A MOVING TRAIN IN THE MIDDLE OF A STORM TO HAVE A FIGHT. It may look cool, but it defied explanation, context and made me lose what little immersion I had. All I could see when I played that part was executives sitting around a table saying: "I want a train chase sequence, can we have that? Fuck it, let's take them on top of the train! Wouldn't that be cool?!" No, it was not cool.

So cool!!!

There are so many plot holes in this it would be kinder to not list them all, perhaps the most insulting gimmick regardless of the plot holes is the lack of any real choice in game, and the forceful way Jodie is made to have a relationship with the character Ryan. No matter how many times I rejected him and tried to get away from this situation, the game kept pushing me against him. It felt like Jodie and Ryan were Barbie and Ken dolls held by David Cage and he was pushing their faces together and making kissy noises. The game gives you absolutely no reason to empathise or like this guy, in fact, some sequences he's made to be a total dick, like when he takes Jodie from her father figure Dafoe and forces her to join the CIA.

She should've hooked up with this dude instead

The game's "unique" gameplay gimmick is the entity Aiden, who is joined to Jodie and whom another player can control. His logic is all over the place: he can sometimes go miles and miles from Jodie, and sometimes he can barely make it out of the next room without feeling the tether. It's all about when the games wants or needs him to. Jodie's powers and Aiden's powers are also not explained very well. Jodie can maybe speak to the dead and stick ghost odour into her head to see the recent past through their eyes - although she can only do the latter power with Aiden's help. So is it Aiden with all the power? Or Jodie? Do they both share the power? It is frustratingly left unexplained by bad writing. 

I feel sorry for Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe in this. They must have been told how important video games are becoming in the world - the video game industry is worth more than the film and tv industry put together - and were hoodwinked into this shoddy, terribly written, frustratingly illogical and hammy story that makes literally no sense when you try and piece it together. The game's internal logic changes at whim to suit the story and Jodie drifts from one scene to another that are barely connected and have various different ideas at different times. I had no idea what the real story was about. Was it about the infraworld? Were the entities - described as being like Aiden - part of that world where the dead are? If Aiden is an entity like the bad ghosts, were they once humans? Why do we get Aiden's/Jodie's powers as the game progresses, but not as the linear narrative progresses? The list goes on ad nauseum.

No, I did not like this game.