Heavy Rain Review

Over the past year, Heavy Rain has been promoted as the videogame to change all videogames: one that proves games can trade the gun-toting, monster-slaughtering muscle men for a story about love, death, family, compassion, and all those things that move us in real life. The game has been billed as a work of "interactive drama," something akin to a "choose-your-own adventure" movie—a largely scripted story with all the panache that makes film so engaging, yet allowing for player agency during key (and not-so-key) choices. This idea has a lot of promise. Unfortunately, Heavy Rain falls short of it on almost all accounts.

The story concerns Ethan Mars, a divorced father recovering from a recent tragedy. His son, Shaun, gets kidnapped by the Origami Killer; a serial killer who kidnaps young boys then drowns them in rain water over the course of a few days. As the game progresses, you'll play as four different characters: the aforementioned Ethan Mars, private eye Scott Shelby who is hot on the trail of the killer, drug addicted FBI profiler Norman Jayden, and  Madison Paige, a young reporter who aids Ethan, and gets herself into a series of sticky situations.



This all sounds well and good, but the designers fail to understand how to make interaction in this kind of story meaningful. As a result, Heavy Rain shoehorns too much control into areas that shouldn't require it. The first couple hours are comprised of characters doing nothing but menial tasks like brushing their teeth and setting the table. I'm all for a game that's about more than action, but these types of interactions don't appear to add anything to the story or the characters. They only serve to remind you that you're playing a videogame and drag out its length. This happens constantly, and in increasingly preposterous situations like when a police captain requires your character to tie his necktie because apparently he doesn't know how. More unforgivable is that these extraneous inputs are frequently mandatory. You cannot progress through a scene until you've done the required actions, no matter how dull they may be. For example, Ethan can't go downstairs unless he's shaved. These tasks get even more ridiculous as the game goes on.

Videogames have a long history of NPCs requiring the player to perform certain duties before they'll aid them—help a woman collect her chickens in Zelda and you'll get rupees, for example. It's sometimes silly, but has become a widely accepted feature of videogame design. Heavy Rain however, aims for realism, making these seemingly pointless tasks stand out even more. For example, Scott Shelby has to do a series of ridiculous chores for the Origami killer's victims' parents before they'll give you information, despite the fact that their children have been murdered. It's a bit like assassin Travis Touchdown doing odd jobs in No More Heroes, minus the irony.



Worse yet is that most of these minute interactions have no penalty for failure beyond repeating the task. For example, if you rock a baby too hard, she'll cry, but you'll just be forced to do it again until you get it right. Even if you try to get your characters killed, they'll often come out unscathed. Rather than forcing the player to keep trying again until they get it right, it would have been preferable to see the characters fail and have some effect on the story. Not unlike how Silent Hill: Shattered Memories allows even the most minute actions to influence how the story unfolds, even if only in subtle ways. This lack of agency over the game's proceedings really hampers replayability. For every decision that matters, you'll have to sit through long, laborious sequences that play out exactly the same each time. As such, for a majority of the game, you might as well be watching a series of unskippable cutscenes that require pushing buttons to move them along.

Further distancing the player from its characters is the control scheme, which has its own set of problems. Movement is troublesome to say the least, with stiff walking controls and uncooperative camera angles, but more troublesome is the unclear context-sensitive prompts. When there's an object you can interact with, a prompt will appear, but the game doesn't specify what the prompts are referring to. At one point, I accidentally left someone to die because it was unclear which of two adjacent prompts meant "save them" and which meant "escape".



Heavy Rain's claim is that its story is more immersive than other games out there. For a game that hinges entirely on this assertion, it's a shame that the script is wildly inconsistent. It's impossible to get swept up in the game when the cast is poorly developed, the lines poorly acted (by mostly non-Americans failing at feigning the accent), and the plot more or less nonsensical. I have to admit that I was not able to guess the Origami Killer's identity, not because it was cleverly hidden, but because the plot did nothing to support the killer's identity.

Despite Heavy Rain's myriad shortcomings, there are some things it does right. While failure is not always an option, there are times where the game's quick time events will affect what happens to your characters. These sequences are expertly choreographed and the on screen moving prompts do a good job of keeping you on the edge of your seat. The sequences are also especially tense, since death is permanent, forcing you to reload the game if you fail. Unfortunately, you're so busy looking at the prompts during these, you can easily miss most of the action. It's a questionable trade-off, but these sequences are so well executed, they succeed in putting a welcome new spin on an old design practice. Not only does Heavy Rain offer a fresh take on some old design ideas, it's impressive from a technical standpoint. Graphics—with the exception of a few poor textures and stiff animations—are well-rendered, environments are lovingly crafted, and characters' faces in particular are among the best I've ever seen.



On paper, Heavy Rain is a good idea. Most games make it all too easy to grow weary of doing the same few things and it's refreshing to see a game try something new. Heavy Rain's unusually moving drama about a father trying to rescue his son, combined with its innovative approach to fail states has a lot of gameplay potential. These things could and should have made Heavy Rain great, but unfortunately, the limited execution of its high-concept design robs it of its power. The game is rife with unnecessary tasks, offers little room to stray from the designer's intended path, contains acting and dialogue that's often terrible, and stumbles often over its many plot holes. These problems make the game's good qualities bittersweet—satisfying for what they are, yet serving as a depressing glimpse at what could have been. Heavy Rain isn't "good" per se, but gamers may find it entertaining for how ridiculous it is. Those looking forward to the game for its reputation—as a game that creates an emotionally stirring experience grounded in every day life—probably want to look elsewhere.


Fun Factor: QTE chase sequences are as riveting as they come.

Difficulty: Even on the highest difficult setting, you'll have to make an effort to fail at Heavy Rain.

Length: About 10 hours if all your characters survive until the end. If you're willing to revisit all the parts that play out the same way, there's some replay value to be found by making different choices.

On the Negative Side: Most of the interactions are meaningless, forced prompts that have no outcome on the story—which doesn't make a lick of sense anyway.

Bang for your Buck: Possibly worth a rent or budget-priced pick up as a morbid curiosity. Not worth full retail price.