It takes a rare game to leave me effectively speechless after having played it. It also takes a rare gaming experience to either leave me muttering “wow” frequently or to have actually been able to move me, almost to tears (but, uhm, manly tears). Heavy Rain does that and more. It is a PS3 game that no PS3 owner should miss.
Game Title: Heavy Rain
Platform Reviewed: Playstation 3
Also Available: N/A
Created by: Quantic Dream
Let me begin by saying that I am not a gamer who cares about trophies or achievements. When I play a game, I play it to unlock new in-game content or bonus content, while completing the story. Heavy Rain is so engaging that this is the first (and likely for the foreseeable future, only) game that I’ve gone back and cared about hunting down every single trophy for in order to earn that elusive platinum (you earned all the other trophies) trophy. Thus far, I’m still not bored with it.
Story: The story of Heavy Rain is a murder and kidnapping mystery. The so-called Origami Killer has been preying on young boys, kidnapping them and killing them in a way that leaves no visible marks on the body. All of the boys have been drowned and have had their bodies abandoned with an origami figure in one hand and an orchid left on their chests.
You play, throughout the game, as four major characters and a handful of side characters. The four main characters include: Ethan Mars (father of two who has already experienced loss and now faces both his own son being the killer’s latest kidnapping victim, who will die very soon if not rescued, and the notion that he may very well be the killer himself during a series of blackouts); Madison Paige (a photo journalist with insomnia); Norman Jayden (an FBI agent working with mostly uncooperative local police, and decked out with a special set of glasses that creates a Virtual Reality environment and crime scene investigatory scanning mode similar to Batman’s cowl); and Scott Shelby (a private investigator on the Origami Killer case).
As each individual character’s story progresses, you work your way closer to (hopefully) finding the killer and saving Shaun Mars. Their stories intersect at times, and the cast of characters and locales grows as the story moves forward.
The story amounts to a sort of high-tech “Choose Your Own Adventure” book (or “Decide Your Destiny” to make a more current Star Wars reference). Your actions in various scenes affect those scenes, and important decisions made within the story can create very different paths through the tale. Do you save a convenience store owner from a holdup, or do you let him die? Do you forgive or reject one who has lied to you?
In certain scenarios (though not all), it is possible for your characters (and related characters that aren’t usually playable) to die. Let the big bruiser junkyard owner get the upper hand and put you in a car about to be crushed, and you had better free yourself before it is dropped into the masher.
Here’s the kicker, though . . . Your choices do matter. The game relies mostly on “quick time events” (QTEs), which I’ll discuss in the gameplay section below. However, unlike most QTEs in other games (God of War, Dante’s Inferno, The Force Unleashed, etc.), failing an action does not always automatically bring you back to the beginning of the sequence you screwed up. Oh, sure, it might do that if the sequence is about drinking some orange juice or getting into or out of a chair, but if you foul up when trying to escape the police, you can end up in jail, or a mistake in the wrong life-risking can literally kill that character.
And the story . . . moves . . . on.
Understand what I’m saying here. If a character fails an important action or dies, the game continues onward. This isn’t “oops, start again.” It is “oops, time to see how the consequences of your actions change the course of the game.” A character that dies is gone from the game, except as others mourn them, while the others continue trying to find the killer without that character’s contributions, which profoundly impacts the last chapters of the game. Moreover, you can even purposely help the killer commit the “perfect crime” and escape.
More than in any other game I’ve seen, this one takes its storytelling cues from your actions.
Add in some good voice work (and some downright awful, especially for child characters), highly emotive characters (with the most advanced facial modeling in video games I’ve seen thus far), and an engaging overall plotline with great pacing (right through the downright epic-feeling finale if everyone survives going into it), and you have a story that should not be missed.
Beware however: The story is not for children. The game itself includes not only violence and some disturbing imagery but also male rear nudity and female rear and frontal nudity, along with a type of scene that ties together both, so to speak. This is not a game for kids.
Gameplay: Heavy Rain was often dismissed prior to release as being an “interactive movie” or a “QTE-only game,” assumed to be meant more for watching than interacting.
The truth is somewhat different, though it is somewhat difficult to describe.
The game allows you to control a character’s movement (walking) and the direction in which they look to notice surroundings, usually with two interchangeable fixed camera angles. Actions that are available in those free moving segments are noted by symbols that represent actions on the controller. Carrying out that action interacts with the environment. At other times, we are talking about actual QTEs. (A “quick time event” means that a sequence is playing in the game and you are to input certain button-presses, analog stick moves, or similar inputs in order to get through the sequence successfully.) In fact, QTEs are a huge part of the game design.
However, to call these regular QTEs would be doing the game design an injustice. The QTEs in this game are extremely varied in their type and different from anything I’ve seen in other games. Yes, sometimes it is just hitting a certain button in time or “jamming” on a button rapidly for a set period of time. Other times, you are moving the right analog stick in a particular direction at the right time. When these are the case, that action feels natural in the gameplay. However, at other times you will nearly contort your fingers to carry out certain multiple button-holding actions, use the Sixaxis controller’s motion controls to balance, yank things in directions, turn a steering wheel, or other such movements. At times, speed plays a huge role in how successful you are. In other words, the game takes QTEs and makes them feel very natural and equal to the task at hand in the game, while introducing new ways of inputting such commands, while also allowing different difficulty levels to help both new and experienced players in getting through the game. (And, no, the demo version does not do this control scheme justice at all.) It needs to be tried in a major segment of the game to be truly appreciated.
The Verdict: If you are a Playstation 3 owner (and an adult), I cannot recommend Heavy Rain highly enough. It is as much of a “must play” or possible “killer app,” in my opinion, as last year’s uber-award winning Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The story is engaging, the gameplay fits to a tee, and your feeling of true consequences for your actions is unparalleled in the current gaming generation.
What’s even better? We will soon see the beginning of Heavy Rain Chronicles, a series of DLC episodes that tie into the characters (if not perhaps the core story) of the game, and those who preordered Heavy Rain from certain retailers will receive the first episode, The Taxidermist, for free later this week.
Grade: A+
A gaming storytelling experience that should not be missed. ‘Nuff said.
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