After playing a bit of Heavy Rain, I would often get on my phone and call a friend who was playing it at the same time. After verifying how far in we were (speaking in vague terms, so as not to spoil anything), we ravenously compared notes on the latest choices we’d made, why, and what happened as a result. (“How did you cut off your finger?”) I was nearly as excited to find out what my friends had done differently as I was to progress further in the game. It’s an urge I get most any time I’ve gotten through a game that confronts me with a meaningful decision.
Beyond: Two Souls never once provoked this feeling in me.
I could be pretty well within my rights to just stop talking right there, because if an experience that is principally about (presumably) making choices and facing the consequences fails to present really intriguing choices, than does it matter much what else it may or may not accomplish? And Beyond: Two Souls is far from perfect otherwise. This isn’t going to be one of those times where I say, “It may have missed this mark, but it’ll totally surprise you with how awesome this other thing is!” It would probably be kinder to just stop, tell you that you should probably skip this one, and leave it at that.
Can you tell I’m trying to put this off? Because the thing is, I really like Quantic Dream. Heavy Rain (which, it seems, cannot be legally mentioned these days without some permutation of the phrase, “for all its flaws”) remains one of my favorite experiences of this console generation. Before that, I devoured Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit if you’re outside the US). I think Heavy Rain is a pretty important game, whatever might be said of its quality. Beyond: Two Souls could be an important game if it predated Heavy Rain, but Heavy Rain is the stronger of the two, as an experience in general and as an exemplar of the (slowly) emerging genre that exists somewhere between film and games. Games like Mass Effect and, of course, The Walking Dead have taken branching narrative far in recent years, and to wonder if that makes Heavy Rain somewhat irrelevant would not be entirely wrong; but those titles work within established game genres, with all the barriers to entry that come with them. Heavy Rain is a game that captivated my parents. The best audience for Quantic Dream’s games aren’t even necessarily playing them because they aren’t gamers. I think the only reason for Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls to be on the PS3 (or any game console) is that there really isn’t an alternative.
But I digress.
Enough Stalling
So. Beyond: Two Souls is the story of Jodie (actually played by Ellen Page, and not just a remarkable likeness), a girl who, for her entire life, has been bound to an entity she calls Aiden. No one else can sense Aiden, although he can effect the physical world, making things go bump in the night and, occasionally, outright attacking or possessing people. Jodie can exercise some control over him, but he’s not a slave to her wishes. Jodie’s connection to Aiden gets her involved in paranormal research, secret government projects, Native American rituals, covert operations, and more.
Players take control of both Jodie and Aiden, and in many scenes can switch between the two at will (though frequently progress can only really be made with one or the other). Jodie wanders around the environment in a pretty standard 3D manner: gone is the weirdness of Heavy Rain‘s control scheme, replaced with a more familiar two-stick (one for moving, one for camera) configuration. A little white dot appears on or near objects Jodie can interact with, replacing the context-sensitive buttons, and now only proximity and a flick of the right stick in the dot’s general direction is necessary to do stuff. It’s an attempt at simplifying an already simple system, and for people unfamiliar with the layout of a PlayStation controller it’s a nice alternative. I think some of the objective was also to make the prompts less intrusive, but I found the little dots to frequently be hard to notice – certainly harder than, say, a hovering triangle icon.
Aiden flies freely in the environment, and can go straight through most solid matter (until the game decides he can’t) as long as he doesn’t get too far from Jodie. Interacting with objects and people as Aiden involves holding L1 and then manipulating the sticks in a variety of ways, not all of which are intuitive; experienced gamers won’t be too lost with him, though less experienced players will probably have a bit of trouble.
