Way back in July of last year, we brought you a first look at Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream’s latest game and an exclusive for the Sony PlayStation 3. The game hits stores this week, which means we finally got a chance to play the full game and see how and if it lived up to our expectations.
To call Heavy Rain a game is something of a misnomer, with the title playing out closer to an interactive movie, or novel: scenes take the place of levels, with revelations about the plot taking the form of boss fights (that’s not to say there’s no fighting in the game…more on that later.) Since it straddles two different things we love to cover on BurnAllZombies, it’s only fair that we look at it as a piece of fiction, as well as a game and how it plays.
Written and directed by David Cage, Heavy Rain takes place in an unspecified city in 2011, following four playable characters as they search for the Origami Killer, a murderer who has killed eight boys before the game begins. Each murder is the same: the boy is drowned in rainwater, and the body is abandoned on a wasteland, with an orchid and an intricate piece of origami nearby. With the killer on the verge of striking a ninth time, the game follows Scott Shelby, a private detective; FBI agent Norman Jayden; photojournalist Madison Paige; and Ethan Mars, an architect whose gets caught up in the killer’s sinister plans.
The game switches between these four characters, allowing players the chance to live the lives of each as they interact with the game’s main story, and also go about their daily lives: playing as each, controlling where they go, what they do and say (and even listening to their private thoughts) does more to bring the player into the game than many other games provide, and Heavy Rain is possibly more about the characters’ emotional journeys than the capture of the Origami Killer. The game also provides all the twists and turns you might expect from a detective thriller, perhaps even more when you consider the extended run time compared with the average movie.
Each of the characters is fully motion-captured with several thousand hours of footage and voice acting going into the game, although this extends to supporting characters as well, and helps to give each character (playable and otherwise) their own identity, a huge help in a game where the gameplay comes second to the story. Unfortunately, while this means that characters themselves are consistent, the same can’t be said for the overall feel of the game: there’s a big discrepancy between the quality of some of the voice acting, especially with the supporting characters, and there’s a whole host of accents thrown in to boot, some of which change mid-scene. And no, this isn’t one of those detective stories where that is meant to happen…
To say anything more would spoil far too much of the game’s plot, but with such a complicated noir plot, there are times where Heavy Rain the game gets in the way of the story: by immersing players in the world of its characters, things become strained when some events or revelations happen just a bit too easily, and while they progress the plot, do more to disrupt the experience of the game than make it more immersive. As with the best detective stories, there’s enough in the plot to keep players speculating throughout, but that just further highlights the occasional logic jumps and gaps in the narrative: they are few and far between, but enough to make players wonder how characters both have access to the same information when they haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet, especially not when similar information-sharing ‘powers’ at other points would make the game a lot easier.
Playing like an interactive movie, or a digital choose-your-own-adventure, gameplay is a mix of three styles: point-and-click investigation; mini-games involving motions for the characters’ simple tasks; and more complicated gestures/button-combinations and quick-time events in times of stress or when characters engage in combat, also known as Physical-Action-Reactions, designed to put players in the same state as their character. However, not all of these are successful, with some of these easier for players than the character on screen, and others are quite the opposite, with some ‘simple’ tasks requiring an inordinate amount of button holding for players to execute.
Given the nature of the game, there is no HUD: rather, the game’s controls are mostly context sensitive, with players interacting with items by looking at them (using the left analogue stick) and pressing a relevant button (or a motion with the right stick.) Although it suits the gameplay, some of these cues aren’t always visible, obscured by characters or other controls, and while there are cases where this makes sense (such as when a character is stressed), in others it proves needlessly frustrating and seems to be more of a problem with the game’s mechanics than an intentional design. When the graphics work, they’re totally impressive, and it’s easy to forget that you’re playing a game rather than watching a movie, animated or otherwise. But there are some points where the game remembers that it’s just that and experiences glitches: playing through, there were several instances where audio thoughts or conversation beats were skipped, and one scene which refused to load any walls in the building that hosted that scene.
Despite the disappointing glitches, the game is still enjoyable, and once they can be patched, will complete the immersive experience of Heavy Rain, easily making it one of the most successful experiences (movie, game or otherwise) available on the PS3, and perhaps an example of just how video games can be treated as art along with every other form in which we love to catch our killers.
Zombie Rating: A-
Heavy Rain is out now in the US, exclusive to Sony PlayStation 3 and is released in the UK and Ireland on 25th February.
