Heavy Rain is an interesting game. It tries to do a lot of things in a way that other titles have not done before. Rather than going for the straight up adventure or action game, the goal was to make a piece of interactive fiction; a movie where you control the character decisions and the final outcome.

It is a hard one to talk about without giving away any spoilers, but I will keep this review completely spoiler free. Have no fear if you have not yet played Heavy Rain. It’s plot secrets are safe with me.

Heavy Rain is the story of a serial killer who kidnaps children and drowns them in rainwater. He leaves an orchid and an origami animal on each of his victims, and is referred to as The Origami Killer”. It is a pretty unpleasant subject and the game is pretty heavy handed throughout. If this sort of thing bothers you to hear about, I can tell you straight away this game will not be for you.

As you progress, you switch between several characters that are attempting to track the Origami killer down. Ethan Mars is a father desperate to save his missing son. He has been sent clues by the killer and is doing everything in his power to save his son. Madison Paige is a photojournalist investigating the killer for a story. Scott Shelby is a private investigator who has been hired by the families of former victims to investigate the killer. Finally, there is Scott Shelby, an FBI profiler who uses his Space Glasses (a high tech data analysis device that let’s him search for DNA and fingerprints at crime scenes) to help him collect clues that could lead to him cracking the case.

It is an interesting premise, and the story takes some good twists and turns. Trying to figure out “whodunit” is the main motivation for playing through Heavy Rain. Good storytelling in games is one of the major things that Heavy Rain director, David Cage, was trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, there are some pretty big plot holes, and a few scenes that felt really out of place and sometimes just plain silly that get in the way of the story elevating itself above and beyond the traditional “video game story”.

The thing that really kills it for me is the acting. Even though the game is set in the United States, they chose a voice cast whose native language is not English. This is incredibly distracting and made many scenes that should be memorable for their intensity into a joke. Only one character pronounced “origami” correctly in the entire game. One character even pronounces it “origarmi”. Add this to the incredibly bad uncanny valley vibe and the visuals, while in many ways impressive, end up coming off as creepy and weird.

To walk, you hold down the R2 button and “steer” your character with the left thumbstick. The walking is horrible and really detracts from the parts of the game where you should feel a connection to your on screen avatar. The camera will change based on trigger points in a given room, which usually resulted in my character spinning in circles and facing the wrong way. Turning back around takes a few seconds longer than it needs to, which really started to add up on my ever frying nerves.

Since there are no set interactions, like in a tradition game where you would have a jump/attack/throw-flaming-pizza button, you rely fully on the game’s on-screen cues to know what you can interact with and when. This works pretty well, but the scope of things that are interactable is almost directly related to the things you need to interact with to advance the plot. This makes it feel more like the game takes place in a series of corridors, rather than in real locations.

With all that said, I do think it does some things in an interesting way. At it’s best, it does feel like an interactive movie. The action scenes made me feel like I was back in the arcade playing Dragon’s Lair, with the distinct difference being mistakes changing the outcome rather than leading to instant death. You will likely be able to complete Heavy Rain in a few short sessions, and even with it’s flaws I think people should at least give it a rent.

My hope is that Mr. Cage takes the common criticisms of this game under consideration for his next project. He has a lot of cool ideas in Heavy Rain that just need to be executed a little better. Heavy Rain 2 may well be the mind blowing game that changes everything he wanted in the first place.

Tags: Heavy Rain, ps3, QTE's, Quantic Dream, quick time events, Shenmue, sony, space glasses

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 11:41 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.