I consider Beyond: Two Souls to be the worst game released this year. Let me explain. You might say that there were worse games released this year like Ride to Hell: Retribution, and you are right. But to me, Beyond: Two Souls is the worst game of the year because games it had a rather large budget, state of the art graphics, and backing from very big companies and yet it still failed spectacularly at what it set out to do.
1) Instructions - one of the most annoying things about this game is that the instructions are vague and unclear. Sometimes the game will flat out tell you what to do. Other times the game tells you nothing. In one scene, Jodie was running down the isle of a train trying to escape some police officers when the game slowed down and changed color and showed that a cart was partially blocking me, which meant that I was supposed to perform an action, BUT THE GAME DIDN'T TELL WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO. So I frantically mashed the analog sticks in every direction only to fail the event (but it didn't matter because I still got away from the police). This happens on numerous occasions throughout the game.
2) Plot - There are a couple of points I want to make about the plot. First, sometimes making the plot appear out of chronological order can be a very effective narrative. It works very well when you want the reader to be in a state of confusion, i.e., they don't understand what's happening and they are trying to piece it together. In Beyond: Two Souls, the fact that the plot is out of order actually fights against the flow of the game. In one scene, Jodie's ghost (Aiden) almost kills another child. Her father sees this, takes her inside and screams at her, raises his hand to hit her when Aiden shakes some stuff in the room so the dad gets scared and simply tells Jodie to go to her room. Jodie then listens in on her parents conversation from her room using Aiden to hear that they are scared of her and don't want her anymore. This is a good scene. The problem is that the next scene takes place almost a decade later. You are woken up by Nathan (Willam Dafoe) who tells you the U.S. government opened a portal to another world, everyone in the facility is dead, and that you have to go in and fix it. The scene that takes place chronologically after you learn your parents hate you is two scenes later. In this scene, your "parents" drop you off at the paranormal research center where you will live until they can figure out what's wrong with you. Jodie is shown alone and sad because she is in a strange place by herself in a room full of cameras. This scene would be so much more powerful if it had followed the scene where your parents say they don't love you. As a result, the scene is removed from context and several hours of gameplay.
Second, the events in this game happen for no other reason than they happen. Let me explain. At one point, Jodie is on the run from the U.S. government because she was accused of committing high treason. She eventually makes her way to the midwest and stumbles upon a group of Navajo who are being haunted by Native American spirits that were summoned by their ancestors to fight the U.S. government. In chronological order, the next scene she is trying to find out who her real mother is. I would like to point out that she is still being hunted by the government for treason. Why did she decide to to come out of hiding and try to find out who her mother is? Because she wants to find out who her mother is. Why does she fight native American spirits in the midwest? Because she does. Why does she want to find out who her real mother was? Because she does.
3) Characters - The characters are flat and boring. The characters have very little motivation for doing anything thing in this game other than that it's what they do. You could argue that Nathan is the only character with some kind of motivation but that argument barely holds. We are given a reason why he builds the portal to the other dimension but we aren't given a reason why he became a paranormal researcher in the first place. Plus, we are given his motivation so late in the game it barely matters and when they give his motivational it makes the ending so laughably predictable. Also, there is no reason to care about any of the side characters because we are given so little interaction with them. We have less than half a dozen conversations with Nathan. In all of those conversations we only learn three things about him: 1) he is a paranormal researcher 2) he has a wife and child 3) His wife and child die in a car accident at some point.
