Brain Candy

Heavy Rain, Heavy Story, Light Impact


There will be Heavy Rain spoilers. Because I love spoiling shit for people more than anything else in the world.


If you own a PS3, or know someone with a PS3, or keep up with videogame news at all, chances are you've probably heard of a game called Heavy Rain. Since the announcement of the PS3, Sony and developer Quantic Dream have backed it as a mature game for adults and for those who care about advancing videogame as an art form. Particular attention has been paid to the story, which was one of the major selling points. It was to be a game that blended the line between cinema and videogame, with a story for the ages.

Scott Shelby, one of the playable characters
(Source)

In the department of graphics and visual style, this game succeeded and that's not up for debate. The characters and environments look authentic and appropriately rain-soaked (it's always raining in Heavy Rain, by the way), and sometimes even you yourself feel waterlogged. Heavy Rain managed to overcome something called the uncanny valley, something that many games and toys fall prey to. Basically, the uncanny valley is where things that look almost human go to die, like marionettes or toys of babies. The faces and, very importantly, the eyes of the character models in Heavy Rain have a discernible source of life behind them, giving the illusion that something is going on in their brain. This is flaunted during loading screens, where the character you'll be taking control of looks around in silence. Characters look sad, hopeful, thoughtful, distressed and a wide range of other emotions, and it really helps set the mood.

When it comes to the promise of a heavy story, Heavy Rain is certainly no slouch in the premise. For the last few years, a city has been tormented by a killer who has been nicknamed The Origami Killer, due to his habit of placing an origami figure in the hands of his victims. The killer kidnaps young boys in public and they stay missing for 4-6 days before turning up dead. One of the characters you play, Ethan Mars, has his son kidnapped and he must find his son before he turns up dead as well.

With a premise like that, the story is ripe for drama, heartbreak, love, terror and a number of other things. Heavy Rain attempts to deliver on all of these and it has a mixed amount of success. To start with the good, holy shit fight scenes. The game has numerous battles, both hand-to-hand and gunfights, that follow very intense choreography. The game is controlled by QTEs (quick-time events) that require button presses at different points, and that determines your triumph or failure in certain tasks. With this method of control, the game can have a lot going on and not risk enemy AI or player choice ruining the set piece. The fistfights are amazingly intense, and most of them left me sweaty-pawed and bolt upright.

Ethan Mars, father of the latest Origami Killer victim
(Source)

It's when the game tried to get into heavier things like death, sadness, love and sex that things begin to fall apart. No matter how much life is behind the eyes of the characters, kissing never looks quite right. Most games don't show lip-to-lip kissing, because that's something that is almost impossibly difficult to animate. Many of Heavy Rain's intimate scenes are made almost laughable because they attempt to depict it head-on, without anything in the way. It comes off as two people touching lips and not doing much else, which ruins the mood.

There are several points in this game where characters (could possibly) die, and I played through a few times with some different scenes to get a feel for what it's like to lose a main character. It all comes down to the delivery of these deaths; Quantic Dream simply didn't cast the right group of voice actors. QD is a France-based studio, and they chose to set their game in America. That's all well and good, but when a small child is drowning and begging for help in a perfect American accent, it kills the mood to have a little French kid run to and fro searching for help. Similarly, Ethan's son (pre-kidnap, of course) doesn't sound happy enough at his happiest or sad enough at his lowest point. Some of the voice actors are simply excellent, like Ethan himself, and it really ruins the sense of immersion and suspension of disbelief to hear accent breaks so often with other characters.

Going back to the point of main characters being able to die, there were some scenes that, at the time, felt absolutely filled with danger, which had me gripping my controller tighter than one should grip a controller. As it turns out, many of these scenes pose no danger at all. In one of Ethan's trials to save his son, he is tasked with killing a man. No matter how you approach this, It leads to being chased through the house while being fired at with a shotgun. It is possible to be shot (barely making you fumble, though) but it's not possible to die, even if you set the controller down and fail every button prompt.

Madison Paige, journalist and friend to Ethan
(Source)

Now, that's not to say that Heavy Rain is not a fun game, because that's far from the truth. I beat it in three sittings, and went back and forth between scenes to see alternate outcomes. It's paced wonderfully and while it isn't afraid to present you with hard choices, or go into daring territory (a shower scene with actual boobies!), it falls short of what it promised. Heavy Rain is a good game, a strong game and an experience everyone should have and support. It's a tentative step in a new direction, so of course it won't be perfect. It shows where improvements have to be made, and I applaud it for trying. I'll take an original game over Call of Duty any day.