Action, when it happens, mostly involves Jodie, and is driven by a decent idea that ultimately ends up kind of dull. Throughout a scene – say, a fight – the action goes into slow motion, and the player needs to flick the right stick in the general direction that Jodie is moving. It’s not too picky a system, and it has some challenge because it’s not always obvious where Jodie’s headed, but compared to the (more complicated, granted) more diverse interactions of Heavy Rain‘s action sequences, Beyond‘s feel dull and repetitive. Sometimes Aiden has to help Jodie fight something off, but his interactions work the same in a tense situation as they do anywhere else – pull back the sticks and release – and it makes disintegrating vengeful otherworldly entities absolutely humdrum.
The controls all seem to be about accessibility, right down to the fact you can play with your smartphone instead, if you like. There’s a free app download that will sync up with the game as long as your phone and PS3 are on the same wi-fi with no trouble and no searching through the PS3’s system settings to pair up the devices. Jodie controls more or less the same with a touch device, while Aiden is a little more limited, moving from point to point in an environment rather than freely. Two players can play, as well, one controlling Jodie and the other controlling Aiden, though they still have to switch off who’s active.
But then, if you’re coming to a Quantic Dream game expecting a deep gameplay experience, you should probably rethink whatever decisions have brought you to this point in your life. What you’re probably here for is the story experience. And that’s…
Well, here’s the thing.
Beyond: Two Souls has an interesting enough setup. There’s tension between Jodie and Aiden, a sort of familial love that doesn’t preclude Aiden ruining Jodie’s life on occasion. There’s a mix of horror and sci-fi that won’t hit everyone the right way, but it’s not a complete miss. Oh, right, and the story is told completely non-linearly. As in, not in chronological order. As in, many parts of the game which happen later in Jodie’s life come earlier in the game. Which kind of gets in the way of your decisions having effects much outside a single chapter and the very end. It’s a perplexing choice. A game that exists to give players choices about how to proceed is by nature highly causal, but to arrange the story in this way most of the major beats are already decided. And this story isn’t really helped along by its non-linearity. The reasoning behind it, introduced in the ending (or at least the one I got), is flimsy, and not remotely worth the sacrifices this structure must have necessitated. This direction doesn’t seem to have dramatically improved the pacing, or introduced extra mysteries, and what little worked better this way could have easily been done via a flashback in an otherwise linear game (a technique Heavy Rain used).
Chapters hop between Jodie’s childhood, to her teenage years, to several phases of her adult life. Some are very short, perhaps centering around a single conversation or event, while others are lengthy affairs that will take a good hour or so to complete. One chapter is even internally non-linear, slightly. Because why not? Some are slice of life scenes, while others involve Jodie saving lives and fighting monsters, more or less. As you might expect, the former is where Beyond works much better. These scenes sometimes offer lots of little, reasonably inconsequential choices: one of the best sees Jodie preparing for a coworker in whom she’s romantically interested to come to her apartment. She’s on a deadline. Does she tidy up? What does she wear? Does she make dinner or just order pizza? What sort of music should she play? And Aiden isn’t fully in support of this relationship. It works, much better than delving into some secret government lab where all hell has literally broken loose. There’s just not enough of it.
“I had to run. I had no choice.”
The fundamental problem in Beyond is that the decisions feel, in the end, very light. The significant ones are already made, and you’ll know what Jodie’s going to do before you actually see her do it, thanks to the non-linear storytelling. A handful of major choices do come back later, but not many, and none of them are terribly compelling, and some effects happen because you thought you were making a different choice, which is…I hesitate to throw the term “dishonest” around, but it is, at least, cheap. Further, there’s often no half-measure. When cornered, Jodie sometimes calls on Aiden to help (or outright rescue) her, or to go all Carrie on some mean teenagers. Using Aiden can be entertaining because there are sometimes several approaches, but it’s easy to go farther than you want and realize you can’t backpedal.
