The meander through the forest was a little difficult, mainly because I couldn’t adjust the settings in the demo, and the default settings are really dark. As you’re trying to get away from search parties that appear almost immediately, you have to rush through the trees, ducking some branches and jumping some fallen trunks as you go. I got hurt more often than not, unable to see what exactly was going on.
Once you get a certain distance, the dogs attack. You have to fight them off with a stick (literally), and with every wounded “yelp” of the dogs, I cringed. I hate to see animals being hurt, even in a video game, so I had a hard time getting through that part of the scene. But once Jodie defeats them, they run off crying, and she’s worse for the wear as she tries again to evade the search party.
The next part was reminiscent of Heavy Rain, in that you must climb a rock wall. The mechanics were very similar to the scene in which Norman Hayden, the FBI profiler, must climb a wall to follow up on a lead and get more clues. As you begin climbing, you can press the buttons popping up on the screen slowly, but as Jodie climbs higher, you must follow the QTEs much more quickly, and you get penalized if you miss one. Once you get to a certain point, you can duck back and hide, and you can feel Jodie’s heart pounding in the vibration of the controller, worried she’s been found, only to discover that the cops come to the wall and think that they’ve lost her.
The rise and fall of tension is so palpable, and it doesn’t stop once Jodie climbs to the top of the cliff and has to use Aiden to try to steal a motorcycle. It’s here that, for the first time, you can actually possess someone with Aiden. In the supernatural form, some of the officers show up as blue, but one shows up as orange, and you can use your abilities to take him over. From there, you can take a gun from one of the cars, or just hijack one of the cars and start slamming it into the guard rails over and over, distracting the other cops long enough for Jodie to steal the motorcycle. I assumed the next scene would just be a cutscene, but you get to control Jodie’s driving as well, taking her down dark, winding roads as she continuously looks over her shoulder at the helicopter that has begun following her.
As Jodie comes face-to-face with a barricade of cops at the other end of a bridge, she stops the motorcycle and looks to the ground, as though wanting to admit defeat. Instead, in her mind, she pleads to Aiden to help her. As you slam on the gas and drive straight towards the officers, you can again use Aiden’s protective shield, allowing Jodie to go through the cars and men effortlessly, pushing them out of the way and making it to the other side, where she continues on. The lead officer, who was in the interim fighting scene watching Jodie learn how to spar, gets on his radio and calls in that they’ve lost her, and she’s on her way to the next town.
If any of the previous tension had you on the edge of your seat, that was nothing compared to the final showdown between Jodie and the cops. They’re waiting for her when she arrives, and they shoot the motorcycle right out from under her, leaving her wounded in the middle of what looks to be the center part of this small town. As she crawls behind a car, trying to protect herself, she again summons Aiden, and unleashes him in full fury on the officers. And this is where things get absolutely incredible.
There’s really no set way to wreak havoc on these cops – it’s completely up to you. You can take certain officers over, shooting your partners, or throwing grenades and really wrecking things. You can kill some of them outright, if they have a red outline. And, as the destruction grows (at one point, a thrown grenade blows up a gas station), you must help Jodie get into a building, at which point she is sobbing and begging for your help, fearing for her life. I missed it the first time, but on the second playthrough, I realized in that moment, I could take over the helicopter pilot and blow up everything.
As horrifying as it all sounds, it was glorious.
There are two endings you can get to that scene, though each one ends with the same idea: Jodie grabs the familiar cop we’ve seen before and tells him, very impolitely, to stop trying to capture her – a scene you might remember from the game’s promotional trailers and early screenshots. She then walks off into the wet darkness, and from there, a trailer plays.
While I loved Heavy Rain, I was concerned about Beyond: Two Souls. I wasn’t sure if the same mechanics and gameplay could carry more than one game. But it’s clear that the changes the developers have made, and the incredibly intuitive and visceral experience of playing as Aiden, has taken Beyond: Two Souls down a much different path. It’s also a completely different kind of story – where Heavy Rain was based very much in reality, Beyond: Two Souls has a supernatural bent to it, focusing on the relationship between Jodie and Aiden – and what it means to be beyond death, if David Cage’s comments are to be believed.
Beyond: Two Souls releases on October 8, but the demo is now available through the PSN. I highly recommend checking out the demo, especially if you’re a fan of any of Quantic Dream’s other work. The game is more like an interactive movie, changing the way you think about how a game is played – and ramping up tension to an entirely new level.
