Beyond: Two Souls

• 1. Introduction

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  Beyond: Two Souls, a 2013 video game from the studio Quantic Dream, was built on a script of around 2,000 pages. A typical screenplay runs between 95 and 125 pages, with each page worth roughly a minute of screen time.

  Elliot Page, who played the lead, described the pace of recording in an interview. "We'd do 30, 40 pages a day. It's insane compared to a film," Page said. "Jodie goes through a lot. This is an incredibly emotional story and journey for this girl."

  Jodie Holmes is the girl at the centre of it all. She shares her life with a second soul named Aiden, who has been tied to her since birth. How can one player guide two beings at once? Who is Aiden, and what does his bond with Jodie cost her? And why did critics who largely agreed on the performances split so sharply on nearly everything else?

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• 2. Playing Both Souls

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  A white dot floating over an object tells the player that Jodie can interact with it. Tilting the controller stick toward the dot performs the action. When a precise move is needed, icons appear on screen asking for a button press or a hold. Conversation options hover in the air, and if the player waits too long, the game falls back on a default choice.

  Chases and hand-to-hand fights slip into slow motion. The player has to read which way Jodie is moving and push the stick in that direction. Stealth sequences ask the player to sneak Jodie through a space while coordinating with Aiden.

  At almost any moment, the player can switch to Aiden. In a two-player game, a second person can take him over instead. Aiden is incorporeal, so he exists permanently in noclip mode and drifts through walls and ceilings. A spiritual tether keeps him within a certain radius of Jodie.

  While controlling Aiden, the screen drains to shades of grey. Interactive things glow with coloured auras. Orange marks characters who can be possessed, red marks characters who can be strangled, blue marks objects or characters affected by the environment that can be knocked around, and green marks characters who can be healed. Jodie often calls on Aiden for a protective shield, for letting the dead speak to the living through her, for seeing events of the recent past, and for healing wounds.

  In the chapter titled The Party, the player decides between brutal revenge on a group of bullies and simply running away. In The Embassy, the player can gather information psychically, or can jeopardise the mission by forcing a guard to commit suicide. Failing certain action sequences changes the course of a chapter, sometimes later chapters too, and can lead to a non-playable character's death. Dialogue choices, combat results and Aiden's psychic actions all feed into the outcome, and some consequences surface several chapters later. Those same choices decide the finale, where any number of endings are possible.

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• 3. Jodie and the Infraworld

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  Caroline Wolfson plays the youngest Jodie Holmes, a girl living with foster parents in a suburban home. Since birth, Jodie has shared a psychic link with Aiden. Through it she can communicate with him, possess people's minds and manipulate certain objects.

  An incident with some neighbourhood kids ends with Aiden almost killing one of them. Her foster parents seek help, and Jodie is left permanently in the custody of two doctors from the United States Department of Paranormal Activity, Nathan Dawkins and Cole Freeman. Under their care she slowly learns to control Aiden and the powers they share.

  Nathan, the researcher the game presents as her surrogate father figure, is building the condenser with Cole. It is a portal connecting the living world to the world of the dead, which the game calls the Infraworld. One night Nathan learns that his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. While Jodie tries to comfort him, she discovers she can channel spirits from the Infraworld, letting them speak to the living through her physical touch.

  As a teenager, Jodie wants independence from both the doctors and Aiden. Several times she tries to live a normal life. Each attempt ends in disaster because Aiden intervenes.

  The condenser later breaks open, and Nathan asks for her help. Jodie pushes past hostile entities from the Infraworld, shuts the machine down and warns Nathan not to build another. That warning catches the attention of the CIA, which sends agent Ryan Clayton to recruit her by force.

  In Somalia, the adult Jodie, now a field agent growing attracted to Ryan, is told to kill a warlord. Afterwards she realizes her target was the country's benign president. Enraged and disgusted, she flees despite Ryan's pleas. Branded a traitor, she becomes a fugitive.

