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Essays 04 November 2019, 20:00

The Breathtaking Keanu Reeves and Co. - Top Movie Stars and Celebrities in Video Games

Keanu Reeves, who charmed the viewers during E3, was not the first actor to perform in the games. Or the last one. In Death Stranding we will meet at least a few stars in the lead roles. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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Willem Defoe and Ellen Page – Beyond: Two Souls

Genre: adventure/interactive story

Developer: Quantic Dreams

Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4

David cage has developed a very specific formula for his games. These are supernatural dark thrillers presented as interactive (more or less) stories with adventure elements filled with riddles, QTEs and... spectacular acting. Even the previous works of the director – Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit – brought some complex characters we sympathized with, but in the case of Beyond: Two Souls – they became the main thrust of the marketing campaign.

Ellen Page was the face of the game, she's a well-known actress we've recently seen in Netflix's Umbrella Academy show. Her creation there was actually very similar to the one in Beyond: Two Souls. Or Jean Grey from the X-Men. In any case, the trope is the same – we have a life-hardened girl who has incredible abilities – and everyone wants to give that power a more or less harmful direction, or pack it in the darkest cell and throw the key away.

Nathan Dawkins offers her a helping hand – and the countenance of William Defoe (Spider-man, Pluto), who cannot be confused with any other actor. Here, he's a rather ambiguous character, whom – despite predictable motivations – we cannot seem to forget. The whole game is very uneven; from a mysterious drama in style of the X Files, it turns into a Michael-Bay-style theme park, but even in the worst moments, it's the actors who pull everything together.

Tim Curry – Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster

Genre: Adventure

Manufacturer: Amazing Media

Platforms: PC

Oh, Tim Curry, the human explosion. The actor who in an instant can go from the king of the Camp to really decent acting. Or combine the two things and win our rapport in roles such as Dr. Frank-N-Furter from Rocky Horror Picture Show (for which Curry deserves all the awards of this world). He also starred in an adaptation of the Stephen King's It – in the original, TV version – cult in some circles. And appeared in games before it was cool.

Those games of course included Command & Conquer, where the cast of, let's call them peculiar, actors was only short of Nicolas Cage, but he also appeared in the forgotten adventure game Frankenstein: Through Eyes of the Monster. It's a typical, classic "point'n'click" built on static backgrounds, against which the actors move – one of them is Tim Curry.

And he appears as no other than Dr. Frankenstein himself, this time as our demonic benefactor. We play the resurrected father of a murdered girl, and Frankenstein tries to help us, at least at first. Then it turns out that the story has a drastic and pretty interesting second dimension. Through the Eyes of the Monster is not among the greatest achievements of the genre, and collected a fairly mediocre scores, but once seeing Tim Curry as Frankenstein is hard to forget.

Hubert Sosnowski

Hubert Sosnowski

He joined GRYOnline.pl in 2017, as an author of texts about games and movies. He's currently the head of the film department and the Filmomaniak.pl website. Learned how to write articles while working for the Dzika Banda portal. His texts were published on kawerna.pl, film.onet.pl, zwierciadlo.pl, and in the Polish Playboy. Has published stories in the monthly Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror magazine, as well as in the first volume of the Antologii Wolsung. Lives for "middle cinema" and meaty entertainment, but he won't despise any experiment or Fast and Furious. In games, looks for a good story. Loves Baldur's Gate 2, but when he sees Unreal Tournament, Doom, or a good race game, the inner child wakes up. In love with sheds and thrash metal. Since 2012, has been playing and creating live action role-playing, both within the framework of the Bialystok Larp Club Zywia, and commercial ventures in the style of Witcher School.

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