Mini Review: Heavy Rain

Argh! So close, yet so far!!! I’ve nearly finished painting Sheryl Nome but disaster struck on the final stretch and I’m not happy with how the hair turned out, so I need to formulate a new plan… It also needs a bit of cleanup around certain areas too… You can check her out here and here. Any thoughts or suggestions?

But because of that setback, I get the chance to put some words on one of the most interesting titles to come out for this generation of consoles; Heavy Rain!

Now, where to begin? Heavy rain gives people plenty to talk about but it’s incredibly difficult to review. Yet at the same time, it’s not very often where you can distil a review into a single word…
In this case, the word is divisive!!!

First up, here are the facts. Heavy Rain is the new title by David Cage and his team, quantic dream. It can be considered a sort of spiritual successor to their previous title, Fahrenheit/Indigo prophecy (for simplicity sake, I’ll use Fahrenheit to reference the title as opposed to the American title from now on). Fahrenheit received a lot of critical praise when it came out on the PS2 and various other consoles. It was a strongly plot driven interactive story where players took the role of an unwitting killer and the police officers who are trying to catch him. Heavy rain plays very much like Fahrenheit but with the more irritating parts removed or refined but the underlying core of the game is still pretty much the same, which is part of the issue…

In heavy rain, you follow 4 characters who are looking for a serial kidnapper/killer who goes by the name of the origami killer. However, the story focuses most on Ethan Mars, a father whose son has become the latest victim of the origami killer. Now, I’m going to avoid all story based spoilers from here on out as without the story, there isn’t much point in going through heavy rain. It works hard to try and squeeze out the most natural choices out of you in various circumstances and adjusts the plot accordingly. As a result, foresight pretty much destroys it as you are no longer making natural decisions but rather ones which you think will get you your desired outcomes.

Now, heavy rain is easily one of the most interesting titles for this console generation because there is quite literally, nothing like it out there right now. It doesn’t fit into any of the regular categories and it pretty much does it’s own thing. To it’s credit, it does a lot of it well but it’s not without flaws, and some pretty big ones as well. but lets break it down a little!

Loved

• Morality that matters: Moral choices are a real buzzword which have been shoehorned into titles in recent years. The problem is that they don’t matter as they are completely inflexible. Take mass effect as an example. It gives you good and evil choices in conversations, which they call paragon and renegade points and they effect how people see you in the game. The problem is that, near the end of the game, certain decisions require you to to be either full paragon or full renegade before they can be unlocked. So you’re not really given any choice at all. You must be either a complete saint or total sinner! But heavy rain does things differently by firstly, not making it obvious which are good choices and which are bad but also your choices are not so visible. You won’t know how your choices affect the game unless you go back and try lots of different things. The changes will ultimately be minor but enough to make your game different from someone else’s.
• QTE that works!!!: God, I never thought I would say that! Personally, I hate QTE sections. At best, they force you to focus on a particular part of the screen to find out what the next prompt is so you miss out on the cinematics which the game was trying to show off in the first place, and at worst, you have what you got in bayonetta where they spring out of nowhere and failure means death!
  Heavy rain takes a slightly different approach by putting the prompts in the context of the action. If you need to press a button to throw a good punch on someone, the prompt will appear close to your fist, where you will be watching anyway. It’s a minor tweak but it works wonders for making the game easier to follow and you don’t end up missing what’s going on!
• Who is the origami killer?: If all goes well, you will meet the origami killer near the end of the story. I won’t say any more than that, but during the course of the investigation, the game does a pretty decent job of providing just enough evidence and hints to allow you to work things out for yourself, or at the very least not be completely shocked by the reveal. It’s the mark of a decent detective story to be able to do that, and since I like the logical thinking involved in such stories, I really enjoyed trying to work out who the killer was!
• Mature without being excessive: Heavy rain is rated 15 in the UK. So only people who are aged 15 and above are supposed to be able to buy it, yet it has one of the most adult and mature stories I have seen in some time. Too often, titles are considered “mature” because it simply has graphic and gratuitous violence and/or sex. Such complaints can’t be used on heavy rain. Yes, there are gunfights and violence. Yes, one of the female characters can walk around topless, but they are all within context and never overdone. If nothing else comes from heavy rain, I hope that people, “critics” and developers will realise that you don’t need excessive violence to call your work mature!

