Beyond: Two Souls

[IamLEAM1983]

Quantic Dream is a bit of an odd bird, as far as game development studios go. Most of everyone tends to focus on the gameplay, some devs have a yen for putting together engaging plots, but few among them are characterized by the belief that a more directed experience allows for deeper emotional impact. A lot of what they do reminds me of the FMV era of the early nineties, in which games tended to be structured as video-form Choose Your Adventure stories. They're light on gameplay, big on characterization; but also big on the Tech sector.

As designed by David Cage (AKA David Gruttola), a France native with whom I share my birthday, QD games tend to focus on Quick-Time Events and excessively light adventure game-like portions. The most action-heavy game they've released, Omikron : The Nomad Soul (1999), was still rather light for a third-person action-adventure title. You'd get QTEs for action sequences, and the occasional first-person view during gun-oriented setpieces. The game that followed, Indigo Prophecy (2005) functioned almost solely with those timed button presses, while the games that would follow would only reinforce that impression.

The end result is that playing a Quantic Dream release feels like watching an excessively pretty and CGI-powered version of Dragon's Lair. You're not doing much of anything with your chosen controller, with the most involved of actions trying particularly hard to emulate the feel of carrying out mundane actions. QD's stuff feels as close to the mythical idea of the “non-game” as could possibly be, with its structure being so unfailingly light that non-gamers will breeze through it with the same ease as the lifelong joystick-twiddlers.

I know it probably sounds a bit esoteric on paper, but it really is fairly simple. Let's say you walk up to a kitchen counter and are told that your character feels like having eggs for breakfast. Your screen might suddenly show button prompts that are aligned with surrounding objects. Press L2 to open your fridge, X to take out some eggs, Square to turn your stove on – so on and so forth. It all works on the conceit that being forced to carry your character through minutia, both during humdrum stuff and life-changing events, will foster a deeper connection with your protagonist of the moment.

The question is, does it work? Well, that depends. On what? On you, mostly. David Cage has a thing for writing slightly clunky narratives with a strong focus on drama that might come across as maudlin to some. Some of his leading figures struck chord with me, such as Heavy Rain's Scott Shelby, but others left me cold. That would be the honor bestowed upon Lucas Kane, of Indigo Prophecy fame.

In Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic's latest offering, Cage offers himself some serious star power. The game follows the misadventures of Jodie Holmes, played by Ellen Page, as well as Doctor Nathan Dawkins, played by Willem Dafoe. Her story is presented in a non-linear fashion, which means you'll juggle back and forth between various periods of her life. He, on the other hand, only intervenes in specific circumstances and spends a good chunk of the game being notably absent from Jodie's life. A third character of note, the invisible and intangible force which Jodie names Aiden, is central to the game's mechanics as well as the plot proper.

The hook is that Jodie was born a very peculiar child. According to tests she passes at a fairly young age, she displays psychometric, psychokinetic and telepathic abilities. What's actually going on is that Jodie is spiritually tethered to Aidan, who seems able to relay his own sights, sensations and experiences to the conveniently incarnate young girl. Whatever Aiden sees, based on where you choose to go as the bodiless entity-slash-camera, Jodie also sees. Whatever Aiden interacts with or disturbs, others assume Jodie manipulated with her mind. She's felt Aiden's presence next to her for her whole life, and tends to relate to him as if he were another person. You'll occasionally hear bodiless and wordless whispers or grunts, to which Jodie reacts as if they were articulate words coming from Aiden.

As you can imagine, her life is a particular brand of clusterfuck. You'll be given ample opportunity to go Carrie on the asses of unsuspecting and deserving teenage asshats and Redneck booze hounds, but there also comes a time in Jodie's life when extensive hand-to-hand combat techniques become part of her repertoire. You'll control her fisticuffs with the same one-button ease as Aiden's TK shenanigans: Ellen Page starts a punch onscreen, the game blurs and slows down to a crawl, and it's your job to angle the left joystick in the direction of the gesture, to essentially complete whatever punch or sweeping kick has been started. That's literally as complex as the game gets, with more difficult or exerting actions (like wading through a strong stream) requiring that you mash the controller's triggers. The long and short of it is that the game's aim isn't to ramp up the complexity, but instead to adequately represent the physical exertion of desperate actions. Considering, expect a lot of button-mashing.

Playing as Aiden is as simple as pressing Left on the directional pad at any time. As Jodie's ghostly pal, you're allowed to clip through walls and doors in a limited fashion, and to better observe your surroundings. Objects that can be disturbed show pale blue dots, humans and animals that can be momentarily possessed glow orange, while potential kill targets glow red. The most complex action you'll encounter will involve allowing Jodie to use Aiden as a sort of spiritual cable between her psyche and a recently deceased individual. Even then, it doesn't go any deeper than angling the left joystick so that Aiden's lambent flow of energy goes from the heads of the unfortunate sods to Holmes'.