One scene in particular demonstrated both these problems, wherein a teenage Jodie wants to go out with friends but isn’t allowed. If you choose to sneak out anyway (and why wouldn’t you?), Jodie ends up in a situation that will effect her for the rest of the game in significant ways, and which is (from what I can tell online) inescapable if you make the decision to sneak out. Aiden has to come to her rescue, and if you choose to possess a certain character in this scene, Aiden will have the chance to grab a shotgun. Now, the people he’s chasing away are not overly savory sorts, but they don’t necessarily deserve to be brutally murdered, but if you grab the gun that’s what you’re going to do. You can’t decide to put it down and back away. You can’t decide to fire a warning shot to scare them. Once you’ve got it in hand, you are shooting three people. That’s it.
It’s times like these (which are frequent) that made me wish Aiden was an NPC. He occasionally is treated as such, when his desires run counter to Jodie’s, and these are some of the best scenes for their relationship. I realize that making him playable was a way of varying the gameplay and introducing puzzles of a sort, but I think, narratively speaking, I would have been much more engaged if I knew an invisible psychopath was hanging over my shoulder waiting to snap, possibly against a character I cared about.
There are a lot of missteps, and it’s disappointing. What Beyond at least gets mostly right is its presentation. Ellen Page does a great job with what she’s given, and Willem DaFoe, making his return to video games after being the villain in the under-appreciated James Bond vehicle Everything or Nothing, is pretty good as paranormal researcher Nathan Dawkins, though he’s not given as much to work with. The power of performance capture has, perhaps, been better employed, but Beyond is still impressive.
The trailer contains a line of dialogue: “The hardest part isn’t what I’ve done; it’s never knowing what’s going to happen next.” But all too often in Beyond, we know what happens next because we’ve already played that. It dwells too much on looking back – lingering throughout the game on Jodie’s childhood, which get less interesting the more we know about her later relationship with Aiden – and not enough on moving forward, even to the point of foreshadowing big, would-make-sense-to-be-a-major-part-of-the-game events that don’t get around to happening within the scope of this title (including at least one striking shot from the trailer). It seems conflicted about how to approach its themes and characters, and consequently there’s a lot that feels undeveloped – a romance, a few mysteries, and a heap of mythology that probably would’ve strengthened the experience.
Beyond: Two Souls has all the components of a defining experience of this console generation. But this time Quantic Dream’s reach exceeded their grasp.
Communicate with the spirit of the author at dix@tap-repeatedly.com.
Ouch. I had every intention of getting this on Day One, but real life intervened, and practically everything I’ve read since – including this great review – makes me glad that I missed out.
Like you, Dix, I consider Heavy Rainforallitsflaws really important, a game that made me think and feel within a context I normally might not. With Beyond it sounds like David Cage & Co have moved away from most of the things that made Heavy Rain a valuable game.
Playing Beyond at Eurogamer, my feelings were mixed, but I put a lot of it down to the Expo floor being a terrible environment to learn a game like this. Now, with your descriptions of the oversimplification (and my memories of control problems as Aiden), I realize that much of it was more inherent to the game than the noisy crowded hall.
I really like Quantic Dream as well. They’ve never hit one out of the park. With luck they’ll take notes from pieces like this and revisit what they’ve done right in past work, so perhaps with their next game, we won’t have to suffix every mention with acknowledgement of flaws.
When playing a Quantic Dream game I can’t help but feel equal parts intrigued and frustrated. Neither the story nor the gameplay is strong enough to carry the other. I do know that, given what they’re going for, a better story would go much farther than better mechanics.
However important their games may or may not have been, I think it’s time to declare that Cage is just too uneven and unfocused as a story-teller and get some better writers. I also don’t think some more traditional game mechanics would detract from their vision.
I will be skipping this one.
It’s always a shame to read a really good review and be left disappointed. Feels harsh on the review!
Sounds like I’ll not bother with Beyond, which is rather a shame as I have only played a little Heavy Rain (at a friend’s house, when on holiday, before I owned a PS3) and can’t really see myself going back to it at this point, as I found it didn’t bite. After bouncing off Fahrenheit some years back as well, I wonder if I will ever find one of these interesting-sounding games interesting enough to play.
