Beyond: Two Souls is an interactive psychological thriller video game developed by Quantic Dream and published by Sony Computer Entertainment in October 2013. Publisher in Russia: SCEE.
The plot of Beyond: Two Souls tells the story of a girl named Jodie Holmes, who has seen spirits and can communicate with them since childhood. She also has her own personal ghost – a spirit named Aiden, connected to his "host" by an invisible thread. He is the reason Jodie Holmes possesses paranormal abilities. It cannot be said that this makes her happy – at an early age, her parents abandoned her, placing her in a special research center, and later she spent a long time as a guinea pig in a series of exhausting experiments, after which she was literally forced to become a CIA agent. Her life did not go the way she wanted, and at one point, realizing that she had been used all this time, Jodie decided to escape. Some episodes of Beyond: Two Souls are dedicated to her time on the run, but this period is not all that the game covers. In fact, Beyond: Two Souls touches on almost every stage of Jodie's growing up: sometimes we see her as a 24-year-old woman, and just a couple of episodes later, she appears as an eight-year-old girl playing with dolls. It is important to note that the story in Two Souls is presented not in chronological order but in a non-linear fashion for specific reasons.
Wherever Jodie finds herself – in the research center, on the streets of a big city, or in an Indian reservation – Aiden is always with her. Sometimes the ghost only annoys Jodie with his antics, but most often he acts as a loyal assistant. Aiden can hack technology and electronics, he can break down a fragile door or destroy a thin wall, and killing a person is as easy as pie for him. The ghost is an important gameplay element, as it is only through Aiden that certain episodes can be completed or certain actions can be carried out that Jodie cannot do. You can switch between Aiden and Jodie at any moment, except during gameplay sections where it is prohibited by the script.
Beyond: Two Souls fully adheres to the canon of the interactive movie genre, and there is no branching gameplay in the game. All control is done with two sticks on the gamepad, sometimes external buttons are needed, but mostly during simple QTE scenes. The game has become significantly easier compared to Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain, which did not please many fans of the French studio’s work in general and David Cage in particular. It seems that gamers have absolutely no influence, that they are needed only to switch interactive images. Nevertheless, many decisions made by players during the passage of Beyond: Two Souls have a direct impact on the finale. There are many endings in "Two Souls," and unlocking each of them is no easy task: you need to replay either the entire game or certain episodes multiple times.