What is Beyond: Two Souls?
The newest title from Heavy Rain creator, Quantic Dream, Beyond: Two Souls is a story-centric game with a star studded cast. The protagonists are played by Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe so, as you can imagine, the voice acting and face capture technology is of a high standard.
Released on October 11 for PS3 only, it is a testament to Quantic Dream as to how good this game already looks.
Beyond: Two Souls – Storyline
If you played Heavy Rain or Fahrenheit, you’ll know that Quantic Dream games are basically interactive movies with a strong focus on storyline. Beyond: Two Souls is no different. Following a young girl called Jodie Holmes through 15 years of her life, you quickly realise that she is affected by a psychic entity known as Aiden. The two can communicate and use Aiden’s abilities to complete various tasks like controlling enemies, launching cars into the air and protecting Jodie, which makes for an interesting gameplay style.
Despite the game’s heavy reliance on Quick Time Events (QTE), the cinematic storyline is very engaging and will certainly have you completely engrossed within the first few minutes. You start off playing Jodie as an eight-year-old girl in a psychological facility that is testing her and Aiden’s psychic abilities. Willem Dafoe is her doctor, Nathan Dawkins, at the beginning and her father figure for the entirety of the game.
The strong relationship between the two was immediately evident during the extended demo we had time with, and it will be interesting to see how it develops throughout the years Beyond: Two Souls spans. If the storyline flows anywhere near as well as Heavy Rain, we’re bound to be in for an epic journey with Jodie, Aiden, Nathan and the other characters.
Beyond: Two Souls – Gameplay
You are asked to control both Jodie and Aiden throughout Beyond: Two Souls, switching between the two to make the most of Jodie’s often rather precarious situations. For the majority of the demo, we were running away from the CIA, so we had to use Aiden’s powers to fight them off and protect Jodie.
Controlling Aiden is a rather alien experience at the best of times and first seems quite complicated and awkward. However, it does seem to get easier as Jodie ages, which is either a deliberate move made by Quantic Dream or we got more used to it – it’s hard to tell when we only had snapshots of gameplay from various sections of the game.
It is still very disorientating at times being Aiden, especially as the edges of the screen are always blurred. You are helped by a weaving purple line that always connects you to Jodie and limits the distance you can wander.
Playing as Jodie is a lot easier as gameplay mixes your classic third-person adventure with series of QTE for the fast paced or more cinematic portions of the storyline. The action actually slows when QTE user input is required, which adds pace rather than detracting from it.
Hand-to-hand combat works with a series of pushes on the right-hand analogue stick in the direction of the punches or kicks thrown. You’ll also have to duck and dodge your enemies’ advances too. The Matrix, bullet-time effect gives you a little more time and space to react to the fast-paced action.
Beyond: Two Souls – Trailer
Beyond: Two Souls – Graphics
Quantic Dream has obviously invested a lot of money enhancing the graphical fidelity of the characters in Beyond: Two Souls, especially the faces of the protagonists.
The game is made using a completely new graphics engine that the developer created whilst working on its as yet unnamed PS4 title. This really helps eke out all the graphical grunt of the PS3 and might make you wonder whether we need next-gen titles quite yet.
We were a little disappointed with the facial graphics of GTA 5, but Beyond: Two Souls will not disappoint. As you can see in the E3 trailer above, Quantic Dream has put a lot of time into making the characters look exactly like their real world counterparts. Helping to make you feel complete engrossed in the game, the quality of the facial expressions far surpass that of Rockstar Games title LA Noire, which is highly prized for its MotionScan facial capture system.
Moving on from the impressive facial capture, the environment is also vast and detailed. We didn’t experience any lag when playing the demo either.
First Impressions
Available on October 11, this PS3 exclusive is certainly pushing the aging console to its limits, but after playing the demo, we were already hooked and looking forward to seeing how the story unfolds.
Next read our roundup of the Best Games 2013