When I was playing Beyond: Two Souls I thought about sending you a message, Dix, asking if I was crazy for not loving the game. If there was something I was missing from this latest Quantic Dream venture. As it stands our thoughts are nearly identical on this game. Beyond: Two Souls was a big let down for me largely due to the element of choice and consequences being taken away. I immediately jumped back into Heavy Rain after finishing it, wanting to see other arcs of the story. I’ve got no desire to do the same for Beyond.
I hadn’t thought about how much they railroad your actions (When I went psycho with Aiden I went all out without a second thought, because I’m a bitch like that) but you’re absolutely right about the game committing you to a set of button presses and actions without the ability to reconsider and without variety.
Well, at least it’s pretty.
I think the question of mechanics is a tricky one for Quantic Dream. I do feel like their efforts here were well-intentioned but overdid it…even playing on the “I play video games often” difficulty, things were super easy relative to that difficulty in Heavy Rain. Then again, in Heavy Rain, the “I barely play video games” difficulty was still super hard for people who, well, hadn’t played video games. (I witnessed this firsthand.)
I think what Quantic’s getting at – or what they ought to be getting at, anyway – is a sort of mature version of the egalitarian experience Nintendo stumbles around trying to create. (I mean “mature” more in the sense of content than complexity.) Frankly, I wish there were more people working on this area, this realm of not-quite-games that are more interactive drama than anything and have a reasonably low barrier for entry. My parents (who are casual gamers at best) loved Heavy Rain as an experience despite all its flaws, and despite being terrible at the skill-based portions of it. There’s a market there, and we need more than Quantic Dream exploring it significantly – both because Quantic Dream clearly has significant and consistent flaws in their work, and because even if they were perfect they can only do so much on their own.
There are some great companies working in the narrative space with more traditional gameplay (Naughty Dog and Telltale being recent luminaries), and they have better writers than does Quantic. But they also are fundamentally, at least right now, still making games. And they know how to do that. Quantic Dream is more using game technology to make something different that fills what I think is a clear void in the market, and it’s worth exploring.
@Kristine – some times I didn’t mind or even think about it, because it made sense in context and even though I played Jodie as not a murderous bitch, I played Aiden a bit more loose – for drama, you know. I mean, I burned down a house! I stabbed some punk! IN ONE SCENE!
The time that it really really made me take notice – I had noticed before, but the first time it really frustrated me – was…do spoiler tags work in comments? I’m gonna see. If they don’t, know that there are spoilers below.
In the scene I allude to in the article when Jodie nearly gets raped, scaring the guys is a given. You’ve got to intercede on Jodie’s behalf. (I’m not sure who wouldn’t, but I think the game will probably wait for you to do something indefinitely.) So there’s three guys: two patrons and the bartender. One patron in particular is the perpetrator of the crime – the other, to my recollection (or, at least, notice) more or less observes, as does the bartender, which doesn’t make them great human beings in anything for not interfering. The bartender did, to his credit, try to get Jodie to leave when she first showed up. So I’m like, okay, I scare them, they try to escape. I notice I can possess the bartender. This gives me (not surprisingly) a new perspective which shows the shotgun he keeps behind the counter. At that point I wanted to back out and see if I had other options first, just to see, but I couldn’t.
So I take the gun – I figure, this is fine, I’m cool with this, maybe I’ll kill the would-be rapist, maybe I won’t, whatever. But my first instinct was to fire a warning shot or something. Scare them further. Couldn’t do that. Couldn’t put the gun down. And, oh yeah, I couldn’t choose who to shoot first, either – I had to shoot the buddy before the rapist. So clearly I couldn’t just shoot one of them. I would have to shoot them both.
