Review of BEYOND: Two Souls by millenia

At first I must admit that I am also a fan of Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain and I think the newest Quantic Dream release doesn’t pale in comparison. I know it has received some mixed reviews but honestly I can’t think of a reason (besides disliking the paranomal plot) why people who enjoyed the earlier titles wouldn’t also love this one.

I think the controls have improved still (Heavy Rain already was an improvement from Fahrenheit) as they are more intuitive. The gameplay is rather easy, the main character cannot die, and while you can still fail in some things, the consequences will not be as bleak as they were in Heavy Rain. Most of the time I thought controlling Jodie and Aiden was fun (and there were parts where the two-character-dynamic worked really well) and not frustrating at all (which was heavily the case in Fahrenheit).

The game is stunning and Ellen Page is brilliant as the main character Jodie. Some of the supporting cast is also excellent.

The story was very entertaining, some people can be turned off by the pseudo-scifi elements but I don’t take my scifi too seriously, this was nothing worse than what we’ve seen in Fringe or X-Files which are among the best paranormal shows there are. Many minor things are left unanswered (I’m also quite sure that different things can be found out playing the game differently) and this “other side” pretty much just is, it is not explained very thoroughly.

Jodie’s (and Aiden’s) tale is told in bits and pieces out of sequence which can seem a bit disorienting at first. Towards the end I started to really like it though. Needless to say that I played this game with one sitting as I did with Heavy Rain. (Yes, there were some toilet breaks.)

The game took me under 10 hours but experimenting with some chapters and different endings as well as completing the extra chapter “Advanced Experiments” my overall time with the game got pushed past 10 hour mark. And I am quite certain I’ll be going for another playthrough later just to see what can be done, even though the differences are mostly slight.

If you don’t straight out hate Heavy Rain, QTE or interactive movies, I would recommend giving Beyond: Two Souls a try.

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Time Played: 10-20 hours
Difficulty: Easy