Suicide is rarely a topic in games, but in this scene you can feel Jodie’s desperation. “I’ve been running for weeks, and for what?” she cries. Aiden, her mysterious spiritual friend, saves Jodie, but she’s none too pleased. But after finally recovering, it’s not too long before Jodie tries to kill herself by stepping off a highway overpass (You also have the option of not trying to jump). Jodie’s eventually saved by Stan (played by Eric Winter), a kind-hearted homeless man who nurses her back to health. She hangs up - and with little energy left, collapses on the street. Despite Nathan’s pleas, she doesn’t give up many details about her situation.
She calls a friend, possibly her only friend, Nathan Dawkins (Dafoe). She struggles to get up, and slowly makes her way to a phone. It seems she’s been homeless for a while now. We find Jodie sleeping outside on the city street. It seems Cage’s ambitions of delivering a story cinematically through games have come true. But, for the most part, Beyond: Two Souls presents a strong story that’s well written, well acted, and well directed. Sure, you’ve got occasional flashing buttons for quick time events (in gaming parlance, these are buttons you hit to complete specific actions during cut scenes) and a disembodied entity that lets you manipulate the game’s world.
Jodie’s life is in shambles, and you’re joining her on a journey of self-discovery. She also has a close relationship to a scientist played by Willem Dafoe ( Spider-Man, Antichrist). The PlayStation 3 title stars Ellen Page ( Inception, Juno) as Jodie, a young girl with a mysterious connection to an entity she calls Aiden. Forgive its flaws and Beyond offers a truly special story-telling experience that you’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere else.Įditor's Note: The above review received minor edits for clarity and consistency following its publication.Judging from the 35 minutes of footage I saw last night at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival (available in its entirety below), Beyond’s gameplay can easily be enjoyed as a dramatic film, as well as a thrilling game experience. Even though this game is rife with innovation, the narrative is still heavy-handed, and that ultimately means that you need to suspend disbelief and fully invest in the story to get the most out of the game. Beyond offers myriad lessons for other developers to follow and improve upon. It tells its story in a unique way, it disregards many gaming tropes that we've come to accept as 'standard'. The game, of course, doesn't let you in on its origin story right off, and so you'll latch onto the small amounts of personality that they let slip in order to put the puzzle together yourself.īut gameplay isn’t the driving factor of Beyond, which-for better or worse-rejects many traditional constraints of video games to push the boundaries of what a game can be. Yet while his his gameplay is lacking, you'll find yourself oddly drawn to the spirit. You may even sometimes wonder why the scene was stopped just so you can complete a single arbitrary task. Because Beyond leans so heavily on the cutscenes and narrative, you’ll never be truly challenged by the gameplay. He can go through walls, hit objects, kill or control other people in general, he serves as the puzzle-solving aspect of the game. ".one of the most amazing aspects of Beyond: the way it seamlessly edits together its narrative modules."Īiden, on the other hand, is a first-person experience where you use the thumbsticks to fly him around. Each option fits well into the flow, and once you choose which path you'll go down, Ellen Page will deliver the line so well that it will feel as though you chose the only correct answer.
Many times during dialogue, the conversation will pause and you will get options for what Jodie can say next. Yet one the other end of the spectrum: the choices you can make inside of each conversation are fantastic and robust. By the fifth time Jodie gets knocked out by the butt of a machine gun-and doesn’t even acknowledge it after coming around-you start understanding that this game leans much too heavily on suspension of disbelief. They say things and move to action in ways that are unnatural their motivations are sometimes questionable, and emotional scenes often fall flat because you don’t feel a character’s actions are justified. Jodie herself as a character is very well done, yet the rest of the cast just wasn't as filled out. Its execution of this narrative, though, is uneven. "Ultimately your story as Jodie is one of a search for happiness."īecause Beyond is a project that attempts to bridge films and video games, Quantic Dream has placed a far greater emphasis on story than on gameplay.