Beyond: Two Souls

I am not usually the kind of person who would describe a video game as an "experience" in the same way that a guy like Peter Molyneux or indeed David Cage may describe them. I tend to enjoy the narrative of games more often than I enjoy gameplay but a game with poor gameplay is certainly going to be as much concern to me as one with a poor narrative would be. It is with this in mind that I am confused, still, as to why I was so enthralled by David Cage's latest attempt at blurring the lines between film and games, BEYOND: Two Souls.

When I was in my early teens I watched my friend play a significant chunk of Farenheit (Indigo Prophecy in North America) which was writer and director David Cage's first major success. At the time I was too young to really be cognizant of much of the themes going on and I certainly wasn't thinking about how the player engaged with the game nor did I ever consider the artistic and cinematic merits of a game like it. I just saw it as a relatively interesting game with cool visuals. I never did get to see the last half of the game and it is only until recently that I discovered that the game actually takes a very sharp turn for the weird. I've had it described to me as featuring an "internet god" and that at best it's a very jarring experience. I have yet to investigate further but it certainly changed my, admittedly limited, view of David and his work.

I have also never played Heavy Rain and have seen even less of it than I had seen of Farenheit. I've heard of the "Press Circle to Jason!" joke and as I understand it the language barrier (Cage is French but seems to focus on writing or releasing his games with a focus on English speaking characters) weirdness is very present in Heavy Rain that will often make characters seem far more obtuse or confusing than they would be had it been written by someone who's first language is English. In any case this has left me with a relatively clean slate as far as my view of Cage and his work goes which meant that I wasn't going in to BEYOND expecting more or less than what I had seen officially advertised.

BEYOND's story revolves primarily around a girl named Jodie (Ellen Page) and her crazy diverse life. From a very young age Jodie has been tethered to an entity simply referred to as Aiden. Throughout her life she has had innumerable wild experiences that all focus on her interaction with other people and how Aiden is constantly in her shadow, figuratively speaking, influencing everything she says or does around other individuals. She had been studied in a facility (more of a home away from home than a clinical facility) by a man named Dawkings (Willem Dafoe) who, for the majority of her life, has been around to help and guide her through many situations but more often than not Jodie finds her self distanced from everyone, never feeling normal and certainly never being allowed to feel normal thanks to her more bitter than sweet relationship with Aiden.

BEYOND quickly gets very frantic and hard to follow when it comes to completing a chapter. The game is delivered entirely non-chronologically often jumping from when she is a teenager, to a young child to being somewhere in her early twenties. It is never clear if there is anything to this choice of delivery other than contributing to how dissonant things generally are for Jodie in the first place. For the most part this didn't actually bother me and as things went on it started to make more and more sense, making connections between chapters and working out the chronology my self became very second nature. By the end everything was clear to me and any confusion I had while playing, particularly in the early game, was cleared up by the mid to late game areas.

In her trials, Jodie meets a series of individuals and comes up against many different obstacles. To say her life is diverse would be severely undermining just how hectic things get for her. To give you a brief idea she has hitchhiked through a desert in America only to live and work with a small Native American/Navajo family (which had it's own mind boggling and relatively self-contained story arc) where she worked on a farm, learned to tame and ride horses and dealt with probably one of the more jarringly supernatural events in the game. She also found her self homeless at one point, living under a bridge in a city with a few other homeless people including a women very late in her pregnancy, scrounging around for food and money only to find her self in a pressing situation with the group. She went through various stages in her early teens from dealing with bratty peers to being a rebellious goth-type trying to find some sense of normality. She even became a operative for the CIA being sent out alone to hunt down a targeted war criminal along with the help of Aiden, who the CIA were all too interested in using and abusing. This is just a taster of how things go for Jodie, never a dull moment.

This is certainly a life that could only be lived in fiction or indeed in very rare cases in real life, supernatural entities not withstanding. Never the less there was not a single moment where my suspension of disbelief or, god forbid, my immersion was shattered or even brought in to question. There is something to be said about David Cage's opting to hire real Hollywood talent to act in BEYOND (Farenheit and Heavy Rain had, as far as I can tell, relatively unknown actors which may or may not have lend well to those games). Ellen Page, for me, absolutely stole the show. To the point where I think if it were any other actor, I wouldn't be quite as enveloped as I was. I don't have any particular bias toward Ellen Page in any other film or creative work she has been a part of, I enjoy her movies but not any more than I enjoy movies in general but her portrayal of Jodie was at times heart wrenching. When it counted, I was in tears a few times as I played and this is something I did not expect. I definitely cry when I watch movies that hit all the right notes that spin up those emotions and there are absolutely other games that have brought me to that level but it's usually few and far between and not nearly as long lasting because of how limiting it can be trying to portray the subtle nuance that a seasoned actor may be able to produce physically.

