I read someone describe the experience as eight hours of David Cage wanking to his own game, which is about right. You can tell the game is in love with its own narrative, which would be fine if the narrative weren't as hokey as it is. I stopped around the homeless pregnancy scene and kind of couldn't help but shake my head at the whole thing. For a guy who spews so much flowery verbiage as Cage does about the importance of narrative in games, and how incredibly cinematic and engaging his stories are (he should really go back and play Indigo Prophecy again), his games sure are full of a lot of stupid bullshit.
Beyond feels no different to me. Maybe it finds itself later on, but when I left off, the game clearly couldn't decide what kind of narrative it wanted to be. It kept going back and forth between hokey, melodramatic character drama and super dark mystery/thriller. I'm not saying you can't have both, but the swings in each scene are so hard that it felt super distracting and I couldn't take anything seriously. Ironically, I ended up finding the scenes with little Jodie the most well-realized and believable out of everything I played. And that's not because Ellen Page's performance as an older Jodie is bad; it's very, very good actually; it's just the setup for the scenes she finds herself in aren't as strong or as well-realized as the scenes with little Jodie.
Cage also has this infuriating tendency to throw a lot of unexplained, nonsensical bullcrap into his games out of left field and Beyond: Two Souls is no different. I don't want to go into detail, but suffice it to say, there's a supernatural plot element introduced into the game early on that somehow feels out of place in a game whose core conceit is an invisible ghost buddy who is tethered to Ellen Page at birth. Take that for what you will.
Narrative-issues aside, the gameplay also feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be. It's like a disjointed hybrid of Heavy Rain, Ghost Trick, and a low-budget 3rd person shooter? I guess?? I don't know; complaining about a Quantic Dream game's gameplay is an exercise in futility so I won't dwell on it much more. It just felt weirdly incoherent, which isn't something I've had a problem with in Cage's previous games. It could be argued those games really didn't have gameplay to begin with, but at least what was there felt cohesive.
It doesn't really need to be said, but the game obviously looks terrifc. It's probably the best looking game of this generation, something that is no doubt helped by the fact that the game is constantly in letterbox and thus has fewer pixels to render.
I don't know, you guys. I don't hate it, and I probably wouldn't even mind it, but it's so hard to take any of it even remotely seriously when paired with Cage's comments over the years. The dude is so in love with himself yet he hasn't once shown that he's as talented as he thinks he is when crafting a narrative.
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