Heavy Rain

If you were someone who didn’t like _Metal Gear Solid 4_ because you felt like you were watching more than you were playing, then it’s probably best to stop reading now: you won’t like _Heavy Rain_. Nor will a great deal more people. _Heavy Rain_ is a game (well, sort of) that takes all of the conventions we’ve come to expect from an action/adventure title and throws them out the window. This is about as far from an FPS or standard third-person adventure as you can get and, for some, that will definitely be a bad thing. You have to approach _Heavy Rain_ with an open mind and unlearn most of the habits you’ve picked up from other games. If you do, then it promises to be a hugely rewarding experience.

The first difference between this and other games that you’ll pick up on will be the way you control the characters. You use R2 almost as an ‘accelerator’, which keeps the character moving in a chosen direction. Changes in direction are controlled by the left analogue stick, which directs the characters’ head movements: in essence, to walk over to something you just look at it and hold R2. This system has mixed success: while it performs well at its primary function, helping you to cope with the constant reorientation that comes with the cinematic changes in camera angle, it ends up becoming cumbersome. As you get more used to it, the system makes more sense, but at the game’s early stages you’ll double back on yourself and bump into things. This is a bit of a shame for a game that prides itself on its film-like presentation; it’s hard to take some of the scenes seriously if your character’s happily walking head first into walls in the background. That’s fine for _Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace_, not quite so for the drama that Quantic Dream are trying to achieve here.

Minor quibbles aside, the controls actually hold together pretty well. Described as a series of button-matching challenges, following a seemingly endless stream of onscreen prompts, the system sounds dry and hardly interactive. In reality, it’s anything but. Once you get into the game, the actions you perform on the pad really feel like they correspond directly to what your character is doing. If feels like being a hidden puppeteer above the set of a crime thriller. Simple actions like opening doors or turning on lights require a mere flick of the right stick, while more tricky ones like applying eyeliner or putting a baby down without waking them up require a slow, careful approach. Having seen quick-time events like these implemented in other titles, _Heavy Rain_ really impresses in the way that your responses to the prompts dramatically alter the action on screen. Where other titles offer a mere ‘You got it wrong, GAME OVER’ screen, _Heavy Rain’s_ approach is much more subtle. If there’s a punch coming towards you and you fail to avoid it then you get hit. The fight will then follow a different course to the one it was on before the failed button press. This system is made surprisingly deep through the use of the Sixaxis motion controls. For example, in a frantic car chase you’ll need to turn the controller in order to avoid cars and passersby. This, and the tension provided by the fact that when your character dies they stay dead, moves you closer to characters’ experiences than any other game I’ve played. The whole control system seems geared towards creating empathy between you and the character: you’ve taken part in many of their daily activities with them so by the time the action rocks around you’re used to relating to them. It really works, too. The accessibility of the control set-up is a clear effort to engage with a new market of gamer, perhaps those who wouldn’t have thought of playing games before.

So who are we relating to in Heavy Rain, then? The majority of the game revolves around lead character Ethan Mars. An architect and father of two, Ethan must battle to save his youngest son, Shaun, who has been kidnapped by the ‘Origami Killer’; a shifty character with a penchant for drowning prepubescent boys in rainwater. Clearly, Ethan’s sections are pretty grim but don’t expect a comic relief character (the crutch of many games based on sinister themes) the other characters aren’t exactly chirpy. We have Scott Shelby, a private investigator hired to hunt down the killer for the victims’ families – arguably the most developed character, who gets a good balance of action sequences and more emotive scenes; babysitting for one of the bereaved, for example. Following the same trail is FBI agent Norman Jayden; perhaps the least believable of the game’s characters, complete with super clue-finding technoglasses (maybe included solely to mix-up the game’s understandably drab colour-palette). The playable cast is completed by Madison Page, an insomnia sufferer who can only sleep in motels. Ethan is definitely the most one dimensional of the characters, his expression rarely moving away from its depressed default setting. Given that his life revolves around finding a son kidnapped by a serial killer, that’s a lack of depth I’m willing to forgive.

That the characters are believable at all is an impressive achievement for Quantic Dream. The pressure put on the dialogue by _Heavy Rain’s_ gameplay is enormous. While other games have probably executed motion-capture and voice acting more effectively, (_Uncharted 2_ being a prominent example) this has usually been in non-interactive areas. There are times when _Heavy Rain’s_ dialogue descends into farce but you forgive them because they’re often at the points when you are choosing what the characters say.

