Leveling Down

Mundane moments with your family set you up for a heavy emotional payoff later

The first trophy you unlock in Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain is called “interactive drama”. It’s an apt trophy name, and it sets the tone for the rest of the game. Heavy Rain is a PS3 Exclusive, and it’s an amazing game (and another argument for all games being multiplatform so I can stop stealing my friends’ PS3s), but now that I’m done with it I think I can hold off on getting a PS3 for awhile, or until espion4ge gets one at the very least! The game creates a brand new experience and perhaps a new genre in video games, but small issues prevent the game from truly realizing it’s potential.

You’re in the Movies!
The easiest way to describe Heavy Rain is to say that it’s like a crime miniseries that gives you an opportunity to not only take part in the action, but influence the outcome. You rotate between controlling 4 different characters, all of whom are connected to the Origami Killer: a serial killer who kills young boys whenever there is a heavy rainfall. At the beginning of every scene, the game notes the day, time, and the amount of rain that has fallen, which factors into the story. It feels like a crime drama with high production values that draws on a lot of inspirations. It’s part Cops, part CSI (a futuristic version), part Se7en, part Saw, part a lot of stuff. The story moves along pretty fluidly, but like any drama, plot twists abound, and they don’t always make sense.

The game aspect involves a series of quick time events, although to call them that is a bit of a disservice. Throughout the game, you are controlling your characters, hearing their thoughts (which serves as a mini-guide), and following on screen inputs to control your character. A lot of these are timed, and for the most part, the controller actions feel like a good representation of what’s going on in the game. For example, if you are in a fight, instead of hitting X to punch and O to block, you will be putting in different inputs that mimic the action on screen. The game will prompt you to push analog stick down (and you’ll only have a second to comply). If you do it in time, you will duck your assailant’s punch, but if you’re late, you get punched in the face. The fight plays out in real time so it gets pretty nerve-wracking. I was never quite sure whether missing an input would result in a knife to the gut, so I was always on edge. I think that’s a good thing, and it puts a nice twist on the entertainment that’s on your screen. When you are playing a game, you’ll see a boss’ life bar, and you’ll know just what you need to do to “win” and you know that you are supposed to win. When you’re watching a movie or a show, you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen: is the character going to win the fight, or does he lose, or worse?

In Heavy Rain, you have the agency of a video game, but the uncertainty of a movie, which makes a pretty fun dynamic. The inputs the game asks for feel pretty fluid; when you are performing difficult tasks, you are required to hold multiple buttons, and sometimes even repeatedly press yet another button. The more difficult the on screen action, the more difficult of a controller input required. It’s a good system, and makes the game feel more like an interactive experience as opposed to a series of quick time events. The only thing I don’t get is why some things are controllable and others not, but I guess Quantic Dream needed a way to control the action to some extent.

Heavy Rain puts you in dangerous situations, and survival of main characters isn’t guaranteed

A High Stakes Affair
What I loved most about Heavy Rain is how high stakes the game felt. A lot of fathers have been saying that this game really resonates with them, since it is about the relationship between a father and his child and what you would do if your child was in danger. Not being a father myself, I still felt the emotional weight of some of the decisions I had to make in the game.

I began the game resolving to never reload a chapter, and just playing things out as they went. Your characters are at risk of death, and I told myself that even if one of the protagonists died, I’d just keep playing (luckily I managed to keep them alive). This really upped the ante and caused me to feel uncomfortable and nervous during the entire game – in a good way. Two things happened. First, I found myself genuinely regretting some decisions I made. When I shut off my son’s TV and he expressed his bitter displeasure, I felt like a horrible father. And when decisions went from mundane to life threatening, I remember how I felt when my son told me off, and started worrying about what WORSE things could happen if I made the wrong decisions. What makes this dynamic even more jarring is the fact that sometimes you only have a couple of seconds to make these life altering decisions, as opposed to the two minutes it took me to decide to turn my son’s TV off. You never know how long you have to make a decision, so I found myself trying to make decisions quickly and decisively in order to not let the game make the decision for me. And then there were the decisions that I literally only had a split second to make.

