The Beyond: Two Souls San Diego Comic-Con 2013 demo featured clunky gameplay, but great storytelling.
The demo for Beyond: Two Souls opens as Ellen Page’s character Jodie is in the middle of a Somalian firefight with rouge soilders.
The psychic portion of the gameplay is first demonstrated as Jodie is forced to use her supernatural companion Aiden to take down some of the soldiers.
What proceeds is a 5 minute struggle to find the “correct” target, all while fighting against the counter-intuative dual analog stick control. Aiden’s controls liken to walking across the surface of a frozen lake covered in baby oil, all while fending off a bad case of vertigo.
The gameplay unfortunately worsens as Jodie is forced into hand-to-hand combat. Her enemies make quick of her with swipes or machetes and fists. Slow-mo activates during these swipes, but the direction to aim the camera stick to dodge is always very unclear.
Regardless of the horrific controls, the demo had it’s shining moments with its plot. We can already tell that Heavy Rain studio Quantic Dream will focus on the gripping story of Jodie’s struggle to survive in a universe dead-set on utilizing her psychic powers for their own devious purposes.
Beyond: Two Souls releases exclusively for the PS3 on October 8, and stars Juno‘s Ellen Page and Spider-Man‘s Willem Defoe.
Hypable will be covering all of the biggest gaming news at San Diego Comic-Con 2013, including our first impressions on the next generation consoles, Sony’s PlayStation 4, and Microsoft’s Xbox One.