finished Beyond: Two Souls. It's definitely not good, but I can't bring myself to hate it despite being super dumb a lot of the times, having terrible QTEs, and some real boring parts. There's enough there that works that it's still sort of an interesting movie-game, it's just a mess. It also looks like it cost a shitload to make. Tons of varied areas with graphics that look about on par with Quantum Break which is insane for a PS3-origin game (note I was playing the PS4 version which looks a lot better). There were parts where it looks like you're playing an interactive live-action TV show. Pretty amazing there and some great art direction and animation too. I actually thought Page gave a good performance for the main character.
The main problem is the timeline jumping around was so random a lot of the middle of the game feels like they just randomly selected the order of the scenes and it really doesn't work. The story spends far too much time flashing back to the main character's childhood and then it's hard to figure out what the story is even about. It's like about her ex-CIA agent on the run bit, it's about portals to the other dimension, then randomly it's a chapter about Navajo Indian Spirits where Jodie is a ghostbuster, and then there's the chapter were she gets to live the homeless life with her homeless friends, oh and then there's the seeing dead people six sense stuff. The plot feels so scattered and all over the place it never feels like there's a nicely woven narrative. Plus some of the tropes were very generic and lame like Dafoe's character's endgame; his character was a lot more interesting early on as a father scientist character.
Gameplay-wise, well what gameplay? The adventure part of pressing buttons to walk around doing mundane life stuff is fine, it can be kind of clever at times, and kinda of lol at other times, but mostly harmless. The entire chapter dedicated to getting ready for a date including a cooking mama style make dinner for two was silly but neat. Otoh, the action QTE stuff where they think they're being next-level by getting rid of button prompts and instead you follow what the character is doing visually is fucking stupid and tons of times I didn't know what direction it even wanted me to press. The stealth was ok mainly because it was so easy. Really hope Detroit doesn't have this button promptless QTE thing Beyond introduced.
Soundtrack was pretty good! Looking at the production art for the game (which is really nice) it's kind questionable how they spent so much talent and money on a story that doesn't have focus. Unlike Heavy Rain, Beyond is pretty much a straight forward choiceless, puzzle-less interactive movie and you can tell they sacrificed that stuff to focus on the narrative. But if you're going to do that, at least save it for when your narrative is fucking awesome; which here it totally isn't.
Eh, don't regret playing it and couldn't put it down tonight for the last 4 hours of the game which were pretty entertaining, but wouldn't really recommend it to anyone other than David Cage fans. Hopefully Detroit is closer to Heavy Rain with even more branching and player-driven narrative.
Also played a bunch of Slayaway Camp which I hadn't realized is available for free on Kongragate, but I bought it on steam for $6. It's a bunch of sliding block puzzles with a 80s horror film homage skin to it. Slide into people to murder them in creative ways as parody's of famous horror movie icons. Gameplay has some creative stuff too because the kids and camp counslers and other humans all run if you slide right next to them. So it's a sliding block puzzle where the layout of the puzzle is fluid and can change depending on your actions which complicates things. Pretty ok little puzzle game for a few bucks and a couple hours.