There were scenes where I could not bare to watch as Jodie found her self at ends with Aiden as he would not let her live a normal life be it through mischievous acts or through jealousy when Jodie shows interest in other individuals. These scenes could only be delivered by someone as talented as Ellen Page or Willem Dafoe, who had his share of tough moments throughout. Had this been hand animated or delivered by less talented actors I feel much of the impact would have been lost and I think this is another reason why I was so caught up in this game. True this could be said of any work be it a video game or a movie but it's a fact that some games fail to deliver on the heart-string pulling front due to lacking some extremely intimate and nuanced acting that could only be seen through fully motion captured and "fully acted" scenes. By "fully acted" I mean that, while they were stuck in a Mo-cap studio with nothing more than building blocks as a set, most scenes were filmed with the actors together, playing off of each other. This really contributed to the overall quality of the story telling and as far as I know David Cage gave Ellen and Willem a lot of control over the delivery of lines and how their respective characters acted which is why I feel BEYOND definitely overcame some of the language barrier issues that may have been present in Cage's previous works.

Another reason why I may have been so affected by BEYOND may lie in the gameplay or more importantly the lack there of. People will argue that it is not gameplay and that it is just "interactive film" or a "glorified point and click" (which is something I'm more happy to get on board with, which is still gameplay, I'm afraid). That said, I'm not denying that there is a severe lack of traditional gameplay but with that in mind and thinking back to playing the game over the two 6 hour sessions that I did in the days following release, I thoroughly enjoyed "playing" the game, so let me explain why. The type of gameplay in BEYOND might be best described as "endlesss quick time events (QTEs)", which essentially boil down to "press the stick in this direction to do an action" and upon pressing it in that direction, the game does the rest for you. Other times it might be "Hammer the X button until you wrestle this bad guy away from you". It is very limiting in terms of player agency, so why would I enjoy a game that all but removes my agency?

Well, when I played this years Tomb Raider or 2012's Halo 4, I immediately understood the gameplay philosophy of both games. One is a third person action adventure game with shooting, melee and acrobatic mechanics and the other is a first person action shooter with a very tight, familiar kinetic experience. Both of these games were excellent at their respective gameplay styles and I thoroughly enjoyed playing both - except when QTEs where involved. Both games employed the use of QTEs every now and then and it was a very jarring and irritating experience. Why? Because it was completely at ends with everything the game "taught" the player to do as they played. One minute I'm flinging Lara across a rocky wall because I'm moving the thumbsticks and pressing the right buttons to make her do that without needing the game to aid me and then next I'm at an impasse where Lara finds her self in a tight spot and all I have to do is hammer both triggers while the game plays out an animation where Lara does all the work herself and my agency is totally gone, leaving absolutely no challenge or satisfaction for me. When I reached the final area of Halo 4, it was a very long (and tedious) process of platforming through various zones, killing enemies and slowly chipping my way to the final boss. I did the work to get there and then when I did I had to press maybe 4 or 5 buttons to defeat the final boss because it turned from a game with nothing but player agency, to a game that wanted to play itself without me, the pesky player, involved.

When I pre-ordered BEYOND, I knew what I was in for. My expectation was to play the game through a limited set of controls, through QTEs and long cutscenes. I never expected more or less from the game and for that reason I was all the more willing to get on board with the gameplay without a hitch. BEYOND, despite being nothing but a huge series of QTEs in terms of gameplay, was a very enjoyable experience as a gamer. I enjoyed the QTEs during combat. While at times it was very ambiguous as to which way I was to swing the thumbstick (usually "in the direction Jodie is moving!"), it lead me to revealing some little scene changes where Jodie does miss blocking a bunch and in turn takes a beating herself or she might navigate the scene differently, it varied. I can wholeheartedly understand why gamers might be frustrated by this gameplay and why they might not enjoy it but for me, gaming is all about expectations. I'm sure we are all familiar with the proverbial "hype train" by now. It's a phenomenon where so many people believe that a game is going to be astounding that they set themselves up for nothing but disappoint when the game is fianlly released. SimCity, Diablo 3 and I'm sure you can list a handful more in recent years that have had this problem. When I bought BioShock: Infinite, I expected to get a relatively decent shooter with an interesting story with a certain level of meta-commentary but what I got was easily one of my favourite experiences in gaming because while it did deliver what I expected, I delivered it on a level that I had not anticipated and much more than I ever could have expected prior to playing. Sure, this works both ways. I could have expected what I did for BioShock and got a terrible shooter with an awful plot - but you pick your battles based on your own experience as a gamer and, if you are so inclined, as someone who consumes a lot of media surrounding games. You tend to get a feel for things and how they're going to affect you, not other people. I applied the same philosophy to BEYOND that I did to any other game I play and in doing so, I never found my self disappointed or frustrated in the lack of agency present in the game.

