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.   

Bestfeeding

A lot of my friends and acquaintances are at that broody, let's-make-a-baby age, and as I get the inevitable updates via Facebook and other social media as pictures are posted, I notice one universal point.

Most, if not all of my younger friends have opted to use formula milk.

Formula milk is fine for babies, and there's nothing wrong with using formula milk - in fact one of my nieces had formula and she turned out into one of the funniest, most inquisitive little girls ever, but you cannot argue with nature: breast really is best.

I have to be really careful not to sound preachy or get up on a soapbox to have a rant that "breast is best", and to be fair, I haven't asked if there was even an option when it came to my friends' choices about feeding their baby. However, I do want to highlight the number of women I have come into contact with that had a choice of breast or bottle and chose the latter. For example, when on the ward after giving birth to my daughter, I was sharing it with three other women, all of which had elected to bottle feed without even attempting breast. I felt a little out of place. Another time when I went to the doctor about my daughter's jabs she was surprised when I said I was breastfeeding. These incidents started making me ask the question if there is a choice, surely it's a no-brainer? Breast milk is free, is always the right temperature, helps you lose weight and is literally developed for your baby's brain development. In fact, formula milk that has been developed from cow's milk is designed for the calf to gain weight: hence why formula babies tend to be fatter than breastfed babies. That's what thousands of years of domesticity has done to our fat farm animals.

Have we become a society where it's so disgusting to expose a breast to feed a hungry baby? Fortunately, you hear very few instances where women are asked to stop breastfeeding in public and it invariably makes national news because it is so rare, and that's a great thing. Breasts have become so over sexualised that something as harmless as a nipple makes some people snort their coffee through their nose and rant on about how we shouldn't be exposing our children to this abhorrent image - I won't make an issue of the massive irony in this train of thought. Social media definitely has a part to play in this: Facebook believes it's ok to make videos available that depict a beheading but will ban an image of a woman without a shirt? What's even more baffling is the bare breasted woman isn't even being depicted in a sexual way, yet some websites decide that a nipple is a disgusting image and is banned almost immediately. Perhaps it's because people think breasts = sex and therefore porn? People are terrified by anything to do with sex, yet breasts have little part in sex, unless you believe what you see in porn is true.

To those very few individuals that are disgusted by my breasts, I'm really glad you're in the minority, but you're damaging young mothers who you're making believe breasts are equivalent to genitalia and should cover themselves with your Victorian values. These women are afraid to breastfeed because you make them believe they're stripping off. I don't mind feeding my baby in public but I cannot help but feel exposed when I do, and I really shouldn't at all. Our society has drilled it into us that breasts are only there to be a sexual part of our bodies and we should be ashamed of exposing them like a cheap hooker.

Of course, there are some women that decide bottle is the best route to take with their baby and make an informed decision to decide to use formula, and I have absolutely nothing wrong with this, what I want to make a point of is women that decide - perhaps even before they fall pregnant - that breast was never an option to consider. This decision I'm sure has to do with the fact they're uncomfortable feeding in public and the odd belief that bottle is easier.When did this become a common thought? Bottle seems to have become the default option, which to me is weird. One of the greatest kicks I got from breastfeeding was the sheer ease of slipping my baby on my breast when she woke up in the twilight hours. Some women don't, but I really enjoyed those eerie hours with just me and my baby. It was worth trading in the few times my partner may have gotten up to do a bottle or two, that option decreasing rapidly if he had work in the morning.

This is not me hating on those mothers that bottle feed their baby: it's about the sexualisation of breasts that make women uncomfortable about breastfeeding and this wrong concept that breasts are genitalia.

...And baby makes three!

So I became a mum on the 12th of November to little Evelyn last year, hence why I haven't been able to write anything until now. In fact, as I write this my tireless partner Leo is jigging said baby on the sofa in an attempt to get her to sleep whilst she mithers relentlessly. Motherhood is tiresome, a lot more tiring than I had prepared myself for! Despite her being an incredibly chilled baby that has currently taken to sleeping through the night and was in a nice, easy routine of getting up at 12, 4 and 8 every night before that; I have no idea how parents with difficult infants deal with getting up screaming every two hours or those that struggle to breastfeed or even feed at all.



Despite the inevitable rocky road of settling into parenthood, we've hit the ground running and so far are dealing with looking after a squirming, shitting, miserable little retch who is - at times - an absolute joy and I wouldn't trade my new life for the world.

This is how she likes to sleep. Seriously.

I didn't however start this post to preach to people about how great or how difficult it is to be a new mum - there are thousands of articles about that - I did begin writing though to talk about what's been happening in the new year, hopes and aspirations and what I plan to do with the rest of my life.

...Or at least the next few months.

For February, I am overwhelmingly excited about going to Center Parcs to see Leo's enormous family and to show off our spawn to them. As she is the first grandchild on his side (number six on mine), she has been cooed over and passed around more times than I can count between his extended family already, and I'm sure that's set to continue in the coming years. I'm more excited about actually going to Center Parcs to use the facilities and to enjoy being in the company of Leo's family. I'll have to not go mad with the Prosecco this time but I'm very much looking forward to swimming in the sub-tropical paradise and hopefully even taking the little one into the baby pool for her first ever swim.

It'd better bloody fit her.

I've also taken to crocheting again now that Evelyn is getting into a bit of a makeshift routine. I just recently put the finishing touches onto a poncho for when she turns one and I'm pretty darn pleased with it. I'd like to do bigger projects than just hats and booties which is what I've been getting familiar with whilst I practised various stitches and remembering to count stitches so my work doesn't go wonky.

All in all, a good start to the year. :)