Beyond: Two Souls

[Premier Alexander Romanov]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvVL9JG3OEs
I wanted to like this game, I really did. But Quantic Dream has simultaneously gone forwards and backwards from Heavy Rain with their latest installment.
The game stars Ellen Page as Jodie Holmes, a girl with a special gift, and Willem Dafoe (the Green Goblin from the first Spiderman movie) as Nathan Dawkins, a paranormal researcher. Jodie can not only see and communicate with otherworldly entities, but has one of her own: an invisible presence named Aiden that can do things for her. Nathan, on the other hand, is a sort of father figure for Jodie, as her abilities mean that she is at a government research facility for the supernatural for most of her life.
The game's biggest draw, and biggest downfall, is that you play events of Jodie's life from ages 8 to 23...out of order. One level, you will be a young woman working with the CIA to uncover secrets from a Middle Eastern embassy, the next, you will be a 13-year-old attempting and failing to connect with stereotypical teenagers at a birthday party. You are hopping all over Jodie's timeline, with early levels mentioning things that you don't find out until later in the game, as more and more points along her timeline are unlocked, and it can be somewhat jarring.
The next is the characterization, which could have helped the entire game immensely if done right. While Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe bring in stellar performances, they are playing Ellen Page, a snarky, semi-sarcastic, angst-ridden youngster, and Willem Dafoe, a normally nice guy who can turn crazy easily. Plus, the game's development of any character outside of Jodie is virtually nonexistant. One level, you are introduced to Ryan, Jodie's hardass of a CIA handler, and a few levels later, set a couple years after the level where you meet Ryan, Jodie has fallen in love with him. Without the time to develop these characters and how their interactions evolve, they come off as uninteresting and bland.
On a technical level, if you have played Heavy Rain, this game is exactly the same in terms of mechanics, quick-time events and all. All you really get to do as Jodie is move around, talk to people, and occasionally have cover-based third-person shooting mechanics introduced. Aiden's controls are not much better, because you have a limited range from Jodie in which to interact with people and objects, which have been helpfully indicated as to what you can interact with by being color-coded. And even the quick-time events don't mean much, as you can get through them without any trouble even if you miss every single prompt. However, certain events will change things about how your character interacts with others, and even how some characters appear physically.
The most glowing thing I can say about this game is its motion capture. The character models are all done by their actual voice actors in motion capture, and the lines were read while computer mapping read a grid on the characters' faces, meaning that their faces and body movements are eerily realistic. The game is beautiful, and impressive on that motion capture standpoint, but there are the occasional texture and robotic movement issues.
To boil it down and wrap it up, Beyond: Two Souls is clearly trying to be an arthouse film, when it is a video game from the same people who brought us Heavy Rain. Ellen Page, Willem Dafoe, and the other actors bring the best they can to the mediocre script, but the game cannot stand alone on that and its motion capture. I want to like this game, even as a guilty pleasure, but with 8 hours of gameplay with some replayability to choose different selections to create different outcomes (23 endings in all), and a muddied, schizophrenic story, I can at best call this average, and that's me trying to be optimistic.
David Cage, if you love movies so much, stop making games and go make a movie instead.

[D.A._Sakuyamon]

This might not be great as a game but I'm actually loving it as I would a movie. A very long movie perhaps but one worth that time.

[Premier Alexander Romanov]

This might not be great as a game but I'm actually loving it as I would a movie. A very long movie perhaps but one worth that time.

That's the thing. The director wants his game to be a movie, and a very artsy one at that.
But it's not a movie. It's a game.