Beyond: Two Souls

Stunningly good entertainment, interesting art, rubbish game. Beyond: Two Souls does more than any other videogame around to further the cause of interactive narrative fiction – sadly, by jettisoning most of the "interactive" bit.

Beyond: Two Souls predecessor is 2010's Heavy Rain. It's probably one of the most important videogames of the last ten years. Ostensibly an update of the old "point-and-click" adventure genre, you play as four characters whose lives cross in a rainy city – your job is to choose dialogue options, solve puzzles and occasionally grapple with action sequences where you hit buttons in time to prompts on-screen in order to smash your way out of a car, shoot your way through a gangster's mansion or, even, to play basketball in the rain while mourning your son.

What was revolutionary about Heavy Rain was not its gameplay, but its thematic depth (loss was a recurring theme) and its avoidance of stereotypical game approaches (the main character was a grieving architect). In its wake, game stories suddenly grew up – even shooter terrorist fodder needed sob-story backstories and tragedy-tinged narrative arcs.

Now, its successor, Beyond: Two Souls, significantly ups some antes while dialing back on others. This is the story of a young girl, Jodie, tied to a mysterious spirit entity she calls "Aiden". The game runs through out-of-sequence key scenes in her life, cleverly foreshadowing and revealing plot points as it does. We see her on the run from a shadowy SWAT team, using her powers for the CIA and as a child growing up "not like others".

Throughout, Jodie is superbly played by Ellen Page. Her mentor is Willem Defoe. Both are (and this is rare for videogames) not just lending their voice and likeness, but are fully motion-captured. The result is stunning – an utterly real, immersive and emotional drama. Page plays Jodie from young child to young adult particularly well – and the entire game really hangs on her.

Page makes Jodie believable, makes you feel for her, and makes you feel her link to Aiden, whom you can also control, is real. With her, the game is gripping. Without her? It'd be second-string sci-fi. Because there's far too little gameplay almost to call this a game.

In Heavy Rain, emotional key moments had decisions attached – and it was clear those decisions would have ramifications. Here, with a chronologically jumbled narrative, it's unclear how your decision to take revenge or not on teenage bullies, or to steal money from a cashpoint when you're starving or not, plays out. That, combined with the fact the play in the game is even more minimal than its predecessor, almost robs Beyond of its interactive status.

Pause and you'll realise how little play there is to the game, but it often barely matters – despite yourself, you'll be shoving the controller, hammering buttons to get Jodie up the stairs in thick smoke, trying to rescue a mother and baby in a burning building – because you believe you are responsible, because you care. And that, ultimately is what makes Beyond great entertainment, but yes, a pretty poor game.

• Beyond: Two Souls is out now. Developed by Quantic Dream and published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. Platform: PS3
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