That kind of choice is really what sets _Heavy Rain_ apart from other games. The game dangles two threats above your head: that any choice you make could be pivotal to the plot and that those choices can’t be undone. Characters die without a continue screen, the story just rolls on without them. That constant sense of the consequences of your actions instils every move you make with huge importance. You may have mowed down thousands of NPCs in the _GTA_ series, but you’ll still stop to ponder the moral implications of killing in _Heavy Rain_. If you’re anything like me, you’ll regret it if you do pull the trigger. It’s a sense of responsibility that no game has really tried before. Other titles have tried ‘morality’ systems but they’re nearly always reduced to a binary ‘good cop .vs. bad cop’ level. It’s grown-up gaming, where in order to get the most out of the story you almost have to start taking the characters seriously as human beings. Again, for this industry, this is all completely new and it brings us back to _Heavy Rain’s_ ambition to force you to empathise with the characters. Together with the control system, the knowledge that the characters are making decisions with dramatic consequences pulls you into the story. It compels you to play scene after scene, creating that ‘just one more minute, I need to see what happens’ feeling without resorting to cheap cliffhanger tricks or the possibility of some kind of ‘reward’.

The sad truth is that if you play _Heavy Rain_ multiple times, you’ll start to see through the tricks it does play. The seemingly endless possible consequences to every decision are unfortunately illusory. Often, different decisions do take you down a new path but you’ll eventually find yourself in the same destination. For instance, on a second playthrough I left a character to get beaten to a pulp yet she still turned up later in a scene I’d already seen; only with a black eye and a momentary conversational reference to her ordeal. While it was annoying to find that my choice had only superficial consequences, I still found it impressive that the game held up the continuity. I found it more aggravating that there are some scenes that just have one way of getting to the end. I replayed a scene in Shelby’s apartment twice, desperately searching for a way for the scene to pan out differently. All I found was a drawer I hadn’t opened the first time I played. It was empty. What you find with _Heavy Rain_ is a decision system that could be loosely compared to those Goosebumps books that came out back in primary school (‘Reader beware, you choose your scare!’). Its overarching narrative remains largely unchanged, save for a few alternative endings, regardless of what you do: you control bits of the story, not the story itself. Irrespective of this the first time I played it I plainly didn’t care. It doesn’t particularly matter if every decision you make has infinite possibilities, we all know that it was a practical impossibility for Quantic Dream to create freedom on that scale. What does matter is that Heavy Rain convinces you that they do. _Heavy Rain_ isn’t a revolution for the way decisions work in games, but it is a lot better than what everyone else is doing.

The story (all those bits that you can’t really change) is hardly revolutionary either. Simply put, it’s: (_Se7en_ + _Saw_) divided by 2. I thought _Se7en_ was pretty awesome and that the original Saw was watchable enough so, for me, that’s a decent average. As well as being slightly on the derivative side, _Heavy Rain_ also isn’t quite so grown-up as Quantic Dream might want us to think it is. It crosses off sex, drugs and violence with a cavalier need to make sure it’s including all of gaming’s taboos. The nudity is, however director David Cage wishes to portray it, largely cynical. Male nudity is quite obviously included only as a means of excusing female nudity. This is made all the more apparent by the fact that Ethan’s shower in the opening scenes lasts for under ten seconds while Madison appears to suffer from a debilitating disease rendering her allergic to clothes. The suggestive motion on the controller required to ‘towel her down’ and a later scene in which you control her performing a strip tease are both ridiculous and disconcerting in equal measure. Quantic Dream have been brave in taking on sex in a similar manner to Hollywood but, arguably, it’s one of their biggest failings. Nonetheless, it didn’t stop me taking Heavy Rain’s characters seriously. Yes, I know it’s excuse making to say it’s not the story that matters but the way it’s told, but I’m willing to make excuses for _Heavy Rain_.

Bar some lip-syncing issues, the graphics and sound are both bang-on: up there with anything of this console generation. In a game of this type, that standard of presentation has to be present and there can be no complaints about _Heavy Rain_. It’s the way Heavy Rain encourages you to feel about all those lovely pictures it summons to the screen that makes it truly exceptional. It’s far from perfect, but the things it does well it does extraordinarily well. Quantic Dream have banged on a fair bit about how their title will revolutionise the way games are made and thought about, which now looks a bit over-ambitious. What is certain, however, is that _Heavy Rain_ constitutes a huge step in (what I feel to be) the right direction for storytelling in games.

It’s a game that everyone will want to have an opinion on (for better or worse). For that reason alone, I can’t recommend it enough.