Beyond: Two Souls

Developed by Quantic Dream, Beyond: Two Souls is simply a mess: its narrative doesn’t work, thanks to a disconnected structure and shallow, boring characters, and its gameplay even less, offering a tiny, inconsequential level of control over the events.

The protagonist, Jodie Holmes, played by Elliot Page, has spent her entire life in the company of a spiritual entity named Aiden. Harassed by her father and shunned by society, Jodie ends up growing up in a laboratory, studied by the kind scientists Nathan Dawkins (Willem Dafoe) and Cole Freeman (Kadeem Hardison). However, when the CIA demands her help, Jodie realizes that she is only being used by the government and runs away.

The first big problem in Beyond: Two Souls is its structure. The story in the game is not told chronologically, being full of flashbacks and flashforwards. At one point, we are following a teenage Jodie having difficulties socializing at a party, at the next, we are watching her first meeting with Nathan, and then, observing Jodie’s training at the CIA. But there is no thread sewing the order of the episodes together: if the training sequence came before the interview with Nathan, for example, or even before the party, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. The impression the game gives is that the writer and director David Cage wrote each episode in isolation, threw them all into a jar, shook it, and drew the order.

The negative consequences of this random structure are numerous. First of all, there is the fact that the inciting incident, which marks the end of the first act of a story, becomes difficult to pinpoint, harming both the pacing of the game and the establishment of a narrative arc. After all, it becomes tricky to mark the development of a character when their journey is all over the place.

Second, there is an obvious lack of cohesion. If one event of a story doesn’t lead to the next – chronologically, thematically or following any other kind of method – its foundations crumble under the weight of the randomness of its form. A scene is much less impactful in isolation than when it’s connected to others that give it more meaning. The structure of a story – the way everything connects – is usually the secret that makes it work. In Beyond: Two Souls, because the placement of Jodie’s episodes doesn’t make a lick of sense, the dramatic force of each scene is diluted.

This lack of cohesion leads to other problems as well. When Jodie is living on the streets with beggars, for example, she asks one of her colleagues to hold her hand, which leads her to incorporate the spirit of his dead wife and talk to him in the girl’s voice. This moment is surprising for the player who, until then, did not know that she had this power. But the story doesn’t frame it as a revelation, a twist, or a big moment. Without any previous build-up and not being in any way a logical extension of what has already been established for the character, Jodie’s power sounds arbitrary in the scene: a rabbit pulled out of the hat at the last minute to meet the needs of the script.

Later on, there’s finally the moment when Jodie discovers she is able to communicate with the dead, but now this scene is redundant because we already have that information. In other words, the structure disconnects us from the protagonist’s point of view, diminishing the impact of both scenes. If those events had occurred chronologically, the player would have made the discovery together with the protagonist, strengthening the bond between them. On the same token, in the scene with the beggar, the player would have paid attention to the drama of the conversation itself and not to the existence of Jodie’s power.

Not that the story of Beyond: Two Souls would be exceptional had it been structured correctly. One of the game’s biggest chapters, called Navaho, has Jodie getting lost in a desert, meeting a family plagued by indigenous spirits, and performing a ritual to save everyone. It’s a chapter that is as disconnected from the main plot as it seems, and it’s also one that contains dialogues so cringeworthy that not even Page can save them: “The fifth talisman!” she exclaims after discovering the object needed to defeat the ghosts.

The issue here is that the game takes itself too seriously for the absurd scenes and silly dialogue it contains. Near the end, for example, a character manages to escape from a submarine by swimming, wearing a t-shirt, in the Arctic. In another moment, Jodie fights karate with several policemen on top of a moving train. So, when Cage tries to sell a melancholic, serious tone, we simply can’t buy it.

Owner of an uneven career at best (he directed Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, games with their fair share of both virtues and problems), Cage here can’t get anything right. Not even the protagonist in Beyond: Two Souls is convincing. Jodie is a girl tormented by Aiden’s constant presence because the spirit has never allowed her to have a normal life. That’s basically Jodie. How does working for the CIA influence her arc? It doesn’t. One mission has her stealing data kept in a vault, another, assassinating an African leader, and it all means nothing. Her story is all over the place without a clue about what it wants to be.

The climax itself involves the CIA, so one would expect it to be important to the character’s development. However, apart from the teenage rebellion against it – “Nobody tells me what to do” – and the villainous one-dimensionality with which the American institution is represented, there is no other element left in their relationship. There is a great disconnect, therefore, between the protagonist’s main conflict and the events forming her story, with one failing to complement the other.

Adventure games are all about their atmosphere and story since regarding gameplay they’re seldom deep. This makes the game’s failures in this regard even more pronounced. But even when we look at the gameplay here we find that Beyond: Two Souls fails at the little that it sets out to do.

It borrows Heavy Rain‘s Quick Time Events, but nullifies what they had going for them – branching paths and consequences – by removing precisely the consequences of failing them. Here, your mistakes are computed together, not in isolation. If the player misses three commands in a fight, there is no penalty for each one. If they somehow manage to get them all wrong, it’s possible that a different scene will occur, but this scene still offers nothing new and is ignored by the rest of the story.

While trying to escape some pursuers on a train, for example, Jodie can be captured three times. Not only does she escape all three times in the same way (Aiden possesses a guard and lets her escape), leading the player to question the ability of the cops to learn from their mistakes, but in the end, this also means that she escapes anyway, saying the same one-liner to the same guy. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you fail or not, if you get captured or not, since the result will be exactly the same: it doesn’t change the events, characters, motivation, or even the lines of dialogue.

There is one scene in this chapter that sums up the entire gameplay in Beyond: Two Souls. Jodie steals a motorcycle to escape some guards and a helicopter. However, if you let go of the analog stick and just keep pressing the button to speed up, there are no consequences to your actions because Jodie will still turn when she needs to by hitting the invisible walls on the edges of the track.

Even in the rare cases when the result is indeed different, it remains insignificant. One of the first major choices is whether or not Jodie should take revenge on the idiot teenagers that locked her inside a closet and went out to eat some cake without her. Should the player choose violence, the game falls into a very light version of Carrie, with Aiden slamming the refrigerator door in a kid’s face and making chandeliers fall. However, this decision has no lasting effect throughout the story: those teenagers are promptly forgotten and the impact of this event on her personality is null. Only one event has repercussions afterward (an attempted rape), and even then, minimal ones despite the gravity of the situation.

In addition to Jodie, the player can also control Aiden. However, the spirit’s actions are predetermined by the game. There are guards he can only possess, some he can only suffocate, while others he can only distract, with no indication of the reasons for the difference. There’s no space for the player to plan, experiment, or think. It’s arbitrary and limited.

The distance the spirit can get from Jodie also varies according to the needs of the moment: when she needs to discover an empty house, he can travel a dozen meters away from her. But when Jodie is in a desert, Aiden cannot move inches away from her. There’s no consistency.

Beyond: Two Souls is a game with very few positives. Apart from the performances and the animation, there aren’t many commendable elements left here: David Cage delivers a mess of a story, an uninteresting protagonist, and inconsequential gameplay.

May 04, 2021.

Review originally published in Portuguese on April 25, 2017.