Short Stories and Scrambled Chronologies in ‘Beyond: Two Souls’
People condemn Beyond: Two Souls for superficial reasons that take the storytelling for granted and focus on the controls. Sure, the controls don’t demand much from the player, and cutscenes – rather than player agency – pave the narrative path through which the story takes its course. But, when agency is afforded, you’re never simply doing something that you have done before, at least, in terms of how the story pieces itself together. Beyond weaves together a narrative mosaic that eventually coheres into an unforgettable and emotional experience.
One of the most polarizing aspects of how Beyond tells its story is the scrambled sequence of the narration. You’re presented with moments of narrative angle from past, present and future of how the protagonist Jodie’s life is portrayed. Pretty soon into playing the game, you’ll be introduced to the loading screen that takes an ethereal form of a kind of DNA sequence that pieces together an otherwise linear string of major events in Jodie’s life.
Beyond excels primarily because of the way it withholds information from the player. You are intended to be somewhat disoriented, as you get to know a character through out-of-order anecdotes and unreliable narrative consequences. The chronology peppers you through Jodie’s story in a way that other narratives – like Westworld – only dream of accomplishing. And it feels like you’re sequencing the genome of Jodie’s life, as represented by the double-helix narrative timeline between scenes.
The narrative achievements of Beyond couldn’t have been accomplished by the way that most traditional video game narratives tell their stories: a linear plot. To the extent that this game is clear and linear, much of the narrative suspense is temporarily drained out. This narrative constraint actually produces an opportunity for the game to treat its non-linear plot as properly contained short stories.
One of the most impactful examples of narrative suspense in Beyond happens nearly halfway through your experience of the story, when Jodie is picked up by the government worker Nathan to clear out a building that has been all but decimated by escaped entities.
This scene brings Jodie’s relationship with Aiden into crucial scrutiny and reliance; she is the only one who the CIA can enlist to enter this violently cursed building. Thus, frighteningly, Jodie weans her way into the building, subtly approaching mangled corpses, investigating the moments of their death.
This entity-infested building becomes a semi-hallowed space for Jodie’s heroic narrative to ascend. As the player, this building presents itself as the first true challenge that your character will face. Jodie has been exercising her powers via Aiden for some time now, but this is the first time that anyone – especially Nathan from the CIA – has called upon you in an official setting to save so many lives.
You are dropped off in Nathan’s car in the pouring rain, and then greeted with a horrific and carnal scene. Military men are being carted off by medics; mangled scientists are on stretchers; spotlights and flashing emergency lights are keeping a wary eye on the shattered glass door entrance. All these warning signs and more greet Jodie for her first solo mission into this building.
A debrief is given to you as you approach the building’s steps, and you learn that you need to shut down a condenser. This condenser is deep underground in this research facility, and has overridden the safety controls that scientists had set in place. Much to their surprise, activating this condenser has successfully ripped open a portal between two words: ours and beyond.
This portal has allowed for innumerable powerful entities to escape, thus massacring the scientists and their research facility. As a little girl with no one but Aiden for comfort, you naturally enter this building with a bit of fear.
It’s a testament to great storytelling when a game can evoke deep emotions in a player, and this scene with Jodie restoring peace by battling entities and shutting down the condenser proves just how great Beyond’s storytelling is – through adrenaline and fear. I felt true anxiety when I started fighting my way through the burning and abandoned building. Jodie’s life is severely threatened multiple times, and your reaction time as a player is the only thing between brutal murder and heroic victory.
Eventually, you shut down the condenser, banishing other entities from entering the human world. But along the way, Jodie’s trials really turn the story’s narrative towards a darker, more mature place. She has to fight off mad scientists, possessed bodies intent on slaughtering her. She has to wade through burning hallways and collapsing furniture. She has to solve a problem that neither the military nor the police can solve. If you don’t think this brave little girl did some serious aging in this process, you’ve never been through a deeply traumatic experience.
One of the more beautiful moments in Beyond was almost a mini-game sequence. In the Homeless sequence, Jodie is in the freezing snow, tasked with gathering some money for a hot meal with her homeless camp. In keeping with the game’s form, you can gather this money in multiple ways. If you look far enough along the street block, you’ll encounter a panhandling musician, who claims that he can no longer play his guitar for money because his fingers are frozen stiff.
