How far are you prepared to go to save someone you love?
A rather interesting and personal question posed the Quantic Dream's Interactive drama, Heavy Rain, which relates directly to the main plot of this harrowing and twisting tale of kidnapping, love and the pursuit of justice. Heavy Rain really brings home to the player exactly how far a game can go in order to deliver a story and through its use of characterisation, setting and plot twists, keeps the player engrossed to see the game to the very end and has them on the edge of their seat from start to finish.
Heavy Rain takes place in 2011 and focuses on a portion of the lives of 4 main characters who the player will control throughout the course of the story. First we have Ethan Mars; an architect who is struggling to overcome a great tragedy that has befallen his family. Joining him are Scott Shelby: a private detective investigating a series of murders, Norman Jayden; an FBI profiler with a severe drug addiction and Madison Page; a photojournalist suffering from a nasty case of Insomnia.
Their adventures all revolve around a series of murders that have taken place by a man known only as the Origami Killer; a sadistic murderer who captures young boys and drowns them in rainwater before abandoning their bodies on a stretch of wasteland. Each of the 4 players has their own role and motivations in the investigations surrounding the Origami Killer and as a result their fates will begin to intertwine. I can’t really say much more as this game is so laden with potential spoilers I would ruin it for anyone who has yet to play the game.
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Heavy Rain follows a very interactive and rather immersive style of play when it comes to controlling your character and performing various actions. Instead of the usual hold analogue stick to sprint like Olympic athlete in the desired direction as with most conventional games of today, you use the left analogue stick to aim your head and the R2 button to move in the direction you are looking and it actually gets really immersive if occasionally clunky in tight spaces. Actions are performed using potentially any button on the controller or by a movement of the right analogue stick and believe me when I say there are a lot of actions to be performed in the game.
As there is no fixed button besides the walk button and the view thoughts button (L2), every event in Heavy Rain takes place in various forms of quick time sequences featuring combinations of the buttons and analogue movements. This can get really tense in the fight scenes where you mess up a button and worry that it could affect the whole outcome for the worse or if you are trying to perform a delicate action and mess up, losing you crucial time for the event. The whole experience is extremely immersive and can really get your heart racing at action scenes dotted throughout the game. This is aided by the fact that the more stressed your character becomes the more clouded and hard to make out the action buttons become.
An attempt at multiplayer, I am delighted to say, has not been made with Heavy Rain as Quantic Dream stick to true gaming roots as a single player genre focused on story telling and enthralling gameplay.
On a purely technical level the game is fairly well made with only a few issues of NPCs walking through one another but this is almost inevitable when you attempt to make a seamless gameplay-to-cutscene transition in a crowded area. Graphics are not top level as with most games of this year but they are good enough to create convincing characters.
That said however, the facial animations are done to an outstanding level with a great amount of the emotional immersion coming from the characters eyes and facial expressions. Hats off to the motion cap. actors for aiding with this and also for providing such strong emotional dialogue as well. Yes, in most cases the motion capture artists were also the voice artists for Heavy Rain and provided their likenesses for all the characters within the game.
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Overall I will say that while Heavy Rain may not be breaking any barriers on the technical level it certainly delivers a truly unique gaming experience without trying to make use of all the typical developer/publisher money-grabbing schemes like an over-emphasised multiplayer or ambiguous promises of sequels when the game was already finished. Even the currently released DLC feels an authentic bonus made for the fans to expand to the back-story as it is not set at the usual extortionate network price but more the price Sony probably forced them to charge.
The game feels entirely like it was not made as an attempt to horde money, but rather as a genuine attempt to tell a very intricate and interesting story. It is a highly enjoyable experience from start to finish and you will not want to put the controller down for a second. Any game where I can sit for 9 hours straight thoroughly enjoying myself and keep wondering what happens next certainly deserves respect in my books. This is a true game like no other. Many will hate it. Even the lead developer was aware of this, however those who do enjoy it will find it an extremely immersive experience full of all the best features of a game, film and crime novel.
Technical Score: 7/10
True Score: 10/10
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Images borrowed from Google image search but if you really want to sue me for using them for something like this then you clearly have a severe mental defect