Quantic Dream has a very good relationship with me, I loved both Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain (I am still yet to play Omikron) so Beyond was high on my most wanted for 2013 list. However as the release came closer and closer the excitement began to fade and when the games first reviews came in I was disheartened to say the least with middling scores more or less across the board.
Luckily though, Beyond is still something special and despite not being Quanitc's best title so far it is still worth going out of your way to play.
Jodie Holmes is a young girl with a very special friend named Aiden. Aiden is a paranormal entity from a place called the Infraworld, the place our souls go when we die. Aiden has been with Jodie since the day she was born and as a result she has never had a normal life. When her parents gave her to the Department of Paranormal Activity (DPA), Jodie spends much of her childhood and adolescent years in solitary confinement, being tested on and kept away from the world in hope that we could understand what happens to us after we die.
The game takes place over roughly 15 years starting with an 8 year old Jodie and ending with a bold, strong yet damaged young woman. In these 15 years we see Jodie's life unfold from scared little girl, to teenage angst, to attempted suicide and finding love as well as much much more.
Beyond's story is one of the biggest things in the game up for critical debate. Though the story is very well written, engaging and probably one of the best supernatural stories around it has been poorly directed by creator David Cage and instead of playing out much like a normal story would, it takes the Pulp Fiction style of storytelling and fragments Jodie's life into pieces and giving them back to the viewer in a non-chronological order. The game opens after the end of the game and quickly begins interchanging between the key moments in Jodie's life.
If you are going to tell a story in a non-chronological fashion, by all means do so as it provides something fresh and quite often unique to a story. However by doing so you are putting yourself at risk of what Beyond suffers from most, having bad pacing.
The game kicks off at a steady pace but quickly escalates into a good hour or so of exciting action before dropping back into a lull for a few hours and then going back into a fast paced nature for a bit. This happens around three times in the entirety of the game and it really doesn't do it any favours because had the game been done chronologically, it would have had a solid pacing curve that would have done the game justice and not had the potential to confuse its audience.
It also has a problem of showing you significant events that have no meaning to you at that particular moment, but then become of major importance later on in the game when you see an earlier part of Jodie's life wherein something happens and it suddenly becomes clear, giving you no time to dwell on the impact of the event that happened earlier on.
Beyond's gameplay is as standard for a Quanitc Dream game. If you are unfamiliar with this formula allow me to explain. David Cage, creator of every Quantic game to date doesn't create a game, instead he directs a film. Quantic games are coined 'Interactive Dramas', essentially films that allow you to participate in the action. Much of the time in Beyond you will be watching cutscenes and gameplay is always kept to a bare minimum. You have the ability to move Jodie around environments and interact with certain objects in the form of short QTE's, but that's about it.
The way this is handled is very different compared to Heavy Rain though, Heavy rain's screen would be for the most part littered with on screen prompts for QTE's and more often than not had rather complex button sequences for nearly every action. In Beyond it has been simplified to the point of near non-existence.
To interact with an object you push the right stick in the direction of the white orb on screen, when required to do a QTE it is often a button mashing/controller shaking affair with only one button being required for use at a time. Combat is handled much like interacting, you push the right stick in the direction Jodie's body is moving on-screen, if you are too slow or do the wrong direction you will get hit, however unlike in Heavy Rain where you had the fear of dying if you failed a combat sequence, in Beyond you simply stop fighting and let Aiden take care of the bad guys for you, plus being able to tell which way to push the thumbstick can at times be rather difficult to tell.
In Beyond you can also play as Aiden to solve problems that Jodie cannot solve alone. For instance you can open certain doors, attack enemies or complete Aiden specific objectives such as healing an injured person by using Aiden, Aiden controls much like the monitor in the Halo games, with the left stick to move and right stick to control direction, L1 is interact and you then use the thumbsticks as directed.
Much of Beyond's gameplay is repeated much more than it has any right to be, though that is what happens when you have such simple & so few game mechanics. This could lead to some players getting tired of its repetitive nature.
Beyond is undecided on its visual quality. Some parts of the game, mainly in the latter half, are gorgeous and extremely well detailed. However some parts clearly have not had the same effort put into them making textures look ugly, colours bland and character models look misshapen & jagged. The motion capture is for the most part very good, however there are often cases of some blocky movements and the lip-sync being off by a considerable amount. These problems do not occur in the higher quality parts of the game (such as those I mentioned toward the end of the game) but they litter the place during the lower quality parts giving the overall product and unfinished feel.
The audio standard is excellent however, voice acting from the likes of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe really do give the game a helping hand in its times of need, the soundtrack is equally amazing and has some real gems in there worth listening to even outside of the game.
In conclusion...Beyond: Two Souls is not the game is should have been. It feels at times unfinished and poorly pieced together. However this shouldn't stop you from playing the game whether that be buying it, renting it, borrowing it, whatever. The game deserves to be played and you will miss out on one hell of an experience if you do let it pass you by, but I cannot say that you should buy a PS3 just to play the game as I said with Heavy Rain.
Beyond Two Souls – 8/10
+Amazing Story
+Great Audio & Visuals (At Times)
-Bad Storytelling
-Repetitive
