Life has been quite busy lately, with the wedding only 16 days away (!) I've had little time for games. When I did get a chance to play I devoted myself to Heavy Rain, and I've finally finished it. My feelings are quite a mixed bag, so lets dive right in shall we.
Heavy Rain often has trouble being defined. It wants to be called an interactive drama but it's also a game (like two sides of the same coin), so I think I will dissect both facets. That out of the way, Heavy Rain is a great interactive drama, and a pretty good game. Honestly if you haven't played it and you like your games to have a good story then stop reading and get Heavy Rain. No seriously stop reading because there will be spoilers.
As an interactive drama Heavy Rain is a magnificent success. The mechanics are better implemented then they were in Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit depending on where you live) and the story doesn't debunk into a great silly mess. The conversations flow better and the characters feelings come across easier. I enjoyed being able to hold L2 and listen to what they were thinking, but ultimately, it ended up tedious because I wanted to hear all their thoughts. That's because I couldn't quite shake the knowledge I was playing a game, and getting trophies, and I had to "collect everything".
As for the story, the main attraction, it is… good. It contains elements of all the popular crime shows, and again, the emotion conveyed is great. There are some problems though. I've only played through once, so I need to go at it from a few more angles, but basically they set up the story as though the father is the Origami Killer. Ethan, one of the four main characters is the father of the kidnapped boy the story revolves around. He has to go through these Saw like challenges to get clues to find his son. Ethan was my favorite character to play as because he was the most frantic, and there was actually a sense of urgency, but his story line also had the most plot holes.
Now as I said I have only played through once so I've only seen one story line possibility. In the beginning it is shown that Ethan experiences these blackouts, he can't remember what he did or where he was, but he'll come to somewhere else and even has an origami figure in his hand. About half way through the story they literally just drop this. It's like the writers forgot they had even set it up in the first place. There might be some B.S. about it coming from the fact he was in a coma but was that whole thing honestly a Red Haring… really?
Another… not quite problem, but annoyance, I had was with the reveal of who the killer really is. I don't think the identity changes based on play through but here it goes SPOILER the private detective Scott Shelby ends up being the killer. My only thought was "What?" and not in a "How could he?" way, but more or less a "how is that possible?" The way they connect the dots and reveal everything that happened behind the scenes was just weak. Scenes I was actually involved in were now completely changed. Honestly, it felt like a cop out, as though the writers couldn't mask the identity AND give you clever hints. They had to alter things YOU experienced and forced it to make sense.
All in all it was still a great story though. I did get a laugh out of how quickly Madison throws herself as Ethan, I mean, he straight tells her he probably is the Origami Killer and she doesn't even blink… I suppose it's like those women who right men in prison convicted of murder and such…
On the gameplay side it works sometimes, and other times gets frustrating. Heavy Rain is essentially one big QTE. The choices you can make have this really neat effect where they shake and move fast depending on how stressed you are. This is awesome in conversations, however, during gameplay if you are fighting someone and things are moving fast it is sometimes very difficult to tell if you are supposed to press a button, hold a button or (the most commonly hard to tell apart) press a button rapidly. It's a minor complaint really, and I was still able to make it to the end without a problem. The other thing that takes some getting used to is the camera and movement. To walk you hold the R2 button and almost drive the person like a car. I honestly don't see the point of this. There is nothing more immersive about it, if anything it removes you from the game because of how clunky it is. The camera does a great job for the most part, though sometimes will crowd the character and you will be unable to see the choices floating around their head. Also finding things in the environment can sometimes be quite a challenge. Honestly, these are the only mechanics in the game and they should just work better.
I'm excited to dive back into Heavy Rain again and see what I can do differently. It seems like there is a trophy for just about every decision you can make (and in a very nice touch, the trophies only appear during the loading screen). I'm also curious if multiple play throughs can tie up some of those loose ends. I'll probably write another blog in the future with my final final thoughts on Heavy Rain (and the DLC too). As for now, I am happy with the game. It kept me engaged, I cared about the characters, and I did not want to stop playing. That's the calling card of a good game, and in this case the calling card was folded into a pretty little swan, and left in the hand of the gamer.
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