Jodie, Jodie, Jodie

For a bit there I was so tired of everything I couldn't even get up the interest to play games. At least that has changed.

I've been playing Beyond: Two Souls which isn't really a shooter but is a little more active than a visual novel. Just call it highly story-oriented. You can make critical choices, but only the ones at the very end change the game radically. Whether you sob quietly or go full Carrie at the party, for instance, might get brought up in dialogue at some point but doesn't change anything otherwise.

Oh, yeah. You are basically playing Elliot Page with psychic powers. Sort of psychic powers. Actually, this is your link to the entity Aiden, which you also "play," but he/it/they get no dialogue choices.

As an aside, playing a character in a game is always a dual-mind thing. This game makes it more so because we don't really know what Aiden is or why he does the things he does. We have Jodie's opinions -- but those are expressed to third parties and are (you guessed it!) a dialogue choice anyhow! And through the game Aiden can learn things (by overhearing conversations Jodie wasn't there for) that may or may not eventually get communicated to Jodie.

Plus the game is played out of chronological sequence. It sounds like a massive mind screw, but it is actually quite straight-forward.

The controls, on the other hand...

Take the crazy left foot, right hand stuff from the early Assassin's Creed. Combine it with the insane camera of Nier Automata. Re-invent everything, from QTEs to shooting, then make everything an action. In about the middle of the game there's a romantic dinner and you can if you choose that path make chicken curry......using mouse and control keys to chop the vegetables one by one! Hell, to scramble through a window takes four button presses of three different buttons!

(And the PC port shares with so many games a seeming complete lack of any standard for how to represent the controls. I get it; on the controller it would be square or cross or whatever...but us poor mouse-and-keyboard players get shown a circle with a line drawn through it and really struggling to figure out what the game wants us to do.)

Example of the control scheme. Normal interaction for a game is, when you get close you get a floating "E" or whatever the interact button is. You press that "E" or square or whatever, and you do the thing (open a door, pick up a fire extinguisher, you know the drill). In this game, you maneuver close enough to allow you to interact (words alone can not describe the sheer hell of navigating a room in this game) then, holding down a mouse button flick the mouse in the direction of the floating interact dot. Then keep holding until the animation completes. Then release, so you can click again to actually do the (like chopping vegetables or climbing over a low fence).

After so many games developing instincts to dodge or parry (dodge or protego!) this one requires you wait for Jodie to choose what she is going to do, start the movement, then you hold down the mouse button and move the mouse (at the right speed of course -- and the game is very sensitive about what the right speed is) in the screen direction that some part of the action is moving. So if you are in three-quarter view and Jodie is doing a bent-knee kick, good freaking luck figuring out which direction you are supposed to be moving.

There's a reason the forums are full of people crying for help on how to get through the CIA Training Sequence.

At least that one, they force you to get up off the floor and try again until you finally get it right. Everywhere else in the game -- almost refreshingly! -- these QTE-like events have no retake. You never die failing to dodge a knife and have to replay the sequence. Well, not exactly. You fail the QTE, you get stabbed, you go to a side-path where now you are bleeding out and have to deal with that, and when you get to the end of that sequence you get a little scorecard telling you "96% of players can dodge a hell of a lot better than you can."

Okay, it doesn't snark at you. Is still...different. On the whole, though, I like it. For two reasons. First is that having to re-take the damned QTE -- and watch Lara Croft impale herself throat-first on a spike trap once again -- isn't a lot of fun.

The other reason is that this became a lot like my "damaged Shepard" Mass Effect run. Jodie gets a hard time of it anyhow, getting beat up, homeless (and both at the same time) and having her and her three whole weeks of CIA training struggling just to survive. (Okay, seriously, it was longer than that. Fortunately you didn't have to play through all of it)  Not breezing through with a James Bond quip, but getting bruised and stabbed and not only that, not always succeeding at trying to save the people she tries to save.

***

And speaking of being a monster: Finally read a review that explained why people like the Murderbot Diaries. Given the gloss I gave to Beyond: Two Souls above, call this a high-functioning autistic with a built-in machinegun trying to find purpose in a corporate dystopia.

And it is funny and heartwarming. Plus various violent interactions. And you really do have to read it to get why people like it.

SecUnit is also my go-to now for Untrustworthy Narrator. Not that you ever take anything it says at face value. 

It doesn't, either.