The only thing that dulls the shine on these high stakes is that in some situations, you may later find out that your decisions didn’t matter as much as you thought they did. You learn this by playing through the game again, or looking up FAQs, or whatever. Some of your decisions matter a whole lot, and some not too much at all. The system still works though, because you don’t know what’s important and what’s not. Moreover, since you jump control from character to character, you sometimes might not know the consequences of your decisions until a few chapters later. It’s like having to wait through a commercial break, or a cliffhanger at the end of an episode. I actually took my breaks at some of these points, since all the TV I watch does this to me all the time (here’s looking at you, LOST).

Oh-ree-game-ee
Some minor qualms I have with the game keep it from realizing its awesome potential. For starters: there are a million plot holes, although that kind of keeps with the “like a TV show” thing. Some of them are forgivable, yet some of them kind of make no sense. There are little things, like guns that never need to be reloaded, that seem a little antiquated. Then, there are other, bigger things, like deus ex machina type forwarding of the plot. Overall, I loved the plot and I loved the twists and turns it took, but these holes kept it from being perfect.

My other major issue was the accents. Oh, the accents. Quantic Dream is a French developer, but they chose to have the game set in America. Unfortunately, they used mainly French voice actors to do the speaking parts. At times, this is downright jarring and really takes you out of the experience. I mean, for starters, nobody can pronounce origami correctly. Norman Jayden, the FBI agent, has some sort of hybrid Boston and French accent, even though he’s supposedly from Washington D.C. And then there’s the children. I wasn’t aware that poor children growing up in the States developed French accents. Some of the more poignant moments in the game are less moving due to this uneven voice acting, and it’s a real shame. It doesn’t even make sense to play the game in French, because it takes place in America! I wish Quantic Dream had just set this game in Europe so I could have played with subtitles. Oh well, what’re you gonna do?

Others have issues with the controls, but there weren’t really a problem for me. The toughest thing is figuring out which input will do what, since sometimes you have multiple options, but usually it’s not that consequential so it didn’t bother me too much. There was ONE part where I had the option of choosing between three addresses in a GPS, but I couldn’t figure out how to choose the addresses. That was frustrating, but ultimately proved to be a non-issue.

All the events in the game lead to its intense conclusion, which can vary depending on choices you’ve made

One and Done
Now that I’ve finished the game, I’ve decided to decline the option to play it again and try to experience firsthand the 17 different possible epilogues (you generally see 3-4 epilogues at the end of each playthrough). It would be fun to see how different decisions make a difference, but I think I’d rather just leave things the way they turned out. Again, it’s like a TV show, what happened, happened, and I prefer to remember Heavy Rain like that. The only difference is that I influenced the outcome of this TV drama.

One of the guys at Quantic Dream actually stated that Heavy Rain is a game only meant to be played once, and that a user’s experience is his or her experience. But if one is interested, there are tons of trophies to go back and get, based on choices, and there is also a trophy for unlocking all of the endings. Thus there is a good deal of replay value if you’d like it, but that also highlights one of my other issues with the game, which is the inability to skip cutscenes. It makes sense in the context of the game, but if I were to play through for the trophies, I’d have to listen to a lot of the same dialogue over and over.

Final Thoughts
I loved this game. It was a lot of fun, I was on my edge of the seat the entire time, and I think someone smart could really take the foundations Quantic Dream built and really make a new genre of video game, one that I would be really interested in. The little things kept it from being a perfect experience, but with all the risks that were taken in making this type of game, I’m willing to overlook them. The game isn’t too long, clocking in at about 8-10 hours (I finished it in 3 days flat, without even needing a marathon session), so part of me thinks it isn’t really worth $60. Another part of me, though, thinks that this is one of the most unique and special gaming experiences out there right now, making the game worth the price of admission. I don’t know, it’s probably a bit of both. What I’m hoping is that games like Heavy Rain and Mass Effect encourage developers to continue to increase a player’s agency as it affects the plot. I yearn for the day when I can subscribe to a TV Show/Video Game and watch/play weekly as I wait to see how the story plays out. Maybe Heavy Rain will help developers to take the risk to try something like that in the future. And hopefully they’ll be able to find some native English speakers.

Final Grade: A-

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