I knew what parts of Beyond Two Souls I would like and dislike before even starting it as I have played games by Quantic Dream before. My gut feelings were largely correct. The story was fantastic with a good amount of choices to branch the story. The characters were well developed over the course of the game for the most part and the game did a good job making me care about them for the most part. I will also applaud the amount of endings I had at my disposal. That being said I found some choices to be very vague. Without going into spoilers some options were far more extreme than I expected them to be or just go in a direction I had wholly gauged wrong. It didn't happen often so it wasn't a huge deal. I played through the game in it's original mix which means it jumped around from year to year a lot and everything was out of chronological order. I actually liked it like this and still found everything easy to grasp and understand. It's nice that the game gave the option to play it in chronological order if i wanted to. The controls were a bit of an issue but to their credit it was far less of an issue than Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit was when it was released. I didn't even bother trying on a keyboard and mouse, as that has never been well supported or implemented by Quantic Dream, but my Logitech F310 did a pretty good job overall. The prompts were changed accordingly so I knew which buttons to press. I found dodging during combat to be a bit of a pain. The game gives an indication as to which way to push the stick but for whatever reason I seemed to misinterpret this quite a bit. For instance sometimes the game wanted me to swing away from something or towards something but for whatever reason I seemed to do the opposite a lot. Another controls related problem I had was the camera. I found it very difficult to adjust it so see what I wanted often enough for it to be annoying. The graphics were fairly well done with keeping it in context of a game released in 2013. Everything from the hair, clothing, environments, objects, etc were all either average or above average. None wowed me but all were good and not anywhere close to an eye sore. The music was pretty well done, especially one scene which had Ellen Page singing a song on an acoustic guitar. The voice acting was great throughout. One thing I will say is that using Aiden's abilities was very inconsistent. Sometimes you could use him and others you couldn't with very little logical reason as to why. That being said there was a good variety of things you could do with him when allowed. On the downside is that you were railroaded into which ability you could use at that moment. Why could I strange some guards but not others, possess some but not others, etc. Again, very inconsistent.
I played Beyond Two Souls on Linux using Wine and DXVK. It never crashed on me. I did notice one bug where Ryan's lips weren't moving while he spoke but it only lasted less than a minute. I don't think this was a Wine issue but I'm not sure. The game had a weird frame rate issue. Originally when I first booted the game up it went above 60 FPS but anytime after that first time it was locked to 60 FPS. I have no idea why this was and I certainly prefer games that sync to my 165Hz refresh rate. I wasn't shocked as other Quantic Dream games have been locked to 30 or 60 FPS before. The game has an auto save system where there are frequent checkpoints throughout a chapter. If you exit it will load at the most recent checkpoint. You can reload an entire chapter if you want. Each auto save overwrites the one save you have throughout the chapter. I would have preferred a manual save system with multiple save slots as it would have been easier to explore different story branches. You can pause the game and cut scenes but can't skip them. There is a resolution option, three ambient occlusion settings, two AA settings and six other graphical settings. Performance was good as I stuck pretty much at the 60 FPS limit the whole game.
Graphics API: DXVK
Disk Space Used: 46.3 GB
Input Used: Logitech F310
Game Version Played: 1.0 (GOG)
Graphical Settings Used: 2560x1440, HBAO, SMAA, depth of field and motion blur off, everything else at highest
GPU Usage: 14-37 %
VRAM Usage: 2565-3582 MB
CPU Usage: 11-28 %
System RAM Usage: 2.9-5.3 GB
Frame Rate: 59-60 FPS
If you enjoy interactive movie type games, especially Quantic Dream games, then you should enjoy Beyond Two Souls. It has their wonky controls and poor camera controls but also has their fantastic storytelling and story branching. I finished the game on the higher of the two difficulties in about ten hours and eight minutes. I paid $10.16 CAD for it but it is easily worth it's current price tag of $29.99 CAD plus tax.
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | Gigabyte RX 7800 XT 16GB | Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB | Artix | Dasharo 1.1.1 | Mate 1.28.2 | Kernel 6.10.6-artix1-1 | Mesa 24.2.1-arch1.1 | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165Hz | Logitech F310 | Wine 9.16 | Heroic Games Launcher 2.15.1