Beyond: Two Souls Special Edition

Disclaimer: this is a fully paid-up member of the David Cage fanboy club speaking, so feel free to tune out if you're after the mud-flinging that will undoubtedly soon fill this page (and not entirely without reason, in fairness).

When Beyond was first announced, before I knew any of the details, I fully expected it to take over Heavy Rain's mantle as my favourite game; Heavy Rain's flaws didn't bother me in the slightest, but they were certainly there, and I felt that the extra time, experience, freedom, and financial clout afforded to David Cage in the wake of its success would likely lead to them being eradicated. And then I started to find out the details. And then I got worried.

Two things in particular made me start to get worried about whether or not I'd even be able to enjoy Beyond. The first, and most simple, was Ellen Page. Now Page has always seemed like a pretty nice person, and I feel bad for having any kind of beef with her, but on the other hand, Juno is such a putrid stain on western culture that if the Chinese had interpreted it as an act of terrorism and bombed Canada in retaliation, I'd probably have been on their side; it's hard to not feel anything other than seething hatred for anybody involved in its creation. She also has the problem that, through no fault of her own, she falls fairly neatly into the manic pixie dream girl niche that any lazy developer looking to get a woman into a game would aim for by default - she's not Zooey Deschanel, but she's close enough to be a concerning presence. The second concern is more complex than that, and it's to do with the way in which David Cage handles writing about the supernatural.

That supernatural elements are a huge part of Beyond is blindingly obvious to anybody that's ever overheard a conversation about it, let alone watched a trailer - and while this is hardly unusual or upsetting for gaming as a whole, it seriously worried me coming from Cage. More than any other writer in AAA gaming right now, he excels at writing about everyday life, at making earthy mundanity and simple human interaction gripping; Heavy Rain had its fair share of action, danger, gore, and crime drama tropes, but some of its most memorable scenes took place in playgrounds, in kitchens, and in motel rooms. By nailing his colours so firmly and so quickly to the mast of fantasy (one early quote stated that 'players might learn the true nature of the afterlife'), he set up an expectation, for me at least, that he may be about to abandon the very thing that makes him so good and sail straight into areas where he's not as comfortable or effective.

The really surprising thing about Beyond: Two Souls is that he hasn't done that at all. For a game that is essentially about a woman that can talk to the dead and her superpowered invisible friend, it's astonishing just how human the whole thing is - it's a platform that has no right to end up being as exploratory and emotionally involving as a game about a father whose son has been kidnapped, but it very nearly matches Heavy Rain toe-to-toe for those earthy moments Cage is so good at. Jodie's journey in this game is about so much more than her gift and Aiden's powers, it's about her finding out who her real parents are, about the relationships she builds with the men in her life (one of whom, the outrageously likeable Cole, is clearly a surrogate mother), about her inability to make friends, about her quest for some semblance of normality in her life, about her desire to just find a real place for herself in the world that doesn't define her purely by her powers. Those last two points are crucial, because they allow the game's most affecting moments - a visit to her biological mother in hospital, for instance, or the entire Homeless chapter - to stand out even moreso than they would have in Heavy Rain's world. There's an argument to be made that Beyond is gaming's first true Bildungsroman.

They're also crucial points because they both explain and justify the game's non-chronological sequencing. Beyond presents a timeline chronologically on its loading screens, but it jumps around between points on that line in a way that, at first, seems to be done just for the sake of doing it. Plenty of critics have leapt upon this, and the way the game constantly dips its toes into various genres (QTE combat, stealth third-person shooter, racing, psychological horror, and so on), stating that it makes the game muddled and confusing. I can understand that view, but upon my second playthrough, it occurred to me that what Cage has done has written a chronological story, broken it down into its more abstract elements, and then presented those in order instead. Jodie's relationship with parental figures. Dawkin's gradually deteriorating mental state. Aiden's discovery of what he's capable of. Ellie's love life and her ability - or inability - to make friends. All of these issues gradually escalate throughout the course of the game in a way that's more natural than a simple chronological telling of her life would be, so to me (and I could well be putting words in Cage's mouth here) it seems like he's decided that these elements are the important ones, that the way the characters evolve is more important than the way the story does, and arranged the game accordingly. If that's true, it's handled brilliantly. If it's not, then it's a very welcome bit of serendipity regardless. Plenty of people have made a point of comparing this to Memento, stating that the true judge of a non-linear storyline is to watch it re-arranged back into chronological order and then judge the two presentations against each other, and I'm convinced that Beyond, like Memento, wouldn't be nearly as effective if played straight.