So okay, I do that. I can’t not, anyway, and I probably wouldn’t have killed the buddy if given the choice – he’s a terrible person, but does he deserve to die? So then I’ve got the gun, the possessed bartender, and two bodies. And I’m like, well, the bartender did try to get Jodie to leave. He might also be kind of a terrible person, but he did seem to recognize she shouldn’t be here and no good would come of it, and at least initially tried, in his way, to do the right thing. So let’s just put the gun down and decide that scaring the shit out of him and murdering two of his patrons (and possibly friends) with his shotgun, by his hands, will teach him his lesson. (Also possibly ruin his life, because “I was possessed by a ghost” is unlikely to fly in court when he’s charged with a double homicide.) So I try to put the gun down. But no. Can’t do that. I think I tried to go back to Jodie as well. Couldn’t do that, either. Nope, the only button I could press was the trigger, one last time. Because two bodies weren’t enough.
Okay, rant over.
All the negative reviews of Beyond including this one bring such disappointment. I was looking forward to it immensely; it seems not to be worth getting right now (or ever maybe :sadface: ).
It looks so good in trailers! Blerg grumble tears etc.
I think it’s a good point that there should be more players in the “not quite a game” category. My comment about Quantic Dream just using more traditional mechanics could go the other way as well. Or in other words, either make the mechanics more “gamey” or simplify them even more. Either way I think their games would be better for it.
I read a lot about how Quantic Dream, well specifically David Cage, really just wants to be a film maker. I don’t see it that way. With today’s technology, even someone with modest means can make films. So I see no barrier for Cage to just make films if that’s what he really wants. I think what he has been creating is exactly what he wants to be creating, namely games which blur the lines between game and cinema. It’s the execution that’s somewhat lacking.
Yeah, I tend to think the “game maker who really just wants to make movies” complaint – which is, of course, leveled not just at Cage and Quantic Dream, but just about any game developer that includes a large number of cutscenes – is a kind of lazy bit of criticism and a fundamental misunderstanding of the material, usually. I really hate when I see that in “professional” reviews of things because it just shouts, “I really haven’t given this much thought!”
Anyway.
I enjoyed your thoughts on the game. I watched a good portion of the story while some people were playing, and it felt really unnapproachable. The world is confusing and doesn’t clearly establish its themes and the dialogue is more like a Godzilla movie than the deep heartfelt sentiment they’re trying to convey.
I think that the gap in the market has to do with how much agency I really want as a player, and Quantic Dream seems to understand that. At many times, I am simply too exhausted to play a challenging game, so the more passive gameplay experience is relaxing. Unfortunately, the writing in Quantic Dream’s games is so bad I can’t engage with them. I like the idea of Quantic Dream dumping David Cage’s writing, but it seems he has a somehwhat fixed position in their creative process and it’s unlikely.
I don’t mind Cage as a creative lead of sorts, because I have liked the initial concepts and some aspects of all of Quantic’s titles; and in many ways Cage is Quantic Dream. But I think he could benefit substantially from a writing team.
Really, I think it’s the rare major media property that can’t benefit substantially from a writing team over a singular author, especially one with a great amount of focus on the story, a branching narrative, and, as is the case with Beyond, a bit of genre-hopping scene to scene.
Though I haven’t done the Googling to really be doing more than talking out of my ass on this one, I’d go so far as to say that the majority of games lauded for their writing have multiple writers, especially when you delve into nonlinearity. (Mass Effect certainly had a few.) I know The Last of Us to be an exception to this, though it’s a linear story and thus much more within reach of a single writer.
I’ve never liked a single this company has done. Cage’s philosophy is simply not one I am interested in. Glad I won’t be missing anything!
You are right about a lot of things. I remember that scene in the bar, possessing the bartender to grab the shotgun and shoot the two patrons. I did not want the bartender to shoot himself after offing the other two, and I stood staring at the screen for several minutes before I realized the game would not continue until I made him shoot himself in the head. I was disgruntled.
However, you’re wrong about this chapter being a completely linear track. There are a few ways to avoid being attacked in the bar altogether. Read this blog post and you might be surprised at how much content is hidden because the game gravitates all players toward the same choices, even though others exist: http://playersdelight.blogspot.com/2013/10/beyond-two-souls-most-unique-feature-is.html