Listen to the Song because it is Breath-Taking.
So, after watching Pewdiepie play the Whole game of Beyond: Two Souls, I think I can finally give my fair take on it. It's story is as follows, and I think people who haven't seen this one yet will like it. Beware, the story is spoiler heavy due to it coming from Wikipedia.
The Story:
The game is told in a nonlinear narrative, skipping back and forth between three points in the main character's life. This plot summary is the story in chronological order.
Eight year old Jodie Holmes (Caroline Wolfson) lives on a military base with her foster parents, Philip and Susan. Since birth, Jodie has had a strange psychic connection with a mysterious entity named Aiden, through whom she can perform many strange and often frightening telepathic acts, such as possessing peoples' minds, strangling them to death, and manipulating certain objects. After an incident with some neighborhood kids results in Aiden almost killing one of them, Jodie's parents seek psychiatric help for her condition. This leads them to doctors Nathan Dawkins (Willem Dafoe) and Cole Freeman (Kadeem Hardison) of the Department of Paranormal Activity with whom they leave her indefinitely.
Under the two doctors' care, Jodie slowly learns to control Aiden and the powers they share. During this time, Nathan learns that his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident, which leaves him depressed. In trying to comfort him, Jodie discovers that she can channel spirits of the dead to help them talk to the living through a psychic link caused by physical contact with the living. Being able to talk to his family brings Nathan comfort. As the years pass, Jodie (Ellen Page) seeks her independence, both from the doctors and from Aiden, and tries several times to live a normal life. Each attempt ends in disaster and results in her having to be saved by Aiden.
At one point, Nathan is informed by his superiors that their condenser, a portal which connects the world of the living with the world of the dead, called the Infraworld, is going haywire and they ask for Jodie's help. After braving many hostile entities, Jodie manages to shut the condenser down and warns Nathan not to let them build another. This gets the attention of the CIA, who send agent Ryan Clayton (Eric Winter) to recruit Jodie. Though she says no at first, she isn't given a choice and reluctantly goes with him. After weeks of training, she passes and is made an agent. She goes on multiple missions, often with Ryan, whom she slowly becomes attracted to. Depending on the player's choice, Jodie can enter a romantic relationship with Ryan.
Eventually, Jodie is sent to an African country to assassinate a warlord. With the help of Aiden and a young boy named Salim, she succeeds. One of the casualties of the attack is revealed to be Salim's father, turning him on her. At the same time the civilians are angered by the death of their leader and pursue Jodie. She tries to escape but the civilians surround her on a roof top. Fortunately, Ryan and his crew arrive with a chopper just on time to evacuate her. On the private chopper (provided by a high ranking CIA officer) back to base, Jodie is enraged to hear on the news that the man she killed wasn't a warlord but the country's benign president. Despite Ryan's pleas, she flees in disgust. Branded a traitor, she flees across the country from CIA forces, whom she has to fight many times. Along the way, she befriends a group of homeless people, one of whom she helps give birth to a baby girl named Zoey, and a family of Native Americans whom she can save from a malevolent entity called "Yeiitsoh."
Eventually, she contacts Cole, who she asks to find her real mother. He manages to find her mother, Norah Gray, in a mental hospital, where she's been catatonic since Jodie's birth. Upon linking with her, Jodie learns that Norah had a similar link to an entity which the CIA feared made her a danger to both herself and Jodie. So after she had her, she was injected with a serum that left her catatonic. Upset by this, Jodie reluctantly has Aiden euthanize Norah. To make matters worse, she's promptly captured by the CIA right after.
