One of the side effects of games being such strange creatures is that they often get remembered for the most incidental things. For every masterpiece celebrated for the worlds it creates, the new mechanics it defines or the visual techniques it pioneers, there are half-a-dozen oddballs remembered because of some quirk of their attract mode, a particularly bizarre bug or a faintly obscene Easter egg. But a greater rarity is a game that will go down in history for something that has nothing to do with any of the code on its disc, but everything to do with someone else’s reaction to it.

Beyond Good & Evil has a lot of code that it should be remembered for: the code that renders the lively haze of its world, Hillys; the code that governs its heroine Jade’s lithe animations; the code which underpins its subtle storytelling techniques. But its place in videogame history wasn’t assured until Ubisoft announced that it was through playing this game that Peter Jackson, then the undisputed king of the box office, had chosen the creator he wanted to work on the game of his next film, King Kong. It was an announcement that bore clear trails of having been spun by a series of PR offices, but at the heart of it was something rare and wonderful. Here was a man at the peak of the world’s biggest entertainment industry finally taking games seriously. Not just seriously as an economic avenue, or a branding exercise, or a marketing ploy, but as a creative endeavour.



So what was it about the adventures of an elfin lighthouse-keeper that made Jackson think Ancel could tame a two-ton gorilla? On the surface it seems a peculiar choice, but while Jade and Kong could hardly be more different, it was exactly because of what Ancel had accomplished with his heroine that Jackson was interested in the first place. Toby Gard, in an odd respect the keeper of videogames’ feminist flame, praised her in an interview in E156 as the only post-Lara female lead to have real individuality and character. It’s a fair point – game heroines are still a rarity, and it’s rarer still for them not to be aggressively sexualised. Jade, with her sensible trousers and serious frown, is a breed apart from the off. She’s instantly her own woman, with her own job and her own style, whose desirability comes from her beauty and depth of character rather than the depth of her cleavage. With one skilled piece of design, Ancel and his team make you care about her, and since she cares about the fate of her world, you care too. That shock of black hair and slash of green lipstick at once give you a sense of your place in the world, define your purpose in the game and provide motivation for seeing the story through to the end.

And that, surely, should answer the question as to what Jackson saw: a game-maker whose skills as a character designer, world creator and storyteller made him a perfect match for the world of film. Except, on closer inspection, it’s clear that Beyond Good & Evil doesn’t deliver a story to match Jade’s initial appeal. The plot – of a world terrorised by aliens and protected by a brutal and totalitarian army – points towards a story with the darkness and moral ambiguity suggested by the title, but instead unfolds into a fairly mundane world-in-peril game scenario. There is a promising moment of sophistication which occurs when Jade first falls in with the ‘terrorists’ who claim the army is in league with the invaders: who should she believe? The army that claims to protect her or the resistance fighters who claim everything she knows is a lie?

However, this uncertainty lasts a few minutes at best, as the army is soon revealed to be a legion of green-faced, mad-voiced child-catchers. Jade herself is a simple photojournalist who can’t hope to overthrow these oppressors by force. Instead, she must use her camera to collect evidence to fuel the resistance’s propaganda war. Again, it’s a promising premise – a game hero who isn’t super-powered, just super-determined. But this too is undermined as the game progresses, with allusions to Jade’s mysterious hidden identity and preordained fate. She even has a special power-up attack. How much more impact would the game’s story have had if it had really been her quick wit and itchy shutter finger that saved the day?



Worse, the cracks that show in the game’s narrative widen when it comes to the gameplay. BG&E offers the standard adventure game mishmash of exploration, stealth, combat, platforming, collect ’em ups and minigames, except its heart doesn’t seem to be in any of them. Ancel, determined not to let his game become bloated, or to emphasise elements which undermined the story he’d created, in the end only hollowed out much of the interaction. Combat is deliberately hobbled, platforming is automatic and joyless, exploration confined to ensure linear progress, collecting turned to a chore by instructing you on the location of every item, puzzles are rudimentary in their simplicity, stealth simplified to repetitive basics, and the minigames diversions at best. Although everything works together smoothly, and there’s no question that Ancel achieved his ambition of producing a streamlined adventure, there’s nothing memorable, nothing meaty in any of the game’s set pieces.