It didn't stick the landing

Finished Beyond: Two Souls. 

Young writers will ask if they should finish their book before they talk to a publisher. Yes, they do. And that's not just because publisher or agent wants to be sure you can finish the length of a book. There's more to it than that. They want to know if all those pages, all those chapters and scenes, all those character and descriptions and bits of action, were actually working towards a satisfying finish.

We're talking, basically, the difference between a story, and a string of incidents.

That's my final review, really. Some of the incidents are fun. But in the end, they don't string together. Through the first two-thirds of the game you feel that everything that is going on is helping to build the final crisis and resolution. All the incidents that the game highlights for you (that is, has you play) feel like they are going to eventually contribute to the story.

And it isn't even a fault of the non-chronological story-telling. The actions really don't make a difference. There are twenty-four potential endings (!) but the differences between them are largely who is still around to share it with you.

You never get a chance to throw off the yoke of your CIA handlers, whether to betray them, run, agree with them, or go on a rampage of revenge killing everything in sight with your powers. But looking back on the entire chronology, now that you've seen all the pieces of it, those pieces don't connect. From the perspective you finally gain at the end of the game, Jodie runs from the CIA, goes back to work for them, runs from them, goes back to work for them (despite the larger and larger betrayals!) And the same for Ryan. No matter how terrible he behaves and how cold you are in response, a few scenes down the road the game is telling you Jodie is in love with him again.

Oh, and those "choices?" You don't really get choices. What you largely get is the failure to pull off a QTE. Even the dialogue choices are only barely choices. Where most game pause on a dialogue wheel or tree, this game flashes several dialogue options at you and if you don't select one within about half a second, it defaults to one and goes on without your input.

It isn't a game. It's a walking simulator. Or maybe call it a karate-chopping simulator. Making you press three different buttons just to climb through a window doesn't make you an active participant in a choice to climb through the window.

Still, even that would be -- might be -- acceptable if the story you got at the end held together. In the end, you do finally find out what Aiden is (and the answer is one that flies in the face of not just how you probably played him, but several things the game has him do). But as I said, there isn't any great resolution. You can't even finish off by dying...you can indeed chose to cross over, but that just means you settle down to life after death instead of life with...oh, how about the CIA agent who lied to you on multiple occasions, and let's not even talk about the dinner scene!

I'm not unhappy I played it. But I'm glad I got it on sale.