Jodie picks up this acoustic guitar and plays a soft, serene solo song. You have the option to stop her from playing at any time, but you can allow her to finish the song, which earns you more than your homeless friends were expecting. It’s a simple song, and a simple moment. Yet it captures the spirit of so much of Jodie’s character. You can hear in her voice a frailty that comes from vulnerability. You can see on her face a kind of truth in the words she is singing; this isn’t just a song, it’s a song from her heart. You can infer from the sight of her frozen breath that this situation is humbling to the point of defining her character, setting up Jodie’s character arc for a resolute future.
One of my favorite things in Beyond is actually one of the most criticized chapters in the game: Navajo. This chapter is essentially divorced from the rest of the story. Navajo presents new characters, a Jodie whose recent past we don’t recognize, with location and plot consequences that are independent of the rest of Jodie’s story, and so forth. In its defense, I love Navajo not because it fits in very well with the story, but because its presence functions like a short story.
Maybe people’s complaints about Navajo would disappear if the chapter was released independently as DLC. Navajo is a great tale of how Jodie relates to other people, how her ethics lead to unwanted consequences, and how the rest of the world has dealt with entities. I think Navajo works so well conceptually as a short story because, in truth, the chapter’s consequence doesn’t substantially affect the rest of Beyond’s narrative.
Those like me who are already sold on Jodie’s character will relish in these unique moments of seeing her characterized with people other than Nathan, in environments other than the CIA, etc.
In this same way, I think the aforementioned scene, Homeless, fits very well as a short story. And to lump this in with the same category as Navajo is a bit risky: the game’s main conclusion ends up depending on your choice between characters from both Navajo and Homeless. I think these options, as a conclusion, are not that great, and in fact probably a bit asymmetrically wedged into the story. That said, I think Beyond isn’t defined in terms of whether or not its final consequence matters (i.e. see my rationale for the end of Life is Strange). What matters is the path you take towards the ending.
The gameplay mechanics in Beyond vary based on the mission to which you’re assigned. Whether you’re controlling Aiden through walls and buildings, run-and-gunning in Somalia as an assassin, solving a murder mystery, playing detective, fending off horror and violence, fighting thugs in a street brawl, stealthing your way past enemies, etc., Beyond does its best to avoid recycling gameplay. That said, one of the most legitimate critiques of Beyond is about the controls.
The controls of Beyond are not always intuitive or consistent, which can really throw you out of the immersion experience from the game. Almost at random, just when it’s been long enough for you to forget about it, the game asks you to shake your controller around to complete a movement. The rest of the game ignores the motion sensing abilities of the DualShock4, but when called upon to use those controls, it never feels natural. Sure, some moments of motion sensing work – striking a match, for instance – but most could easily work by virtue of the analog stick – like jumping down from a ledge.
Ultimately, your choices in Beyond don’t amount to much. The variations in the gameplay consequences are seldom fundamental to your experience as a player. Mostly, choosing something different means a different track of dialogue. And yet, sometimes, acting in a certain order or fashion will save a life that would otherwise be lost if you chose differently.
I don’t think it’s a tenable critique of choice-based games like these to predicate their value as stories and storytelling mediums on variation. Rather, I think these games succeed when you feel involved, invested, and identified with Jodie and her situation in the world. Beyond accomplishes this by giving you just enough agency to make her story your own.
Beyond is also a great commentary on mental health. The most obvious example is illustrated in how a young girl deals with living in a way that no other kid does: with an entity always around, attached to her psyche. Jodie scares off other kids, is bullied by kids who think she’s strange, and suffers from multiple levels of identity disorder. From the root level of Jodie never knowing her biological mother as a child, to being rejected by her surrogate parents early in her childhood, to living in a CIA test lab, under surveillance, and so on, we are invited to radically sympathize with a girl whose main impediment in her life is something out of her control.
Beyond Jodie, we see other characters grapple with similar struggles. Nathan’s constant lamenting of his dead wife and child has driven him from caregiver and role model to the point of sadism, authoritarianism, and eventually suicide. Jodie’s own biological mother is revealed to have been drugged by the CIA to the point of being in a lifelong coma. Jodie has to decide whether her mother’s soul can bear such a state. We are invited at every turn to see these characters complexly, and that’s where is game succeeds.
In anticipation of David Cage’s forthcoming release, Detroit: Become Human, this game is a great primer for understanding videogames as a storytelling medium. The gameplay of Beyond is downplayed in proportion to its narrative, but that’s no reason to relegate it to the title of “interactive movie” as some have. This game captures the story of a young woman in a sci-fi setting with brilliance. Those who complete Jodie’s arc will find themselves at a crossroads: to put her story to bed and let it tell itself, or go back and see what other kind of character we can create, if only we think beyond what we’ve done before.
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