After spending around four hours in the company of Beyond: Two Souls, it’s hard to imagine what the PlayStation 4 could be capable of if this is the level developers have reached on current-gen hardware. Having played around a third of David Cage’s paranormal adventure over the last week in the comfort of my own home on a large HD TV, I’m confident to say that it is going to be the most highly polished, graphically superior and realistic-looking game to have ever graced Sony’s current-gen console.
I’ve written a Beyond: Two Souls preview where you can learn more about the game, but I felt that I should give Quantic Dream the exposure it deserves by flagging up the quality of the graphics in a separate post. Such is its visual appeal that I’ve been left drooling at the possibilities that the PS4’s superior hardware will offer developers who have large budgets at hand. Beyond has actually made me pause the action just so I can prove to family members that this is actually me playing a real game and not a movie or CGI cut-scene they’re watching.
Turn overleaf to find out why Beyond is PS3’s best ever looking game…
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Here’s a snippet from the preview…
“Facial animations are incredible. The emotional content of character’s words are reflected in a bead of sweat tricking down a forehead, the raising of an eyebrow or an infinite number of subtle gestures. But what Beyond does so much better than any other game is create eyes that appear almost human. When you stare into Jodie’s eyes you can almost feel the pain, loneliness and sadness she feels. You feel sincerity from characters, their fear, their anxiety and their anger all through their eyes and tiny facial movements. What Cage has done here is somehow take the famous proverb “eyes are the windows to the souls” and apply it into a videogame context to inject real emotion to his characters.
The Last Of Us was a stunning-looking game filled with fine detail in its scenery and impressive set-pieces, but Beyond: Two Souls edges it in terms of realism. There’s a scene where you need to work your way through a fiery building and you can almost feel the heat from the flickering flames due to the way its been designed to mimic a real-looking blaze. The attention to detail is phenomenal. It’s in the way that the rain pours and trickles down a window pane or the movement of the trees and leaves as Jodie runs through a forest. The game feels alive as do its characters and I don’t think I moved my eyes from the screen once during the playthrough.
Cut-scenes merge seamlessly into gameplay and it’s often impossible to tell the difference between the two. I’ve (Jodie) stood there motionless for a few sections before moving because I’ve assumed that I must still be in a cut-scene. Not so…it feels surreal to walk around with this level of detail, kind of like an out-of-body experience. Throughout my hands-on preview of Beyond I’ve shook my head at times and talked to myself out loud uttering phrases like “Look at this” and “You’ve got to be kidding” as the graphics really have blown me away.
Read the Beyond: Two Souls hands-on preview.