Beyond Two Souls' Crazy Story, Strange Controls

Beyond: Two Souls has the potential to be PS3's brilliant swan song, or something that misses the mark completely.

Beyond: Two Souls could very well be PlayStation 3’s superb swan song, a fitting end to the console’s impressive legacy. But it also has the potential to be something else entirely, something unfocused, confusing, and perhaps too ambitious. Both sides of Quantic Dream’s most recent project showed itself when I sat in on a behind-closed-doors demonstration of a new part of the story, a section of the upcoming PS3-exclusive title that left me both excited to play the full game and concerned that it might be a little too muddled for its own good.
When Beyond: Two Souls was first introduced at last year’s E3, we saw a portion of the game known as Hunted. This time around, we caught a glimpse into an extended section of the game called Somalia, a segment of protagonist Jodie Holmes’ adventure far different than that shown during Two Souls’ debut. When combined with a third sliver of the game – the Homeless chapter revealed at the Tribeca Film Festival – it’s clear that creator David Cage’s new vision is wide-ranging, vast, and complex.
The Somalia chapter gives a fresh glimpse into Holmes’ role as a dangerous and skilled CIA operative, an evolution in her life alluded to in trailers, but one not yet fully understood in the greater context of the story. The chapter takes place somewhere in the last third of the game, though Beyond’s non-chronological slant means it’s hard to say exactly where it lands on Jodie Holmes’ personal timeline. All that’s clear is that she’s on an exceptionally dangerous mission, one that places her in a lawless land as she hunts down a ruthless warlord known as Jamaal.
Early on, a young boy named Salim accompanies Holmes. Salim’s presence is immediately jarring because he’s not just any boy; he’s armed with an assault rifle and he’s willing to lay down fire to protect Jodie. It remains to be seen how the two found each other, but they’ve formed an impromptu friendship, one that relies more on body gestures than language.

A daring rescue.

Such a relationship is representative of what makes Beyond: Two Souls so promising. It’s bold, it’s unusual, and it’s unexpected. David Cage excels at writing dialogue, but interactions between Jodie and Salim, littered with words that the other person can’t understand, is expertly done. Since the entirety of the game was motion captured, character performances really stand out. Facial expressions are realistic, and the voice acting is superb. The 174 days it took to record Two Souls’ motion capture was clearly well spent.
What’s less appealing are some gameplay elements. Holmes finds herself in a firefight almost immediately after the demo boots, at which point she unleashes her spirit companion, Aiden, to assist her. Players can switch to Aiden at any time with a mere press of the triangle button, and Aiden’s powers are vast. In this particular section, he can knock over, distract, and outright kill Jodie’s attackers, and Aiden can even possess susceptible foes, giving players control of that character in order to do your bidding.
Your bidding typically results in the quick death of the assailed enemy, whether through brutal suicide or by drawing the attention of other enemies in the area, who will attack the possessed person once it’s clear that all is not well. This is an interesting element in Beyond: Two Souls, and it lets the game’s supernatural element shine, but I fear that Aiden also gives Holmes an unusual amount of power that takes something away from the experience. Holmes never feels quite as vulnerable as Heavy Rain’s Ethan Mars. She has such a fascinating history riddled with misfortune, and yet she never truly feels in danger because Aiden always has her back. 
Aiden controls like an airplane in a flight simulator – and he can be manipulated only in an area close to Jodie herself -- but Jodie’s movements are at times relegated to quick-time events and other movement-limiting options that appear unnecessarily restrictive. It’s again similar in some respects to Heavy Rain, but the game relies so much more on quick, fast-paced action, making the control scheme appear unnecessarily limited. Why should a player press the X button to run to nearby cover when that could be accomplished by using the analog sticks?
Beyond: Two Souls also relies at least partially on motion control, a disappointing design choice in 2013, years after most other developers abandoned any hope of immersive SixAxis options. Quantic Dream is far too talented and too clever to break their game’s immersion with such unnecessary frivolity, though I commend the studio for freshening up combat in Beyond: Two Souls, making it more fluid and natural than anything Ethan Mars was doing in Heavy Rain.

How did Jodie get to this point?

This shines through in one part of the demo in particular, when Jodie Holmes is doing battle with a series of militants on the back of a moving pickup truck. In Heavy Rain, such a sequence would have been littered with on-screen prompts telling you which buttons to press and how to press them, but during this sequence, the screen is clear of any distractions. Quantic Dream invented the interactive drama genre, and it demands a clean interface like the one that Beyond: Two Souls seems to tote. This represents a marked step in the right direction.
Choice also returns in Beyond: Two Souls, though it’s unknown exactly how Holmes could have gone through the Somalia sequence differently. It was made clear after the demo when, during a Q&A session, it was noted that while there are certain parts of the story that the player must arrive at, the journey to those points are wildly different. This is pretty much identical to Heavy Rain, though it seems that Beyond: Two Souls might be even more wide-ranging and open-ended.
Heavy Rain was one of those games that told such a compelling story and felt so incredibly unique that it was easy to look past some of its flaws and gameplay deficits. Beyond: Two Souls looks like it’s shaping up to be a similar type of game, one that may lack tight, action-oriented controls, but one that emphasizes its story and characters far more than the experience of actually playing it. And while it’s unusual to say that gameplay doesn’t matter as much as the story, anything Quantic Dream makes tends to be an exception to the rule.

Jodie's friendship with Salim is a highpoint of the demo.

It’s also clear that Quantic Dream learned a thing or two from Heavy Rain and has made improvements in Beyond: Two Souls to reflect those lessons. Let’s just hope that its all-over-the-place plot comes together into something coherent and enjoyable, because it’s never been clearer that what appeared to be a supernatural-slanted game about a girl and her unusual spirit companion is indeed about something much larger than that. And that may or may not end up being a good thing.