Beyond: Two Souls may have debuted to some rather mixed reviews when it released this fall, but that hasn't stopped the game from moving some impressive numbers. Developer Quantic Dream shared on its official site that the game managed to sell over 1 million copies before Christmas 2013. What's more impressive is when you consider Two Souls' October release date, meaning that the game hit that sales number in just under 3 months.
According to a tweet from Guillaume de Fondaumière, contributing to those numbers were over 70,000 sales from France alone. Fondaumière shared that would make Two Souls the better seller than the developer's last interactive drama, smash hit Heavy Rain "in it's first 12 weeks on shelves in the region."
Even before the game was released, it was the subject of a considerable amount of attention for its high amount of detail, and cast of notable actors and actresses, which included Willam Dafoe and Ellen Page, who did both motion capture, voice acting, and provided the physical likeness for their respective characters. Composer Hans Zimmer even stepped in as a music producer toward the end of the game's development.
Like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls was a heavily cinematic experience, but was criticized for being a bit more disjointed. The game centers around Jodie, played by Ellen Page, who was born connected to a mysterious entity named Aiden. Players switch back and forth between playing as Jodie or Aiden, both of which controlled in vastly different manners. The game featured non-linear storytelling with quite a number of flashbacks. Both of these features which were both praised and chastised.
Sony seemed disappointed in the mixed scores, with SCEA Associate Product Marketing Manager Derek Osgood responding to the varying opinions by writing, "Many reviewers (both positive and negative) cited the difficulty in attributing a score to the game because it's such a unique and different experience. Comparing the game to 'traditional' gaming experiences is just a difficult comparison to make. I do encourage you guys to try the demo, talk to your friends who have played the game, and read the reviews in full when you're making your decisions."
The game is out now exclusively on PlayStation 3, and currently has a 70 rating from critics, and 8.1 from users at aggregate score site Metacritic. It was one of the few games to recently demonstrate Sony's PlayStation Now streaming service at CES.
