There are many moments in the game, where not only does the player not have freedom but has no choice whatsoever… The plot calls for a specific thing to happen, so you press the necessary buttons and make it happen. (The above image is concept art showing how Aiden moves through the world) While Aidan was a great idea, his unfulfilled potentiall greatly outweighed what his playability was able to bring to the game.

I know it would asking way too much for the designers to try to put in that level of freedom especially accounting for all the consequences, so that’s not where the answer lies… Maybe the game-play should have been presented in a way where it doesn’t seem so obvious that the freedom was out-of-reach. That sounds like a really fun time right? Well, it turns out he can only act on things that have action options, which is especially disheartening when we’ve got an entire world to explore with so many different things in it that we’d like to see affected. This wouldn’t be so bad, if I didn’t feel that certain moments were begging for it… We are given Aidan, an entity to play around with who has abilities and can float around the environment acting on things. There is a serious lack of freedom in this game. There is an attempt giving the player an array of choices, but they are limited to small moments, like conversation, and only several options are given, each of which will inevitably progress the story in the same direction. That’s alright, but doesn’t lend itself to gameplay very well, as players expect to be given choices. There is a set plot, and things will happen that are suppose to happen. While it wasn’t a terrible idea to try and adapt this story to a game, a lot of control had to be taken out of the player’s hands in order for the story to develop properly. I think if Quantic Dream realized that by writing this for a video game they were biting off more than they could chew, they could have sold the script to Focus Features and audiences might have been better off. I can’t see much point in warping this story into a game-play experience other than to try and further the medium. Beyond Two Souls should have just been a movie. Which leads me to my one and only complaint. The script appears to be given the same heart-felt attention as would be a film script… Along with that, the writers did an amazing job at presenting something imaginative and compelling. I like my video games rich with story, characters, and emotion, and Beyond Two Souls was a stellar example of each of those, too. The character design, voices and acting, production design… all of it was terrific.

The original score was well above average, and the sound design was flawless. The graphics were consistently impressive, and the attention to detail in the environments were even more so. There is a lot to like about Beyond Two Souls, and a lot to praise.

Beyond two souls concept art