![]() ![]() It shouldn’t feel boring or bumbling to be a wrathful poltergeist, but Aiden manages to be both. ![]() The floating controls are awkward, sluggish, and disorienting, while the way in which you interact with the world - holding down buttons and moving the analog sticks about - is ungainly and alienating. It’s also not very enjoyable to play as Aiden, despite what promise he has. Just a plodding, methodical march towards the game’s warbling conclusion. There’s no tension, no sense of investment, no pleasure to be derived from getting personally involved. It didn’t really matter if the bad thing happened (there was only a cosmetic change) and I simply didn’t care about the bland, superficial plot vehicle whose lifeless idea of life was in my hands. Nowhere is this more typified than one sequence in which I could choose to speak up in order to stop something bad happening to another character … and I didn’t say a word. Once you cotton on to the fact that your personal input is almost meaningless, and the impact of your inaction is frivolous, your only real incentive for “playing” is to humor the game, and it does indeed feel like you’re patronizing it when you decide to play along with the fantasy of player agency. Likewise, Jodie’s barely meaningful adventure in the Navajo Desert is Beyond‘s best sequence of events, but it leans heavily on well-worn and practically gauche Native American stereotypes to make it work.Īs with Heavy Rain, the potential for thrilling chase sequences and action scenes is mercilessly dashed against the rocks in favor of an experience so arrogant, it cannot bear to throw up a barrier between you and its allegedly brilliant story. The scene in which Jodie is bullied at a party before Aiden wreaks violent revenge is stylishly done, but it’s nothing Carrie didn’t do better. If we have to be told what a character’s personality is, without the character ever exhibiting a single trait pertaining to its verbal description, the writing has failed completely.Īdmittedly, there are some decent scenes, but those are mostly thanks to tried and tested narrative tropes seen dozens of times before. The best he becomes is a generic love interest with no distinguishing features. She tells us - through Aiden - that he’s so funny, and great to be around, but we never see any evidence of this. One character, for example, is introduced in an early scene as a cold, unlikable hardass, right before we skip to Jodie falling in love with him years later. Its frequent time hopping does little to help the fact that there’s nobody to root for, and even less to remember. This is to say nothing of Beyond‘s total lack of character development. ![]()
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