Beyond: Two Souls tells a long and sprawling tale involving psychic ghosts, secret government agencies, corrupt military operations, and teenage angst. However, chances are you don’t feel like sitting through eight hours of quick time events (QTEs), so allow us to tell you the story, without having to press a single button.
Jodie And Her Ghost Friend
Beyond: Two Souls is about a girl named Jodie Holmes who, at a very young age, develops a bizarre bond with an otherworldly entity named Aiden. Everyone just assumes that he’s Jodie’s imaginary friend, until random paranormal occurrences start to happen, including Jodie being attacked by ghosts.
Everything comes to a head when Jodie sneaks out of her backyard to have a snowball fight with some kids. One particularly ugly kid begins shoving snow into Jodie’s face, and she has trouble breathing. Aiden, in an effort to get this pig-nosed kid away from her, begins choking him, exposing her psychic powers.
As a result, Jodie’s adoptive parents take her to see Nathan Dawkins, played by a surprisingly docile Willem Dafoe. Dawkins studies supernatural phenomenon at the DPA (Department Of Paranormal Activity). Eventually, Jodie’s foster father can’t handle Jodie’s new powers, and convinces his wife to leave her under the care of the DPA permanently.
Life With Daddy Dafoe
Dawkins, as well as his colleague Cole Freeman, essentially raise Jodie as surrogate parents. This especially becomes the case when Dawkins’ wife and daughter are killed by a drunk driver, which is when Jodie discovers she can communicate with the dead and allows Dawkins to speak to his family one last time before they cross over to the afterlife.
We flash forward to a grown-up Jodie, and one night Dawkins wakes her up in a panic to take her to another facility. The DPA had built a machine called a Condenser that could create a portal to the afterlife, AKA the Infraworld. Of course, that was a stupid idea, the machine broke, evil psychic ghosts escaped everywhere, and only Jodie can save the day. She manages to shut down the machine and tells Dawkins to make sure they don't try anything that dumb ever again.
The Government Wants That Ghost!
One day a rather good-looking jerk named Ryan Clayton arrives. The CIA had ordered the DPA to turn Jodie over to them, where she'd be trained to become an elite operative. Jodie is furious, but Dawkins tells her that they have no choice, and she’s forced to join against her will.
She spends three years training to become a badass, while Aiden becomes a psychic ghost killing machine. At this point, Jodie can use Aiden to fling objects using telekinesis, choke people, possess people, create a force field, heal physical wounds, channel the dead, and see into the past or future. He’s a regular ghost Swiss Army knife.
Jodie becomes a CIA agent, and is sent on missions with Ryan. Along the way Jodie develops feelings for Ryan, something that Aiden is against and tries to sabotage. Ultimately, she and Ryan become an item, whether Aiden likes it or not.
Jodie is sent on a solo mission to Somalia to assassinate a warlord. She takes him out, but is wounded and barely saved by Ryan. On the way home, she turns on a TV playing a news story that reveals the person she killed wasn't a warlord, but was actually the elected president of Somalia. His death has destabilized the region, which is exactly what the CIA wanted.
On The Run
Jodie feels betrayed by Ryan and realizes she's being used for her powers, so she runs from the government. She's chased by just about every law enforcement agency possible, but manages to get away after a confrontation that levels a small town, takes out a helicopter, and wipes out an entire SWAT team.
After being on the run for quite a while, Jodie contacts Cole and asks him about her real mother. They track down Jodie's mom who's being held at a psychiatric ward. Jodie manages to communicate with her comatose mother using Aiden. Unfortunately, the government had injected her with a drug that essentially ruined her mind, so Jodie and Aiden put her out of her misery. To add insult to injury, the government finds Jodie and they knock her out.
Jodie wakes up in a strange office, which turns out to belong to Dawkins. He's become the director of the DPA, and even though Jodie told him not to, the government has built another larger Condenser. Dawkins then reveals that the reason she was brought to the building was so she could run one last mission for the CIA, and then be free.
One Last Job
A country called Kazirstan has developed a Condenser of their own, and Jodie is being sent in to destroy it, along with her original trainers from the CIA and, much to her chagrin, Ryan. They infiltrate the base, but are easily captured and tortured. That Condenser then conveniently also starts to go haywire. Jodie blows up the base, and she and Ryan barely make it out alive.
From there, Jodie is awarded with her freedom and goes to talk to Dawkins one last time. However, he also has something else to show her. It turns out that Dawkins has developed a smaller Condenser, which contains the ghosts of his wife and daughter. He asks Jodie to speak to them, but she reveals that they're in tremendous pain because they're being torn between the real world and the Infraworld.
Dawkins doesn't believe this, however, and it becomes clear that he's losing his mind. After all, you don't hire Willem Dafoe and not expect him to descend into madness at some point.
It turns out that the CIA lied, and they capture Jodie. They believe she's too much of a threat living or dead, so they're going to do the same thing they did with her mother by injecting her with a drug that puts her in a permanent coma. Luckily, Aiden does his best Lassie impression and manages to get Cole and Ryan to rescue her.
Unfortunately, Dawkins completes his turn towards evil, and in an effort to unite the living with the dead, he disables the containment field around the Condenser, unleashing the ghosts of the Infraworld.
Willem Dafoe Unleashes Hell
Jodie, Ryan, and Cole all rush to stop the Condenser, although Cole gets injured along the way. Jodie and Ryan manage to make it down and see Dawkins wandering around looking for his family. Eventually, he realizes that he's lost his way and kills himself, which allows him to be with his family again (which is kind of a gross way of glorifying suicide when you think about it).
Jodie makes it to the Condenser, and as visions of her past float around her, she discovers that Aiden was actually her twin brother. He died after being strangled by the umbilical cord and has been with Jodie ever since.
From there, Jodie either chooses to go to the Infraworld and be with Aiden and anyone who died, or go back to the real world, where she spends a lot of time crying, and then getting it on with Ryan on a boat.
No matter what happens, we flash forward to the future where, of course, the government made another even bigger Condenser. It's gone off again, and Jodie stands above a destroyed city, where a massive portal to the Infraworld is wreaking havoc. She then vows to save the world in Beyond: Two Souls 2...
... which will likely never happen, so it's just a crappy cliffhanger.