Seeing dead people must be a traumatizing gift, but it can't be as bad as smelling them. While Jodie Holmes kneels next to a lifeless lump, steeling herself for a violent flash of this poor man's final moments, it becomes my job to funnel his ethereal post-existence energy - represented as a spooky mist rising from the body - right into her meticulously rendered face. Beyond: Two Souls is a game about life and death, except when it's about getting a face full of ghost farts.

It's hard to ignore Beyond's insane fluctuations between bravery and bungling as you play the dual roles of Jodie, a delicate but determined woman with psychic abilities (and the likeness of Ellen Page), and Aiden, the spectral entity tethered to her and the true source of her astonishing spoon-bending powers. When scientists try to discern the nature of their relationship, they don't know it's really you flying through the room and the walls, possessing people and riling objects as if you were firing at them with a slingshot.

The freedom you display as Aiden has a chilling effect on the people in the room, almost as if the game itself is frightened by an entity with so much agency. Like Heavy Rain before it, Beyond: Two Souls is a restrictive game that sacrifices repeatable mechanisms and emergent scenarios for a cinematic structure, with objectives propelled by the needs of the scene more than the needs of the medium itself.