Heavy Rain — Losing My Mind Is Easy To Do… Where Are You?

I’m sure gamers are sick and tired of reading Heavy Rain reviews that say that Heavy Rain is a hard game to review.  Well, you know, if gamers are into reading as many reviews as they can of a game.  Anyway, I’m here to say: it’s true.  Game reviewers aren’t just making excuses for not understanding the game: it really is a hard game to classify.  It plays less like a video game and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book with quicktime events.  The way the game is set up, it’s like you’re watching a movie where you occasionally add your own input as to where you go and what you do.

Quicktime events have gotten a bad rap in gaming, and for good reason.  It’s a cheap way to fight an enemy: instead of using skills or combos or intelligent use of a menu to defeat bad guys, you’re pushing buttons at certain times.  For example, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed incorporated them to add cool finishing moves to boss fights, but there were a few fights that I was handling well enough without needing to use a finishing move.  Naturally, I messed up the finishing move and was suddenly a lot worse off, tactically.  Sometimes you don’t need to do something fancy, you just need to pull the chain around your fat and ugly captor’s neck and strangle him until he is dead.  Fortunately, Heavy Rain is a little more forgiving when it comes to quicktime.  Mess up on a few buttons and you might take a hit or two in a fight, but you can still win.  It’s quicktime for dummies.  It’s also completely necessary in this context.

Say what?  Necessary quicktime?  Yeah, the game uses a few design choices that necessitate the use of quicktime.  The game is presented like a movie, so the action is rarely from a truly first person perspective.  Scenes where a player gains full control of a character are presented in a traditional over-the-shoulder view like most JRPGs have been doing lately, and controls are contextual, depending on what you’re doing and which character you’re controlling.  Meanwhile, action scenes (chases, fights, etc.) are presented in a cinematic style and a player is only given a split second to react to the required input before a less desirable outcome occurs.  Enough of those can potentially cause a player to fail the scene, but it would depend on the scene.

The game frequently autosaves, as if each choice you make and each action you perform is an important one.  Even making eggs is important!  It ties in to the trophy system, where you can earn trophies for accomplishing various objectives in the game.  Some scenes award multiple trophies for the exact same activity, but for different results.  As such, this game is meant to be replayed multiple times in order to get all the trophies, unlike games like Final Fantasy XIII where you can earn all the trophies in one playthrough, including content available to you after the end credits, if you spend hundreds of hours playing the game.

Unfortunately, the trophies are pretty much the only replay value Heavy Rain has.  The overall story remains exactly the same every time; it and the quicktime events are all the game really has.  It’s like you’re reading a book.  Once you figure out who the Origami Killer is, there’s no surprise the second or third time around.  However, there’s an important point to bring up: games like Breath of Fire and Super Mario World don’t have multiple endings.  Games like Final Fantasy X and Starfox Adventures don’t have multiple story branches.  And yet, when people play these games, they play them because they like the story and they like the game play.  That could certainly be the case for fans of the game, since there isn’t any other real reason to replay Heavy Rain unless you like seeing 100% in your list of trophies, and also since game play does not require more than the skill required to press what buttons the game tells you to press at certain times in the scene, and even then you can get away with messing up until near the end of the game.

Occasionally, you’re given a choice between a few different ways to handle a scene, and if you don’t make a choice, the character will either do nothing and let something happen, or they’ll do what they’re more likely to do.  In one case, when I was presented with a decision whether to take a narcotic or not, I was not given the option to stop my character from taking it.  Oh, it was there, but the game seemed to purposely hide it from view until it was too late to make a decision, and he ended up taking the narcotic.  I was not happy, to say the least.

What’s funny is that my favourite part of the game is the tiny little detail that the writers included in one of the scenes, where a character is commenting about music she doesn’t like.  She still gets the sub-genre right!  The music wasn’t half bad either, so that was a bonus.  Thanks to the music, I actually felt like I was in peril for most of the game, even though death wasn’t really a consequence until the end.  There was one major thing that I had a problem with until the end, but I can’t really mention it without spoiling pretty much the entire point of the game, and I’ve probably risked spoiling it already for the more clever gamers out there who may be able to figure out exactly what I’m talking about if they play through the first few chapters of the game.  I’ll just say that I was not disappointed in what I thought I was disappointed in.

The characters themselves are played well, and it’s obvious that a lot of work was put into the visuals and the control scheme in order to get everything perfect.  The character models are very well done, right down to the smallest of details that the game rams down your throat every time it’s loading a new chapter: one of the character’s faces is presented up close on the television screen and you can see the texture of their skin.  Not only that, but whoever designed the game seems to be able to construct a nude female well enough that she looked realistic and not like those unrealistic characters you see in games like Final Fantasy VII (mostly fixed in the sequels), Tomb Raider and Dead or Alive Xtreme 2.  I never liked seeing top heavy characters or characters whose breasts each had their own physics equation.  I imagine if life were like DOA, those breasts would hurt after a while.

Heavy Rain takes place about a year and a half into the future while including game play mechanics that depend on technology suddenly leaping ahead by at least thirty years, I’ll say forty, maybe fifty years.  I mean, come on.  CSI sunglasses?  (No, not Horatio’s.)  And don’t tell me that it’s secret FBI science that is highly classified and we’re not allowed to see it.  Why haven’t we noticed agents wandering aro
und crime scenes with sunglasses and a weird glove, pushing at the air with it, looking for clues?  Because it doesn’t exist.  It won’t exist in a year and a half.  It’s a bit of a break in the reality of the story, yet I’ll give this to them, even though I think they could’ve just as easily used current forensic science and adapted it for the game.

Anyway, this review has been hard to write, and has been very long coming.  Heavy Rain is one of those games that does things well, but is hard to quantify.  I think it would’ve been easier if the game had been crappy, but it’s not.  It’s an interesting experience and is definitely worth a rent, since you can easily play through the story at least once within the space of a rental, and you’ll still get the trophy for supporting interactive drama.

Hey, wait a minute.  Aren’t all games “interactive”?

*Note: this review is written after playing Heavy Rain on an easier setting.  Certain statements may not be true of the game on a harder setting.