Beyond: Two Souls

David Cage simply doesn't know how to make a video-game.

His studio has made a living off of getting celebrities and other actors to record a bunch of facial expressions and voice lines. When you purchase Beyond: Two Souls you are literally giving yourself the luxury of listen to a bunch of audio and visual cues done by, in the case of this game, Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.

Cage succeeds with these completely hollow yet densely programmed works because there's a certain subset of gamers, rather, people....who believe in being immersed completely in some sort-of fictional world. It also seems that this subset does not enjoy using their own faculties and they abhor hand-eye coordination. These people also want to become (*cough*) something they are not, which is fine! Most video-games are about that...

...But imagine if you told your group of nerd friends: "Hey, let's play some D&D. But I'm not going to be the Dungeon Master and I don't want to roll the dice and I don't want to make any decisions whatsoever within the dungeon or quest my Master makes and I don't want to create my own character or respond to any of the adventuring decisions we're about to do"

You would not tell them this, just so we're clear.

David Cage's games are created in what I will call, The Emotional-Reality Denial Realm. He ignores the ground rules of human interaction and human intelligence in order to bring his characters to the great heights of Negative Emotions. All this in order to draw sympathy for those characters and thus, for the people who actually enjoy Cage's games, gamers draw some sympathy for themselves. The heights are attained through an uninterrupted cruise of melodramatic events that don't have any semblance of narrative clarity. In addition to this, his claim-to-fame is that you just barely control his paper-thin characters so the Negative Emotions are reached quickly and usually without incident. David Cage's insistence that he's a "director" or the idea that his games are "film-like" is a load of horse phlegm served to you on a brioche bun baked with a smidgen of human shit.

Your role-playing experience in his "games" are streamlined straight to the part where you cry into your napkin and rant and rave about how emotional mature you are for succeeding at sitting through Cage's Emotional-Reality Denial Realm.

Maybe I should take a step back and clarify something here: controlling any character in a video-game offers you some from of role-playing experience. You think of Pong even, you are role-playing one of two paddles in a diametric, 2D world where the only object of concern is a bouncing ball that might slip past you. When a developper like Cage decides to give you control of something, you are relating to those character through this form of role-play.

But what if the character you're given to control is some sort-of unrealistic amalgam of the developer's infantile notions of how adult life is supposed to work? What if that developer doesn't actually hand you the controls, but gives you a tepid and shallow illusion of control? Quick-Time-Events that you cannot fail, shallow motion controls which require the bare minimum of physical action.

What if your dad hates you, your boss tricks you, you go to a bar and the guys are rapists, you imaginary friend wants to cock-block you, your mom isn't your real mom, you're alone, etcetera, etcetera. What if you finally reach the end of all the possible Negative Emotions that are available to you in your pre-determined storyline and forget about said story until the Great Man who create the storyline for you decides to plop another one on your lap? The next ones about ANDROIDS in DETROIT I hear!...

Beyond: Two Souls is a particular kind-of bad game that illuminates just how important it is to actually give players a plethora of objects to interact with and a focused amount of inane actions for a player to perform. Beyond: Two Souls's storyline's only merit is as transgressive kitsch: no person would realistically go through any of the shit Jodie is put through and even if they were those would have almost zero resemblance to the events shown in Beyond: Two Souls.

Honestly, I could rant all day about David Cage games, so I'll wrap it up...

My biggest peeve with Beyond: Two Souls is the bar scene. I hate it more than the child-soldier shit with Salim....

If you go to a bar for the the first time alone as a sixteen year old girl, you will not be immediately attacked by the first two males you see sitting on their stools. Even if you are, I absolutely guarantee you will not want, have to, or even be able to take a shotgun to both their heads with your imaginairy ghost friend. Everyone playing or reading this review should seriously ask themselves why this game treats something like sexual assault with a supernatural, decision-making role-playing scenario...

This really is an "experience" you should not play by yourself or even "play" at all. Watch all the scenes on YouTube or from a streamer. I also highly recommend interpreting all the events in Beyond: Two Souls as exactly what wouldn't happen in the scenarios the game shows.