Beyond: Two Souls

[hogso]

Are you talking about the price or the game? Because if it's anything like Heavy Rain then you might as well be watching a Blu-ray

 

Exactement Captain Hastings, as referred to by Ingram above

[Ginko]

Ah, serves me right for skipping to the most recent post!

[hogso]

So I picked it up for £15 in the sale, and have put in a few hours so far.

 

There is actually the making of decent game in it. In the hands of another dev, some of the ideas and techniques employed would have made a wonderfui survival horror game. There's a section where you play as the girl when she's about 8 or so, as she struggles to deal with 'Aiden', who is, for want of a better term, a Poltergeist, I guess. You can control him, and messa round with stuff. The reason this section works so well is because you feel very vulnerable playing as this little girl, who is waiting for dinner to be cooked, and basically wonders around the house playing.

 

Whilst she does that, though, 'Aiden' appears in a mirror for a split second (it's literally a black scribble/blob thing, not a human form at all), and, when the girl is playing with two dolls, controls a third and man, it ain't half a creepy moment. At the end of that little chapter there's a very Poltergeist (the movie) moment, when she is trapped in her room, with her parents trying to break the door down as she screams. When they do get in, she's covered in cuts and bruises and blames 'the monsters'. There is also reference made by her, when speaking to 'Aiden', that he shouldn't be scared. For whatever reason, the idea that a spirit, or whatever it is, with incredible power in the human world/realm (it can move things about of course, but also possess people), is scared by something...else, I found quite an uncomfortable one.

 

There's also a section, when she's older, where you control 'Aiden' and he takes out a whole SWAT team, including a helicopter, which is pretty fun. It doesn't seem that sort of thing happens nearly often enough, though, and again, like the above example, a whole game of being a ghost **** shit up might be pretty good. But this isn't that game, it merely hints at it, like a gameshow host blaring 'Here's what you could of won!'

 

They've been the best bits so far. It looks good, sounds great, the voice acting and motion capture is superb, but it just isn't much of a game. For the price of £15, though, it's well worth a look for fans of Heavy Rain, which I was. All others should avoid. Unless it was like. £5.99. Or something. Or maybe if Aiden forced you play it...

 

In fact, I think it's worth mentioning that I would consider both this and Heavy Rain the same way I view The Walking Dead and Telltale's other 'adventure' games. Gameplay is minimal in both, with production values being far superior in Quantic Dreams' games, whereas the characters and story tend to be better in Telltales' games. The latter being the more important of course, which makes those games 'better', but I thought it a point worth making.

 

I just find it a bit odd that The Walking Dead was so heavily praised and Heavy Rain/Beyond panned by certain sites/reviewers/critics, when they are actually very similar beasts. You play The Walking Dead for the drama, right? Not for the gameplay. I would say the same of Beyond & Heavy Rain. It all comes down to pricing, then, I suppose - season pass of The Walking Dead was £15? So that would be a fair price to pay for this too

Edited January 6, 2014 by hogso

[hogso]

I finished it last night (yeah, I haven't been playing much PS3) - all in all I'm glad I got it. I found some of the set pieces to be entertaining, and moments of the story quite touching, but unfortunately the story as a whole wasn't good enough to forgive the lack of gameplay entirely.

Maybe one day such a game will come about, and if it does I will snap it up. But this - nor The Walking Dead for that matter - isn't that game.

[leemond2008]

Picked this up today, looking forward to it because heavy rain is probably my favourite game of the last 10 years.

[Ginko]

Picked this up today, looking forward to it because heavy rain is probably my favourite game of the last 10 years.

 

IT'S NOT A GAME! Even calling it an 'interactive movie' is pushing it considering the sheer lack of interaction.

[hogso]

I platiunum'd it the other day. As long as you enjoyed Heavy Rain, and didn't pay much for it, you should get on fine Leemond. As I mentioned in my above (probably overly long) post, the story isn't good enough to be able to get away with the lack of gameplay, but I did think some of the set pieces and story elements were well realised, and it's quite touching in parts.

 

As touched on in the MGS thread, the difference in the quality of acting and voice performance is very telling, because they used proper actors, playing the scenes and doing the motion capture and voices at the same time. Unfortunately it doesnt really matter too much about that if the script isn't great. And not all of the perfomances are good, there are a couple which are just terrible - the military general is godawful for example.

 

My favourite line in the game is - "SHIMUSHANI...! YOU...YOU TALK?!" - it's Shenmue level stuff, and really, really made me laugh.

 

"Want to try a game of lucky hit?"

[leemond2008]

I really enjoyed it up until the Shimushani stuff that just dragged on and got really stupid and tedious.

It's been decent so far but not a patch on heavy rain, heavy rain actually made you feel like you were in control of what happened but beyond: two souls just makes you watch a load of cut scenes then press a few buttons just to initiate the next cut scene. I know HR was like that it just felt like you had more options and more things to so.

The voice acting and motion capture is fantastic as you said though.

I normally buy a game and play it for a few hours then switch it off to never play it again but these kind of games hold my attention (probably because you don't need to mash buttons or have any major skills to play or complete them)

Are there any other games around like these two?

Edited February 12, 2014 by leemond2008

[hogso]

There's a few - Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy, which was the cut American version (the cut was an interactive sex scene, oo-er) which is made by the same devs. In fact, they only made one other game, Omikron on the Dreamcast (and PC?), but Fahrenheit is really very reminiscent of Heavy Rain and Beyond. They've been getting more uninteractive as the games have gone on, with Fahrenheit having a bit more 'game', I guess. It had an interesting mechanic where the mental health of the main character would get worse depending on what happened, so you could actually lose the game. There were also interesting 'dangerous' elements that could result in a game over - one I remember in particular is, when in your apartment, if you choose to drink a bottle of wine and take some medication, you wake up the next morning dead I guess that they knocked that sort of thing on the head with Beyond cos they wanted to tell the story and that was it, which is a shame. afaik you can only 'lose' in Beyond right at the very end if you fail a QTE.

 

It's still very much story driven more than anything else, though, and as it is an earlier attempt by Quantic the gameplay that there is can be a little awkward at times. There's one section in particular where you climb a fence, a fence of all things, which can be quite infuritating if you don't do the action when you're supposed to. The story also goes completely mental by the end, but it's worth a look. It was on PS2, Xbox and PC (on GOG aswell) too I think.

 

Other than that there are some ' 3D adventure' games which might be worth a look - I'm thinking of something like Dreamfall here. Man I love that game, although that may be because I loved The Longest Journey so much (the game that proceeds Dreamfall) and seeing those characters again bigger and better and in a properly realised 3D world was glorious.

 

Barely interactive indie PC games are also quite in vogue at the moment, something like Gone Home is well worth your time, even though it is literally you just walking round a house looking for your sister.There's also Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable.

 

They're all PC though, not sure if you game on PC, so seeing as you definitely do have a PS3 then the best comparison would be The Walking Dead, probably.

 

In my opinion though the ultimate in this vein of game will always be Shenmue. There is more gameplay than the likes of Beyond sure, but the most enjoyment you get from the game is just walking round and talking to people, playing darts and buying capsule toys...