It's this focus, and the performances from the cast, that allows the game to hang together despite its kaleidoscopic approach to genre. So yes, my worries about Ellen Page were totally unfounded as well - with the possible exception of a brief, odd chapter where she turns into an emo kid for a while, her performance doesn't ever drop. To say it's the best bit of voice acting ever to appear in a video game is probably a little unfair, not just because Page comes with a cache almost no video game actor could ever aspire to but also because this is no ordinary game (Nolan North, to pick the obvious example, is yet to star in a game that gives him the space and freedom Page has here to really express his range), but it's the obvious conclusion to come to. This may not be surprising to anybody who liked Page's previous work; what's likely to be surprising to all of us, though, is how good the voice acting is right throughout the cast. This is frequently a flaw in gaming - a lot of voice-heavy games I've played sound like they hired real actors to play the main three or four parts and bored family members to play everyone else - but there's barely a single character in the game that doesn't feel like it went through some kind of casting process. Even figures that are clearly antagonists, like Jodie's foster father, are voiced with enough care to make them at least slightly relatable. The only exception to this is the teenagers that appear in a birthday party segment, which is not co-incidentally the only chapter in the game that merely serves Jodie's character arc and not itself.

This is another impressive feature - while several strands run through them and as a result they're not as powerful or meaningful in isolation from the story, the majority of these chapters work well as self-contained features. As mentioned, they hop genres, but not as wildly as that term might suggest to somebody who associates the term with someone like Protest the Hero, and sometimes in a way that feels like a love letter to gaming as a whole. (And let's be clear on that - Cage, for all he talks about ways that the medium lets itself down, clearly loves video games and always criticizes with a tone of disappointment rather than anger or dismissive, which doesn't come across well enough when you see his quotes written down rather than hear them from him.) The Condenser chapter, which appears early on and sees Jodie sent into a lab to shut down an early prototype portal to the afterlife that has malfunctioned, plays out like a modern remake of the action sections of Deadly Premonition might, all the same spooked horror and psychological intrigue, but built on an engine that actually works. Navajo, the game's lengthiest section, nods to Red Dead Redemption in its setting and method of transport, and I'm sure I've seen its own horror sections in another game too, although I can't quite place where. Most obviously of all, a chapter called The Mission is a nod in the direction of just about any third-person stealth shooter you could name; the one it particularly seems to echo to me, thanks to its emotionally devastating bait-and-switch pay-off, is Spec Ops: The Line. And then there's the James Bond-esque Embassy, a chapter called The Experiment which you can quite happily turn into Poltergeist if you want to, and Welcome to the CIA, which could conceivably be set to the South Park/Team America montage song. Oh, and then there's Homeless, which is absolutely fucking phenomenal, an absolute tour de force in its own right.

All of this points to Beyond: Two Souls being an auteur's labour of love, much moreso than Heavy Rain was, and so you have to wonder why it's not as good a game. The answer, actually, lies in Homeless itself.

The really significant thing about the Homeless chapter is its supporting cast. There are four people who take Jodie in when she runs away and collapses on the street in winter, and it is literally the only point in the entire game when they appear. This is also true of the Navajo chapter, but while both of these chapters are given major significance by the choice of endings you get given, it's only the cast of Homeless that makes enough of an impact to make you care about their fate and not just Jodie's (and - without giving out too many spoilers - it's their ending that seems canon, and if any sequel to this is ever made I will bet serious money that it follows on from their story). It's a reminder of how great the interaction between the four main characters in Heavy Rain was and how good Cage is at writing for a set-up like that....and while it's seriously impressive that this game can introduce four new characters halfway through and make you genuinely care about them less than an hour later, it hurts Beyond that it doesn't happen more. Heavy Rain's de facto main character was Ethan, because it was his son that was kidnapped and clearly he had the most investment in finding him, but it gained a lot of its power and intrigue from the way it bounced around between four (actually five, because I'd include Lauren) characters of almost equal importance to the story. Beyond can't do that, because you only ever control Jodie (it's naturally tougher to identify with a character in a game when you don't step into their shoes), and because, while the writing and acting for Dawkins, Cole, and Ryan is good, they disappear for long stretches of the game (Homeless and Navajo being the prime examples). I understand why Cage has done this, but in a largely successful effort to present one person's entire life, he's sacrificed the advantages of presenting the intertwined lives of several people over a shorter period of time. Homeless gives a glimpse of this, and while it's fantastic, it almost hurts the game as a whole by underlining the ways in which it could have been better.

This is a minor gripe, though; much like an explanation of why a club like Napoli or Arsenal are merely competing in the Champions League rather than winning it, it shouldn't detract from how great it is in the grand scheme of things. Beyond: Two Souls attempts a lot within its lofty concept and just about gets everything right, pushing a few select boundaries of what is possible within gaming and raising the bar for other developers when it comes to voice acting, mo-cap, scripting, and ambition in storytelling - and it can console itself in the fact that, even if it's not Cage's finest game, it's likely to be remembered as his defining moment.