“Beyond: Two Souls” is the (as of now) latest game from French developer Quantic Dream (QD), but you may know them better as David Cage.
The studio is pretty well-known for its cinematic approach to games, which has resulted in weird defenses from the studio. Despite all that though, Beyond: Two Souls managed to make an appearance at the Tribeca Film Festival, only the second video game to do so (the first being L.A. Noire). Their previous games, Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy), have received some critical praise, with both sitting around an 80 on metacritic.
Lately, you may have heard of them in various news sources about the studio’s toxic work environment (each of those words is a different hyperlink), with one of the journalists who originally broke the story allegedly being blacklisted by Sony.
David Cage, QD’s founder and CEO, is often referred to as an auteur, (an auteur is a filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that the filmmaker is regarded as the author of the movie), but routinely says weird and odd things about his own works. He often feels that he can create real people within his games but seems intent on not exploring what themes and messages his games are making, because those have consequences and he would rather just make games with 2,000-page scripts. The opening paragraphs in the previous link’s article are telling:
Sony is being a little cheeky when it comes to bragging about the depth of Quantum Dreams [sic] upcoming thriller game, Beyond: Two Souls. It recently shipped out a 2,000 page book to a few news outlets to show off how long the script for the game is.
When the book was opened, it was totally blank, revealing no secrets or spoilers other than a statement on the first page which says “The average film script is about 100 pages long. At 2,000 pages, this is not your average film script.”
CONTENT WARNING
Throughout the game, there are moments involving mature themes, including (but not limited to):
Self Harm, Abuse, Sexual Assault, Attempted Rape, Suicide, Torture
Beyond: Two Souls (BTS) is the fourth game from QD/Cage, following Heavy Rain, Indigo Prophecy and the oft-forgotten Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Indigo Prophecy through to this game all feature limited UIs, environmental interactions, and quick-time events (QTEs).
The conception of this game is a little… stalker-ish, to be honest, with Cage reportedly spending “the last 12 months looking at pictures of Ellen Page” before even approaching her to work on it.
The big selling point for this game compared to the others, however, is its sheer starpower filling in the roles of its main characters Jodie Holmes and Nathan Dawkins, played by Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, respectively, though the game will be played entirely from the perspective of Page’s character, Jodie. But even that isn’t free from controversy when it was revealed that QD went much further than they promised with Page’s in-game appearance.
There is a lot of real world stuff going on surrounding this studio and this game, so I apologize in advance if not all of it makes it into the actual videos of the LP.
Let’s jump right into what this LP is, because this won’t be a normal playthrough of the game.
When playing through BTS, the player will experience little vignette-style chapters told almost completely out of order. There is an in-game explanation for this, but I feel like this makes the game’s narrative and themes a little hard to digest when you could experience tonal whiplash from two adjacently-played chapters. So, for this LP, I’ll be showing the game off in chronological order. We’ll start from the earliest point in the story’s timeline and work our way forward until we reach the end.
I’m doing this for a few reasons:
- Can Cage’s story, as it is written, become coherent when characters are introduced in a proper narrative order and maintained for the length of time they are utilized?
- Do the larger chapters, the set pieces, still flow in and out of the story like they do when played in the game’s normal progression?
- Do the mysteries/reveals of the game work better when we, as the player, know the same things that Jodie does?
Note: I am not doing the LP in this way because of some belief that stories must be told in chronological order to be good; this is merely a chance to look at one particular story through this light, to see what happens.
There will also be two videos for each update, one with uncut commentary (where I will be talking over cutscenes and dialogue pretty liberally) and one with cut commentary (where I won’t be doing those things).
Q: What is the spoiler policy for this thread?
Though we are going to hit some things out of order, and sometimes be unintentionally spoiled for later parts, don’t spoil anything until we’ve seen it.
Q: Is knowledge of other Quantic Dream games necessary for this game?
No, but it may help you understand a bit more of what is happening in the game, especially how the gameplay mechanics work.
Q: Can we discuss other Quantic Dream games in this thread?
Absolutely, though if you’re worried about mentioning spoilers for those games, just use spoiler tags and you’ll be fine.
Q: Is this technically a SoulsBorne game?
Yes.
