10 Groundbreaking Video Games That TOTALLY Missed The Mark
2. Beyond: Two Souls
Celebrity voice acting and motion capture alone do not a good game make. The sooner the AAA game industry learns that, the better.
David Cage's games are like the marmite of the gaming world. You either love them, or you hate them. Any one of them could have made it onto this list, but with so much attention drawn to the performances of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe in 2013's Beyond: Two Souls, it's this one that stands out above the rest in the worst of ways.
While critics praised the game's graphics and the idea of story-driven games as an art form, it is important to remember film critic Robert Ebert's famous saying: that a game cannot be art because a game is something you can win. Between those two extremes, my argument is thus:
Beyond: Two Souls focuses on its story to the detriment of its gameplay. It plays like a film that occasionally requires some player input for it to keep going. And as much as David Cage was hailed as a "visionary" for this new form of storytelling, innovation should surely be about adding to what is already there, rather than squashing tried and tested things down in favour of cutting-edge motion capture and a story meant to inspire.