The second of Quantic Dream’s PlayStation trilogy lands on PC. Beyond: Two Souls brings Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, and not a lot else.
As the previous console generation ended, the PS3 had a fine swansong of a year, not only having third-party titles like Bioshock Infinite, and GTA V, but one of the biggest games of the decade in The Last of Us, perhaps the PS3’s greatest exclusive of all.
So any other exclusive of the time was going to have an uphill battle on its hands, and in the case of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain follow-up Beyond: Two Souls, its own problems, combined with the encroaching start of a new console generation, made for an almost mountainous struggle. So perhaps now, six years later as it heads to PC, maybe it can be revisited from a fresh perspective?
Beyond leans on sci-fi far heavier than its predecessor had, telling the life story of Jodie Holmes, a young girl with an otherworldly set of abilities given to her by an invisible entity. We get to see Jodie grow up, struggling to understand and control this strange link to another. It should have been a good framework for an interesting and pitiable life story, but a big issue for the original release of the game was in how that was presented.
Originally, Beyond‘s structure skipped around Jodie’s personal timeline with little rhyme or reason, often nullifying the intended impact, though some scenes such as the one at a teenage party where the sheltered Jodie gets a taste of the psychological cruelty people her own age can dish out, work well in isolation.
In this PC release (and indeed in the PS4 release) the option to play it chronologically has been added, which does smooth out some storytelling wrinkles, but it does not stop large swathes of the story being absolute nonsense of the highest order.
Whatever order Beyond tells its tale, it’s still an erratic and often aimless bit of wishy-washy hokum. Occasionally, as with Heavy Rain and the more recent Detroit: Become Human, Quantic Dream captures a little slice of humanity really well, but it ends up feeling like a fluke when multiple clunky attempts at being ‘cinema’ drag the quality bar down. See here, scenes such as the grating espionage at a high-class party (and the daft toilet scene it contains), or the whole Native American chapter and its ridiculous supernatural malarkey.
It’s almost a quality of Quantic Dream’s titles to date, to be a confounding messy rollercoaster. To waste gorgeous visuals on storytelling that could almost read as a heart rate with how many highs and lows they hit. One has to wonder how much is propped up by the earnest performances of Ellen Page as Jodie, who as a character, deserves better. Page puts emotion and gravity into the more personal aspects of the story. In a section where Jodie is homeless and living on the freezing streets, it’s her empathy for the suffering of others that elevates it.
Willem Dafoe, a man who seems perfect to put in a video game (just look at him in Spider-Man or The Boondock Saints and tell me you wouldn’t want that scenery-chewing masterclass in your game), but he plays it quieter here, which is fine, he can do that well too, but maybe the silliness found in Beyond would have been better complimented by a bit of Dafoe daffiness.
As a game, Beyond is a much smoother ride than Heavy Rain, sharpening those contextual inputs up, and throwing in some fun sections where you possess things as Aiden, the spiritual entity tethered to Jodie. Sure, there’s still plenty of menial drudgeries to complete just for the sake of it, but it’s hard not to get a little kick out of it.
There’s also a kind of co-op mode, where one player is Jodie, and the other is Aiden. It can be a laugh, but it makes a further mockery of any attempt at seriousness when another human can dick about as Aiden
So the end result is a grab bag of quality. A heavily uneven story, with generally fine performances, and a perfectly serviceable set of mechanics to go with some pretty damn fine visuals. Beyond is often meandering and lunk-headed, but it has moments of magic that make it an enjoyable enough way to spend a few hours if you can persevere through its failings.
Beyond Two Souls review code provided by the publisher.
Beyond Two Souls is out now on PC and PS4.