Beyond꞉ Two Souls (2013)

This might be one of the worst games I've ever played.

Sure, it's technically competent, it looked amazing for the time, it has controls that mostly work, it has very good voice acting courtesy of Willem DaFoe and Elliot Page.

Everything about this game is just repugnant though. It's a video game that is so deeply ashamed to be a video game. David Cage has attempted to create a Hollywood blockbuster in the form of a video game but has only succeeded in showing that he is capable of neither. There is little interactivity and what you do have boils down to a handful of choices which ultimately do not matter. The controls are fine but they go for a style that is very difficult to read, often times the prompt will just fade into the background.

The characters are kind of boring and flat as well, excellent performances can't save them from that. The plot is absolutely nonsense. I hate the term 'schlock' but I can think of no better word to describe this. It's a story that is bafflingly awful and has some of the worst dialogue I've ever heard. Zack Snyder would be too ashamed to release this. Nothing emphasises this more than a now infamous phrase:

'Underwater Chinese Ghost Base'

An entirely accurate description of part of the game. You have to infiltrate a secret underwater Chinese base that is running their own experiments on the ghost world (I respect myself too much to remember or look up the actual name it's given in the game) which sounds really cool but it's unbelievably boring and slow and really adds nothing to the story. And that is kind of emblematic of the whole game really. Nothing that happens really amounts to anything. Most of it is just Jodie (Elliot Page) wandering from situation to situation, getting caught up in something and having to deal with it, sometimes Nathan (Willem DaFoe) contacts you and is worried about you.

There is no character arc really. You see Jodie as a child and she's kind of sad and lonely and she is frustrated about being seen as a freak because of the weird ghost that is latched onto her. By the end of the story, she's sad and lonely and she is frustrated about being seen as a freak because of the weird ghost that is latched onto her, except now she loves the ghost.

Nathan's is somehow even worse. He is researching the ghost world for... some reason. The story tells you that it's because his wife and child died in a car accident and Jodie channelled their spirits to say goodbye to him and he wants to find a way to bring them back. This would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that he was already working with Jodie before this happened so he had some kind of prior interest in this subject that's never really explored. He kind of meanders through the story until the end where he goes full Green Goblin and removes all the safeties on the... US government's secret ghost portal. I cannot believe that was written with a straight face. That's just something they've made for some reason.

He unleashes the ghost world and it goes about as well as you'd expect. While people are dying and Jodie tries desperately to shut it down by wading into the heart of it, she finds Nathan inside the big chamber shouting and looking for his family. Jodie tells him that they're gone and he needs to let them go. His answer to this is to... shoot himself. His ghost then appears with his family and he looks happy and Jodie smiles at him before running off to shut down the portal.

To reiterate, this game says, in no uncertain terms, that Nathan was correct to kill himself to be with his dead family and he's much happier that way. I cannot even begin to describe why this is such a bad thing to depict. It's so unbelievably reckless that I'm amazed this got past any kind of editor, supervisor or higher up at Sony. This character's entire arc was basically leading up to his redemption and happiness via suicide. It's disgusting. There's no other way to put it. It is absolutely disgusting to show this in a positive light.

Another big source of criticism for me is the 'romance' between Jodie and boot boy, Ryan. Ryan is a dick a lot of the time and is unappealing in basically every way. The game constantly tries to force you to like him though and despite being able to make choices, even if you turn down Ryan, it will try to make you reconsider later.

The Super Best Friends famously played this game and through their entire playthrough, they hated this guy and tried to reject him at every opportunity to the point that they even chose the ending where Jodie dies specifically to get away from him. Even then, the final cutscene establishes that Jodie's ghost spends a lot of time hanging around him. It's inescapable. And that's the core of why this fails as a game. You have no control, no agency and you cannot fail. Even when you fail, you succeed. Failing prompts is nothing more than a minor setback. Even if you get the shit kicked out of you in a fight, a plot contrivance causes Jodie to win. Because as a wise man once said "Game overs are a failure of the game designer."

David Cage said that this is a game that should only be played once and after seeing multiple playthroughs of it, it's obvious why. There is little to no variation in anything. Your choices make almost no difference. The only one that matters is the final choice and even then it amounts to 'Is Jodie alive at the end or is she a ghost, either way she's doing the same things.'

David Cage didn't want you to realise that this game is a railroad, a straight line from point A to point B with no stops or detours. This is a game in the sense that a DVD is a game because you have to press the start button on the menu. Your choices will not affect anything. You will get the same story everyone else does.

At the time, this game was regarded as a mature step forward for video games which is embarrassing. Had this been released as a movie, it would have been panned and regarded with disdain, likely winning several Razzies. It showed what storytelling in games was like at the time that this was god awful and yet this was considered a step up. I think that's awful and I'm glad that in the 12 years since then, games have matured a lot and have been telling more compelling stories.

That's not to say nothing that came before was good but it was still considered rare or it was confined to more obscure releases or JRPGs which were at their nadir in the public perception at the time, seen as little more than masturbatory material for pathetic anime nerds. A sentiment that definitely had its roots in xenophobia. To put this over something like Valkyria Chronicles is ridiculous.

So what of the legacy of Beyond: Two Souls? Well, there isn't one. The game was quickly forgotten. It had not, in fact, been the next step forward in gaming nor was it compelling enough to have any kind of staying power. This was Elliot Page's first and, to date, only video game role which is a shame, I think he's a great actor but I can only imagine how terrible this was for him. Many stories of David Cage having books full of photos of the actor as far as back as when he was a baby and creating a fully nude model that still exists in the game data without Elliot's consent probably scared him away from games ever again. Willem DaFoe only had one more video game role after this, a small part in 'Twelve Minutes' which I haven't played.

Despite how much of a disaster this game was, David Cage made another in 2018 titled Detroit: Become Human' which is... marginally better than this but still a nightmare of faults. It was also announced that his studio was working on a Star Wars game to the chagrin of everyone but that was several years ago and nothing has been heard since. Combined with the various legal troubles the studio has found itself in, I think it's safe to say that this won't be coming out any time soon.

To quote the Super Best Friends: "I made ze bad game" - David Cage