The CIA hands Jodie over to Nathan, who is now the executive director of the DPA, who, despite Jodie's warning, have built another, much larger condenser. He reveals to Jodie that the CIA is willing to let her go and live her life if they do them one last favor. After a briefing, it is revealed that a military facility in the fictional nation of Kazirstan has built their own condenser. Desperate to keep the condenser technology exclusive to the CIA and its allies, the CIA sends Jodie to destroy the condenser. Ryan and her old colleagues at the CIA are sent in as her support team, where tensions are still present. Trekking across heavily snowing fields, the team manages to follow a convoy to the facility, where Jodie and Ryan, disguised in the uniforms of two deceased soldiers, take a pilfered submarine to the base, only to be captured. To make matters worse, Aiden is separated from Jodie by a containment field meant to keep entities away from the living. Luckily, he manages to deactivate the containment field, unleashing the other entities on the soldiers, and frees Jodie and Ryan. Jodie destroys the condenser and they make their escape.
Back at the CIA, Jodie is seemingly let go and given a new identity. However, before she leaves, Nathan reveals a miniaturized condenser he built to speak exclusively to his family. Unfortunately, when he and Jodie perform the psychic link, she realizes that his actions are making them suffer and leaves him to consider this. When she tries to leave, however, she's recaptured by the CIA. CIA head General McGrath informs her that she's been deemed too dangerous and they're going to do to her what they did to her mother. To make matters worse, Nathan soon appears and informs Jodie that he's decided to shut down the containment field to the DPA's newest condenser, merging the two worlds together and making death meaningless. Too weak to free Jodie, Aiden contacts Ryan and Cole and leads them to her. After Nathan succeeds in shutting down the containment field, the three chase after him into the heart of the condenser, codenamed 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 going. Eventually, she confronts Nathan near the Black Sun, resulting in one of three possible outcomes. Either Jodie talks sense into Nathan, causing him to commit suicide or fails that and has Nathan turn a gun on her, leading to either Aiden killing him or Nathan and Ryan killing each other. Either way, Nathan reunites with his family and points Jodie forward. If Jodie fails to destroy the Black Sun, entities overwhelm and kill her, and Jodie's soul is guilt stricken after the living world is destroyed by the Infraworld. If Jodie successfully shuts down the control to the condenser, she has a series of visions which makes her realize who Aiden is: her stillborn twin brother. After turning off the machine, Jodie ends up in a corridor, where she (and the player) has a choice: to go back to the world of the living, or to go on to the Beyond.
If the player chooses to return, Jodie survives the explosion of the condenser, but she loses her psychic connection with Aiden. Depending on prior choices, Cole and Ryan can also survive the explosion. Finally left alone, Jodie's memories of the past slowly become scrambled and she decides to start a whole new life. At this point, the player chooses whether Jodie's new life is alone, with her homeless friends (who are no longer homeless), with the Native Americans, or with Ryan. Choosing to be alone, with the Native Americans or Ryan reveals that Aiden is still watching over Jodie even though their link has been severed. After discovering Aiden's presence, Jodie reveals her dreams of a possible post-apocalyptic future where she alone stands between the Infraworld and humanity. Choosing her formerly homeless friends results in Jodie facing that future with Zoey at her side. Choosing the Beyond results in Ryan, Cole (assuming they have survived) or the military discovering Jodie's corpse. Jodie keeps watch over her living loved ones while maintaining a psychic connection with Zoey (the scrambled memories here being the result of Zoey having difficulty understanding what she sees), whom she prepares to face the possible post-apocalyptic future alone.
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So. The game is set in a non-linear timeline, incoherent from sense itself. And While this is a very different take from previous games like Heavy Rain, it works like nothing else.
The Soundtrack is composed by Lorne Balfe, and I think you should give it a listen, it's the best soundtrack I've ever heard in years, and this is coming from someone that has played Slender: The Arrival and Dust: An Elysian Tail.
So Overall, what do I think of this big budget video game starring Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page? Well, let me release it, all in three words (excuse the profanity):
It's f***ing amazing.
The story is well-set, the soundtrack is the most atmospheric collection I've heard, and the setting is unique. I'm not afraid to give it a solid 9.5/10. It comes just shy of a perfect mark, but come on, it proves to people that not all video games are for the money. It proves some of them are for the experience, and that's what matters.
Enjoy the Soundtrack, it's something that everyone will either get chills or shed a tear over.