Starring actress Ellen Page who plays the game’s main character Jodie, 2013’s downloadable game Beyond: Two Souls combines Hollywood and video games in a way that neither lacks gameplay nor skimps on story.
How to Download Beyond: Two Souls
The game can be played only on PlayStation 3 and PS4. No Switch, Xbox One or Windows version has ever been released. To download it you should go to the PlayStation Store. To start, click on the button below the review. If you like the works of Quantic Dream, check out also the crime story Heavy Rain (2010) and the science fiction android story Detroit: Become Human (2018).
The Game Review
Billed as an action-adventure game and interactive drama by developer Quantic Dream, Beyond: Two Souls relies heavily upon its balance of these two extremes.
Linked to a supernatural force called Aiden, Jodie is gifted with powerful abilities because of this connection. The game follows Jodie as she grows up from adolescence into adulthood all while exploring the ways that this unique link with Aiden has influenced her life.
William Dafoe makes an appearance in the game as Nathan Dawkins who works for the Department of Paranormal Activity.
Acting as a kind of father figure to the protagonist. A part of the United States Department of Paranormal Activity, Jodie is sent to Dawkins by Jodie’s foster parents who want a cure for her increasingly dangerous condition.
The abilities gifted to Jodie by Aiden include possession and telekinetic manipulation of objects in the environment. Laden with the paranormal and supernatural, Beyond: Two Souls explores the idea of dual universes – one for the living and another for the dead – in which one can influence the other.
How this translates into gameplay is that Jodie is very much restricted by the environment around her while Aiden is not. Able to move anywhere, Aiden can do things that Jodie cannot and can help her out in tough situations.
Due to his bond with Jodie, Aiden is limited in the distance he can travel away from her. Unlike Aiden, Jodie can interact with objects in the world and influence things in a more direct manner.
Incorporating these two gameplay elements together in increasingly complex ways forms the vast majority of Beyond: Two Souls.
To break it up, there are scenes that can best be described as quick time events where the player will have to make button presses and directional movements in order to maneuver Jodie through some situation.
While they break up the pacing of the gameplay, these events are often nothing more than cinematic filler that serves more to move the story along than anything else. Given that, they make sense within the overall cinematic vibe of the game.
One thing that the Beyond: Two Souls engine allows for to an extent still largely unseen in many games of this type even now is for huge variance in player choice and game outcomes.
From impacting individual scenes to shifting the direction of Jodie’s fate entirely, Beyond: Two Souls actually puts a premium on moral, weighty decisions that have a real impact on the course of the narrative.
A beautifully experimental game that is also well made, Beyond: Two Souls is the ultimate evolution of the full-motion video games that were so prevalent on early PC CD-ROMs.
