Beyond: Two Souls is an action-adventure game developed by Quantic Dream and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was released on 8 October 2013 for PlayStation 3 and on 24 November 2015 for PlayStation 4. A port for Windows, self-published by Quantic Dream, was released on 22 July 2019.
The game features Jodie Holmes, one of two player characters. The other is an incorporeal entity named Aiden: a separate soul linked to Jodie since birth. Jodie, portrayed by Elliot Page, possesses supernatural powers through her psychic link to Aiden, growing from adolescence to adulthood while learning to control Aiden and the powers they share. Willem Dafoe co-stars as Nathan Dawkins, a researcher in the Department of Paranormal Activity and Jodie's surrogate father figure. The actors in the game worked during the year-long project in Quantic Dream's Paris studio to perform on-set voice acting and motion-capture acting.
Beyond: Two Souls premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, the second time the festival had recognised a video game. Writer and director David Cage said that game development studios should provide "interactive storytelling" that can be played by everyone, including non-gamers. The game received polarised critical reception upon release. It sold 2.8 million units by July 2018.
A television adaptation of the game is in development, with Page serving as a producer through his production company.
Gameplay Beyond: Two Souls is an action-adventure game, requiring the player to move and guide the character into interactions with objects and other non-player characters in the scene to progress the story. The player primarily controls Jodie through the in-game environments. At almost any time, however, the player (or second player during a two-player game) can switch to control Aiden instead. Aiden, as an incorporeal entity, exists permanently in noclip mode and can move through walls, ceilings, and other obstacles; however, he is limited to moving only within a certain radius around Jodie due to their spiritual tethering.
While playing as Jodie, the game includes interactive objects marked with a white dot, which can be interacted with by tilting the controller stick in its direction. If Jodie must perform a specific action, icons pop up on the screen to prompt the player to press and/or hold certain controller buttons. Conversation prompts float in the air, defaulting to a certain choice if too much time passes before selection. During action sequences, like chases or hand-to-hand combat, the cinematography moves into slow motion whilst Jodie performs the physical manoeuvre; during this time, the player must determine the direction Jodie is moving and push the controller stick in that direction to complete the action. Other sequences require real-time stealth, which has the player sneak Jodie through environments while coordinating certain actions with Aiden. Failing certain action sequences will alter the course of a chapter (and sometimes later chapters) and in some cases lead to the death of a non-playable character.
While playing as Aiden, the game becomes monochromatic. Amongst the shades of greys, interactive objects are highlighted by an aura shining in one of several colours, with the colour of the aura indicating his potential interaction: orange characters can be possessed, red characters strangled, blue objects (or characters with environmental effects) knocked around, and green characters healed. Jodie frequently calls upon Aiden to provide different abilities, such as form a protective shield around her, allow the dead to speak to the living through her, grant her an ability to see events of the recent past, and enable her to heal a character's wounds.
As the player makes choices throughout the game, the gameplay's plot is revealed. Besides affecting dialogue and story developments, the outcome of entire scenes (and in some cases, the outcome of scenes several chapters later) can be manipulated to a certain extent based on player choices. These choices are typically moral decisions made through Jodie's dialogue options, interventions with various characters, success or failure in her combat scenes, or psychic actions that the player chooses to have Aiden perform. Examples of choice-based outcomes are the chapter titled The Party, where the player is given the choice of unleashing brutal revenge toward a group of bullies or simply running away, and the chapter titled The Embassy, where the player can either engage in psychic information retrieval or can jeopardise the mission by forcing one of the guards to commit suicide. Choices also determine the finale of Beyond: Two Souls, as any number of possible plot endings can be experienced by the player.
Plot Young Jodie Holmes (Caroline Wolfson) lives with her foster parents in a suburban home. Since birth, Jodie has had a psychic connection with a mysterious entity named Aiden, with whom she can communicate and perform telepathic acts, such as possessing people's minds and manipulating certain objects. After an incident with some neighbourhood kids results in Aiden almost killing one of them, Jodie's foster parents seek help to care for her condition, permanently leaving her under the custody of doctors Nathan Dawkins (Willem Dafoe) and Cole Freeman (Kadeem Hardison) of the United States Department of Paranormal Activity.
Under the two doctors' care, Jodie slowly learns to control Aiden and the powers they share. During this time, Nathan and Cole are building the condenser, a portal that connects the world of the living with the world of the dead—the Infraworld. One night, Nathan learns that his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. While trying to comfort him, Jodie discovers that she can channel spirits of the dead from the Infraworld; she helps the spirits speak to the living through a psychic link created by her physical contact. As the years pass, a teenage Jodie (Elliot Page) seeks her independence, both from the doctors and from Aiden, and tries several times to live a normal life. At each attempt, Aiden intervenes, ending in disaster.