Considering the simplicity of the overall technical setup, the appeal rests in the notion of choice, as central to most Quantic Dream releases. As explained above, the game really is an HD Era-Choose Your Own Adventure, or a throwback to those old DVD player-based “games” that used to pause videos and ask you to choose between two or three possibilities.

There's another point in the story where Jodie, having complained of her lack of friends and of a traditional teenager's lifestyle, tries her luck at attending your average teenybopper's birthday party. Depending on what you do, she'll either find herself a date and a long-term relationship, or she'll be cruelly mocked by the other partygoers for daring to display her abilities. In that second instance, you'll have the choice to claim some good old-fashioned revenge for yourself, or to simply flee. All of these outcomes will affect the remainder of the story in subtle ways, as well as Jodie's future character development. This mechanic applies to action sequences, as complete successes or partial failures can also bring minute variations to the complete picture. Will you outrun those cops without a hitch, or will you have to go CQC on their asses? That's all up to you.

Of course, the end result is that Beyond isn't terribly difficult. The story has to move forward (or rather, back and forth, as it were) no matter how good or dismal you may be. Your performance might matter in terms of how personal the experience feels, but it really doesn't in the grand scheme of things. You're watching a movie with chunks of interactivity; like a better-paced and constructed Hideo Kojima vanity project. The difference is instead of being stuck with five minutes of super-clunky gameplay for forty-five minutes of gorgeous CGI, you're given six to eight hours of extremely light, if consistent gameplay that's seamlessly merged into the audio-visual spectrum.

Considering, I don't have much structural criticism to level at the game. It's borderline Adventure Game territory and big swaths of the gameplay are lifted from the nineties' era of Point-and-Click games, which is something that's pretty hard to fuck up. It's almost easier to consider it like a movie. If that's the case, then how do the movie bits fare?

For starters, Page and Dafoe are flawless, which is commendable considering how disembodied and potentially difficult mocap and facial capture tech can be to an actor that isn't used to them. As this side of the industry grows, however, I wouldn't be surprised to see Andy Serkis, Troy Baker or Crispin Glover try their hand at giving masterclasses in the art of emoting for the purposes of game development.

Granted, this isn't the most complex script ever. Ellen Page's past roles tended to carry an innate sadness and a bit of a conflicted nature that is well and truly present in Jodie. She's essentially Haley (see Hard Candy) with a side order of witchiness and Ariadne (see Inception) with a side order of asskickery. Jodie's story wavers between moments of saccharine happiness that are obviously set as precursors to moments of soul-destroying cruelty or various hardships, Aidan more or less standing as her incarnated and disembodied impotent rage. When the game wants you to go to town as the spook, it wants you to go to fucking town. You'll trash bungalows, destroy highway dives and turn protracted sieges against the CIA into absolute bloodbaths. The catch is that you're free to play Aiden as a crafty boogieman or as a sweeping instrument of vengeance. It's just a shame that this comes to characterize most of your emotional ties with these characters. It feels like David Cage wanted to put together a sort of eulogy or posthumous praise for Sissy Spacek and Stephen King's Carrie White, re-spin the character for the post-24 era as someone who's as gifted with karate chops as with supernaturally wreaking havoc. The game's disjointed narrative eventually plops Holmes in the middle of Navajo folklore, at which point you can feel that the conclusion (or at least, the final bit of exposition concerning Jodie's nature) is about to be revealed.

Let's just say there's a reason as to why the game's subtitle is Two Souls. Look up Native American folklore and the obviously supernatural selection process behind shamen and witch doctors, and you'll understand.

Considering, Willem Dafoe feels a bit like of a missed opportunity. His Doctor Dawkins is... there, he's nice, he provides exposition and is especially devoted to Jodie's five year-old self; he's the father figure she needed despite his status as a researcher in paranormal phenomena – but that's it. Considering how he's tackled directors like Sam Raimi and Lars Von Trier, I can't help but feel that there should've been more of him.

There's a lot of things in Beyond. It wants to be a supernatural thriller, it wants to have shades of Zero Dark Thirty, it wants to be a slice-of-life drama for a girl with powers who's starting to be sick of it; it's a fun deconstruction of the whole Friendly Ghost mythos – it's a lot of things, and as a piece of fiction, it's not always wholly successful.

It's still, however, a unique game in today's spectrum of shooters and open-world games. If you have a PS3 or know someone who has one, do try and give it a shot. Pack some popcorn and some soft drinks, too, while you're at it.