There is definitely a kinetic difference between playing as Jodie and playing as Aiden, whom you can switch to at almost any point in-game at a moments notice. Jodie moves around any given environment as you would expect a person to move. She walks on two legs and can't phase through walls. Her pal Aiden, however, can fly around the environment, pass through walls, interact with other humans or indeed Jodie herself. His distance from Jodie is limited in that he can only move so far before it starts to negatively (or specifically physically) affect Jodie, so he must maintain a certain safe range from her while he peruses the area. Aiden has a few powers under his ghostly sleeve. He can choke people out, he can heal them or he can even posses them and these tools are used in various ways throughout the game, usually healing is reserved for moments where Jodie or friends are injured, or for dispatching of foes in tight situations where Jodie may be captured if she is spotted. Aiden also has one last feature which I will admit is pretty much his Deus Ex Machina power. There are a few instances where Jodie is in severe danger and her only way to survive is to fling her self at or through whatever may be endangering her and when doing so, Aiden will engage shield of sorts that surrounds her. This is used sparingly but is still there enough to realize that it was an easy cop-out for the designers that be to write Jodie out of a corner, so to speak. Playing Aiden is fun and is a refreshing breather from all of the QTEs and walking from point A and B as Jodie, which is often her limitation.

Aside from the gameplay, BEYOND is absolutely stunning in the sound and visuals department. I haven't ever played a game that looked this pretty on a console before. The Last of Us is a pretty amazing looking game but due to how big it is and how much the player has to move around, it's understandable that things had to be toned down in certain areas to maintain a playable framerate. BEYOND, being the game that it is, didn't necessarily have to account for the possibility of high player interactivity with the environment because it is so focused and so linear it tends to be that every scene was absolutely gorgeous and seeing as the game had the full suite of Hollywood actors, quality voice recording and a full Mo-cap arrangement of not only body movement but also facial capture, it meant that there was a lot of detail and subtlety to everything involving the actors and without getting too creepy, the detail in Ellen, Willem and everyone else's faces contributed much to the overall graphical quality of the game and at times matches the level of immersion you might feel when watching a well shot movie or TV show. The Soundtrack was composed by the same person who composed for previous Quantic Dreams games; Normand Corbeil who unfortunately had passed away prior to the completion of the game. Lorne Balfe and collaborator Hans Zimmer worked to finish the soundtrack and it definitely rings clear as familiar Zimmer-like swells of cinematic orchestral music play throughout the game. At times I could have sworn I was listening to the soundtrack to Inception, which given the supernatural nature of BEYOND is a fitting theme to aim for and the game benefited all the more from it.

I've been having a hard time putting my finger on why I've had BEYOND at the back of my mind for the last week and indeed why I'm so willing to defend it when it does have clear flaws and is not a perfect game by any means. I think it comes back to what I talked about earlier in regards to my expectations when it comes to video games or really any creative medium. I tried not to get my hopes up and I tried not to let anything jeopardize the experience for me prior to playing. I was open about the gameplay because I knew what I was getting in to. I was familiar with some of the disdain and distrust some people have in David Cage and Quantic Dream but I let my ignorance to their previous works take precedence because I felt something in my gut about BEYOND that I don't feel for most games prior to release. The combination of visuals, themes, the narrative itself and of course the promise of getting to see the astounding and chilling talent of Willem Dafoe alongside Ellen Page who, as I see her in more and more films, is proving to be an unbelievably talented individual herself. Again I'll call back to how I couldn't bare to watch some scenes because her delivery was so intimate and realistic that I felt like I wanted to tell her it would be okay, rather than sit back cold in my chair while I watched 3d models wiggle around on my televisions screen. Maybe it was the novelty of a game designed to be an interactive movie and how interesting the concept had been to me, having never played Quantic Dreams games prior. I'll probably never truly know why this game of all games has elevated itself above all of 2013's releases and proved to be one of my favourites in a long time but what I do know is that, though it is not in my nature to think of games this way, this was an experience more than it was anything else and it is truly one I will never forget.