At one point, Nathan asks for Jodie's help with the condenser, which has broken open. After braving hostile entities from the Infraworld, Jodie manages to shut down the condenser and warns Nathan not to build another. This gets the attention of the CIA, who send agent Ryan Clayton (Eric Winter) to forcibly recruit Jodie. After training, the now-adult Jodie goes on multiple missions as a field agent, often with Ryan, to whom she slowly becomes attracted. On one such mission in Somalia, Jodie is assigned to kill a warlord, only to realize afterwards that the target she killed was not a warlord, but the country's benign president. Enraged, Jodie flees in disgust, despite Ryan's pleas. Branded a traitor, Jodie becomes a fugitive, evading pursuing CIA forces. Along the way, she befriends a small group of homeless people, one of whom she helps give birth to a girl named Zoey; she later lives with a Navajo family, whom she saves from a malevolent entity. The CIA eventually recaptures Jodie after she attempts to reconnect with her catatonic biological mother, who has been held and forcibly drugged for decades in a military hospital.
The CIA hands Jodie over to Nathan, now executive director of the DPA, overseeing the DPA's newest condenser, code-named the Black Sun. He reveals that the CIA is willing to let Jodie go if she agrees to a final mission. Jodie and a CIA team led by Ryan destroy an underwater facility housing a Chinese-developed condenser before it is used to attack the United States. Jodie then learns that Nathan built a miniature condenser to speak exclusively to his family, but without success. After showing Nathan that his refusal to let them go is only making them suffer, Jodie tries to leave, only to be held in captivity by the CIA—the organisation has deemed her too dangerous to be free and intends to subject her to the same fate as her mother. The now-insane Nathan informs Jodie that he intends to shut down the containment field to the Black Sun, merging the two worlds together and making death meaningless. Too weak to free Jodie, Aiden contacts Ryan and Cole, leading them to her. After Nathan shuts down the containment field, the three chase after him into the heart of the Black Sun, with the intent of destroying it.
During the trek towards the Black Sun, Cole is injured by entities and Ryan sacrifices his own safety to keep Jodie alive. Eventually, Jodie confronts Nathan near the Black Sun. Nathan is either killed by Aiden or commits suicide to reunite with his family. As Jodie shuts down the condenser, she has a vision—Aiden is her stillborn twin brother. Jodie must make a choice: go back to the world of the living, or go on to the Infraworld and be reunited with everyone she has lost. If Jodie chooses Life, her connection to Aiden is severed and she is no longer useful to the CIA. Jodie must choose how to live her life, either alone or with Ryan, Jay, or Zoey and her family. If Jodie chooses Beyond, she joins Aiden and other lost ones in the Infraworld, dying in the process. She continues to watch over those who remain in the living world, warning the now-teenage Zoey of the coming danger. By the story's end, the Infraworld has become a widespread threat in the not-so-distant future. Jodie prepares to confront the threat.
Development
David Cage, founder and CEO of Quantic Dream, announced Beyond: Two Souls at Sony's press conference during E3 2012. He showed the crowd a debut trailer featuring the game's in-game graphics. Cage described Beyond as a "more action-driven experience" that offers "much more direct control" and "much more spectacular action" than Quantic Dream's previous game Heavy Rain. Cage has called his games "fully controllable" while admitting "when there is an action sequence, yes we integrate these quick time event sequences ... in a new way." Unlike Heavy Rain, Beyond is not PlayStation Move compatible. Earlier games created by Cage, which have been called "wrought psychological thrillers", demonstrate that emotional narrative is a critical element in a Quantic Dream game's development. The script for the game was around 2,000 pages long (an average screenplay is between 95 and 125 pages long; each page is approximately one minute of screen time). "We'd do 30, 40 pages a day. It's insane compared to a film," Page said in an interview. "Jodie goes through a lot. This is an incredibly emotional story and journey for this girl."
Quantic Dream, an advanced motion capture studio as well as video game developer, required the Beyond: Two Souls actors to perform motion-capture acting as well as on-set voice acting. Actors cast in the game worked during the year-long project in the Paris studio to perform the physical actions seen onscreen as performed by their fully realised video game graphic characters. Meanwhile, Quantic Dream programmers, artists, and animators, led by art director Christophe Brusseaux, created the computer-generated imagery seen in the game. David Cage provided writing and direction and Guillaume de Fondaumière was the executive producer.
Beyond: Two Souls is dedicated to composer Normand Corbeil, who died of pancreatic cancer on 25 January 2013. Corbeil had worked on Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain and its predecessor Fahrenheit and was unable to finish his work on Beyond. Lorne Balfe, who wrote the score for Assassin's Creed III, replaced Corbeil as the game's composer after Corbeil's death. Balfe's collaborator Hans Zimmer joined him as producer in August 2013.