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Rating: The problem is that Beyond isn't bad. I mean, if you spent all of Boxing Day playing it and finishing it in one sitting, it can't be something bad or boring because it's been a long time since you spent so much time in a single session in front of the PlayStation. Sure, maybe in the days following Christmas there isn't much to do, that's a given, but, you know, you have that nice stack of games to finish on the shelf, you could have spent the day playing any Christmas game with your relatives or taken a healthier walk to burn off the thousand calories gained between Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas lunch. But no! You spent the damn whole day reliving the memories of this poor girl, Jodie, tormented by her spirit Aiden.
So let's say if you lost all that time behind said title, it can't necessarily be bad. The problem with Beyond isn't being bad or boring. The problem with Beyond is that it isn’t a video game. But let's take it step by step.
Beyond is the fourth production of the Parisian Quantic Dream, led by David Cage, a visionary guru of the industry who pursues his personal vision and aesthetic of the video game medium, all aimed at the total fusion of the "played" with the "watched," aiming to create more than gaming experiences, intense films to "pilot" or interact with.
With his previous work Heavy Rain, the year of grace 2010, he had already hit the mark, but he tries again three years later (let's say today) by putting aside the canon of the psychological thriller that had so enriched his previous production and shifting sharply towards a paranormal/existential angle.
Beyond is basically the life story of a girl like many others - or rather, one who would like to be like many others - but is unfortunately plagued by the ability to live in symbiosis with a spirit presence she controls at will, Aiden, allowing her to move objects, possess and suffocate people, go to places entirely in a spiritual way where she could hardly have had access. The entire plot branches out and retraces the story of Jodie and Aiden non-linearly, throwing the gamer right into the middle of the story and leaving them the burden of understanding how they got to that exact point with continuous flashbacks and flash-forwards that lead to relive the story up to that moment and subsequently outlining future events.
You thus retrace Jodie's childhood, her relationship with her parents, her teenage troubles, the achievement of the maturity typical of adulthood (highlighted by a greater ability to control emotions/or "control" Aiden).
Cage’s love for his work is apparent in the continuous scenes or sketches that pedantically follow each other in illustrating the moments of Jodie's life: basically, Cage's histrionic genius understands that a life is too long to speak only of paranormal or assassins in thriller sauce, so he decides to make the work much more varied than Heavy Rain: Beyond is a "pastiche" among various film genres where one moment you find yourself in a comedy scene/situation, next you’re literally in a scene reminiscent of a James Bond film, and at another, the work assumes the hues of science fiction.
So, Cage's passion for cinema is there, but will this be enough to make a good product? In effect, all this variety renders the plot disorganized and in some sequences also haphazard, to put it bluntly. This is a BIG problem because the storyline in video games is literally a pretext in Cage's works, beautifully to watch, but must be the main course. And if it is made bland by filler scenes or as deep as a puddle side characters, there's not much left besides a superb acting performance by Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.
Because come on, aside from the jaw-dropping graphics and the curiosity to see how far technology can go in providing such high digital acting, there's not much left; it remains an Heavy Rain trying to make up for its youthful sins by clumsily mimicking graphic adventures and action video games (like in Dragon's Lair, so to speak) or a Cage trying to create a huge existential-cinematic pastiche—almost a kind of fetish tribute dedicated to Ellen Page's acting ability.
Which suddenly becomes a bit ugly and somewhat boring
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