HATED

• Movement controls: In heavy rain, they implemented a system where the left stick controls the direction where you look and you press the R2 button to walk in that direction. In the majority of the game, it works fine, but when it doesn’t (and you will come across a section like that at least once!) it’s maddening. Even the system gets confused from time to time.
• The BIG reveal: In the above points, I said that I loved the way you are able to work out who the killer is. The problem is that once the reveal has been done, several sections of the game no longer make any sense. I won’t go into any more detail than that but it’s really annoying when that happens.
• Plot holes galore!: Several elements within the game exist purely to try and get you into a certain way of thinking or to trigger an event. Once it’s task is done, it’s promptly dropped and forgotten. One of the best examples is Madison Paige, one of the characters you control. When she first shows up, you discover that she has acute insomnia and can only sleep in “sleazy motel beds.” Why? It was never explained. The sole purpose of the insomnia is to ensure that she meets Ethan Mars, who happens to be staying in the same motel. once that’s accomplished (pretty quickly, I might add) then the insomnia is ignored, as if it never occurred.
• Romance: David Cage cannot write a good or convincing love angle in his stories if the fate of the world depended on it. FACT!!!
• Linear to a fault: You may not realise it initially, but the plot and even the choices in heavy rain are incredibly linear. Like Fahrenheit, the choices you make ultimately make very little difference to how the story progresses, save for a few sections where it will obviously branch, such as the vaunted sections where a character can die but the game continues regardless. There aren’t as many sections like that as you think so for a large part of the experience, you are simply following a tightly controlled script. It’s very good at presenting the illusion of choice, but it’s just that. A total illusion!

For myself, the linearity of heavy rain is one of the major sticking points I have. In fact, because of it, I question if it’s a game at all! Check the review again! I tried very hard to avoid calling heavy rain a game (damn hard it was too!) and that was the biggest reason. One of the earliest trophies you can earn from it is called “thank you for supporting interactive drama.” that’s a pretty good way to describe it.

A games magazine once interviewed Warren Specter about his (then) newest game, Deus Ex (still freaking awesome BTW) and he was asked how they went about making it so open ended with respects to how you could tackle problems. And this is what he said; “The plot is mine. How you follow it is up to you!”
That last bit is important because regardless of the game in question, even if it’s something as linear as uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2 or even bayonetta, you are given a certain degree of freedom to choose how to go about certain problems, usually how to dispatch a bunch of enemies. It may not vary much but you can diversify your tactics and weapons to go about things differently, even in those games. Do you take out the heavy first? or try and take many out with a single explosion?
But for heavy rain, both the plot AND how you follow it are strictly controlled. You cannot deviate from what the very strict and limited choices presented to you. It’s akin to driving a car and being driven.

The other major sticking point were the plotholes. As a fan of the detective way of thinking, such holes simply detract from the overall conclusion. Even if the story ends, you are left with “what if” questions, and for detective stories you cannot have “what if?”
Others may go through heavy rain thinking it as more of a thriller, focusing on whether or not Ethan will be able to save his son as opposed to who is the killer. They can overlook the holes as it doesn’ t contradict the outcome and they are satisfied with an ending. “what if?” questions aren’t going to give them sleepless nights.

Despite all that, I will say that I enjoyed heavy rain. It will cause debate for a while yet and kudos should be given to sony for having the balls to release something like this, which is not guaranteed to sell well.  It’s a title which will promote discussion, not only about the experiences people went through but also what it may mean for the industry as a whole. Heavy Rain made it up to #1 in the UK games chart on it’s first week of release. It’s now down to #4 but still, #1 is a pretty amazing achievement for something like this and a PS3 exclusive no less!
Some people will really enjoy it while others may hate it. You won’t know which camp you belong to until you try it yourself.
Heavy Rain may end up being one of the most important titles in recent years and may get publishers and developers to diversify and take more risks. Then again, it may not change anything but even if that happens, it will still serve as an example of what the medium is capable of even after removing all the trappings which have caught on over the years. A talking point for those who wish to discuss video games as a medium.

Success or failure? Industry changer or footnote? Nobody can say, but one thing is for certain, heavy rain will not be forgotten!