  On the run, Jodie befriends a small group of homeless people and helps one of them give birth to a girl named Zoey. Later she lives with a Navajo family and saves them from a malevolent entity. The CIA finally recaptures her after she tries to reconnect with her catatonic biological mother, who has been held and forcibly drugged in a military hospital for decades. The baby born during that flight is not forgotten, because Zoey returns at the very end.

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• 4. The Black Sun

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  Nathan now holds the post of executive director of the Department of Paranormal Activity, and the newest condenser in his care carries the code name Black Sun. The CIA tells Jodie it will let her go if she completes one last mission. She joins a CIA team led by Ryan to destroy an underwater facility housing a Chinese-developed condenser before it can be used to attack the United States.

  Afterwards, Jodie learns that Nathan built a miniature condenser to speak only with his dead family, without success. She shows him that his refusal to let them go is only making them suffer. When she tries to leave, the CIA holds her instead. The agency has judged her too dangerous to be free and plans to give her the same fate as her mother.

  On the trek, entities injure Cole, and Ryan sacrifices his own safety to keep Jodie alive. Near the Black Sun, Jodie confronts Nathan. He is either killed by Aiden or takes his own life to rejoin his family. As Jodie shuts down the condenser, she has a vision that reveals Aiden is her stillborn twin brother.

  Then she must choose between returning to the living or going on to the Infraworld to be reunited with everyone she has lost. If she chooses Life, her connection to Aiden is severed and the CIA no longer has any use for her. She decides how to live, alone or with Ryan, Jay, or Zoey and her family. If she chooses Beyond, she joins Aiden and other lost ones in the Infraworld and dies in the process. From there she watches over those left behind, and warns the now-teenage Zoey of danger ahead.

  By the story's end, the Infraworld has grown into a widespread threat in the not-so-distant future, and Jodie prepares to confront it.

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• 5. The Paris Stage

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  Quantic Dream's Paris studio worked as an advanced motion capture stage as well as a place to build games. Over a year-long project, the actors delivered voice acting and motion-capture performances together on set. The physical actions seen on screen came from their bodies, then appeared on fully realised game characters.

  Elliot Page played Jodie from adolescence to adulthood, and Willem Dafoe co-starred as Nathan. Kadeem Hardison and Eric Winter filled the roles of Cole and Ryan. Behind them, Quantic Dream programmers, artists and animators created the computer-generated imagery under art director Christophe Brusseaux. David Cage handled the writing and direction, and Guillaume de Fondaumière served as executive producer.

  Composer Normand Corbeil had worked on Heavy Rain and its predecessor Fahrenheit. He died of pancreatic cancer on the 25th of January 2013, before he could finish his work on this game. The finished game is dedicated to him. Lorne Balfe, who had written the score for Assassin's Creed III, replaced him. Balfe's collaborator Hans Zimmer joined as producer in August 2013.

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• 6. Road to Release

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  At Sony's press conference during E3 2012, David Cage announced the game and showed a debut trailer built from in-game graphics. He called it a more action-driven experience than Quantic Dream's earlier Heavy Rain, with "much more direct control" and "much more spectacular action." Cage conceded that action scenes use quick time event sequences, which he said were integrated "in a new way." Unlike Heavy Rain, the game does not support PlayStation Move.

  On the 27th of April 2013, five months before launch, Quantic Dream released a new trailer and showed 35 minutes of the game at the Tribeca Film Festival. Both Page and Cage attended. Only one video game had been recognised by the festival before, 2011's L.A. Noire. Around the worldwide release, Cage argued that studios like his have an obligation to provide "interactive storytelling" that everyone can play, non-gamers included.

  On the 5th of September 2013, the PlayStation Blog announced a demo for the 1st of October in the United States, the 2nd of October in Europe and the 3rd of October in Japan. A few PlayStation Plus subscribers received it a week early, on the 24th of September 2013, and GameStop handed out a limited number of beta keys that day. The full game arrived on the 8th of October 2013 in North America, the 9th in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and the 11th in the UK.

  The European version was censored so it could keep a PEGI rating of 16 instead of 18. Two changes, totalling 5 to 10 seconds of gameplay, were enough.

