Willem Defoe and Ellen Page – Beyond: Two Souls. Not only Keanu Reeves – movie stars in games

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

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.