Even if the series wasn’t stuck in development hell I would still say this: if any game is its own sequel, it’s Beyond Good & Evil. With the news last week that we’re getting a remaster with a bit of extra stuff in it, I went back to the original – almost the original, the Xbox 360 port that still runs on my Series X – to play the game once more and remind myself of why I love it so much. It was an odd experience – the game had changed a bit, in that I was drawn to different things in it, and I feel like I played through it in a slightly different way. But every time I’ve replayed Beyond Good & Evil it’s been a different game, I think. Let’s explore that.
My early memories of Beyond Good & Evil are all about waiting. Ubisoft’s sci-fi action adventure was originally only on PS2, and over in GameCube land a port was promised, but the timing was always hazy. I remember reading about this weird game in Edge, though, in a preview which had rather dark, under-exposed screenshots. Here was a game in which you weren’t a soldier but rather a journalist. Your planet, Hyllis, was under attack all but secretly, and you were effectively fighting an information war to expose the truth. How different, I thought. How French! And the game’s sci-fi world was European too, by turns classical, with all those canals on Hyllis, all that honeyed stone in the buildings, and silly, like a French comic strip filled with talking animals: pig mechanics, space whales. Moebius meets The Fifth Element.
So the first time I actually played it, I think it was just relief. Here was this game I had been after for ages, and what it seemed like, more than anything, was a Zelda game. The health system was similar, with the player collecting heart containers to give them more life. The combat gave you a melee attack and, eventually, a sort of ranged option. And you moved across an intricate, soulful overworld before diving into what amounted to dungeons. That first playthrough I think I was just marvelling at how the rules and rituals of Zelda had been carried across, re-examined, how the experience had been shifted from fantasy to science fiction, and how the narrative had shifted to a different kind of quest.
Second replay, I think I was looking over a girlfriend’s shoulder. This was the first and probably only modern console game they’d played, and what gripped them more than anything was the story. So this was my story pass too. I was fascinated this time by the way it’s a game about news media: the planet is being invaded in a sort of false flag operation that allows the real baddies to destroy everyone’s freedoms and rob the place of its resources. But this means it’s an action adventure in which there’s always a TV blaring the news back at your hub. There’s an idiotic anchor who travels around spreading lies and cutting short interviews when they get out of hand. Dungeons may have bosses and platforming challenges and stealth, but they build towards you taking photos, and, in fact, the hero Jade’s main item in the game isn’t the staff she wields in combat, but the camera she uses to expose conspiracy.