  Right after launch, nude images of Jodie appeared on the Reddit online community, drawn from a shower scene in which she is not fully visible. Industry analysts deduced that someone with a developer PlayStation 3, which allows quality assurance features such as a free camera mode, had made and uploaded them. Sony moved quickly to have them removed and asked the community to help. It explained that the images showed a digital model rather than Page, who has a no-nudity policy.

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• 7. Mixed Verdict

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  Metacritic described the critical reception of Beyond: Two Souls as mixed. Reviewers broadly admired Page's portrayal of Jodie and Dafoe's performance as Nathan. They also praised the technical detail in the animation and graphics, the elaborate motion capture, the emotional soundtrack and the game's pull on non-gamers.

  PlayStation Official Magazine in the UK admitted that quick time events mean "you lose explicit control." It still called the game "PS3's graphical high point" and found Page's work "Astonishing," adding a "painfully human presence." Polygon was less taken with the writing but thrilled by the motion capture, which it called "staggeringly great," and by Quantic Dream's ability to "perfect a new way of telling stories." GameSpot called it a "gripping adventure" in which choices let players shape what kind of person Jodie becomes. GamesTM called Page's performance "truly breathtaking" and described Cage as "visionary."

  Other outlets were harsher. Electronic Gaming Monthly liked the visuals and performances, but felt Quantic Dream had ignored feedback and delivered "another flawed experiment." GamesRadar+ praised the innovation and the number of choices, yet warned "you'll never be truly challenged by the gameplay." IGN found the experience too passive and wrote: "It is unwise to build up our expectations of being able to choose our actions and then take that away from us where it feels most important." Joystiq disliked the lack of solid character interaction and the unintentionally silly plot. Destructoid pointed to thin characters and frequent narrative dead ends. Eurogamer's editor noted that choices may colour each self-contained chapter, but the overall story is "going wherever it's going."

  In July 2013, the game was reported to be among the twenty most pre-ordered of the year. By the end of 2013, it had sold one million copies worldwide in its first three months. In France, Quantic Dream's home country, it sold over 70,000 copies in that period, more than Heavy Rain managed in its first three months.

  Heavy Rain had a budget of $22 million. Beyond: Two Souls cost $27 million, not counting roughly $18 million for marketing and distribution. By July 2018, sales reached 2.8 million copies, making it one of the best-selling PlayStation 3 games.

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• 8. After the Launch

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  By June 2015, Quantic Dream had announced a PlayStation 4 version alongside Heavy Rain for North America, Europe and the PAL region. Beyond: Two Souls arrived on the 24th of November 2015, and the Heavy Rain remaster followed on the 1st of March 2016. A Blu-ray disc later packaged both games together.

  At the 2019 Game Developers Conference in March, Epic Games announced that Quantic Dream would bring Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and the newer Detroit: Become Human to Windows throughout 2019. Each was exclusive to the Epic Games Store for a year before reaching other storefronts. A demo appeared on the 27th of June 2019, and Quantic Dream self-published the game on the 22nd of July 2019.

  Awards began long before launch. After E3 2012, Destructoid named it Game of the Show and best PlayStation 3 game. The Daily Telegraph called it the game most likely to win an Oscar. In 2013, Page received a Behind the Voice Actors award for best female vocal performance. At the Spike Video Game Awards, Dafoe was listed for best voice actor and Page for best voice actress. The 2014 British Academy Games Awards list it in Best Artistic Achievement, Best Original Music for Balfe and Best Performer for Page. The 17th D.I.C.E. Awards listed it for animation, original music composition and story.

  In November 2014, Cage described the divide in the industry between hardcore players who treat games as skill-based sport and casual players who see them as a hobby. He said Quantic Dream tries to build "a middle way, with games that try to tell a story, to carry meaning, and where violence isn't the core activity."

  In January 2025, it was announced that Pageboy Productions, Page's production company, had acquired the rights to adapt the game as a television series, with Page set to produce.

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