Interactive, dynamic movie

by Tim White

Fun factor: Fun

Worth to: Buy

Heavy Rain is the most immersive, emotionally powerful game ever. Period.

Rarely can a game make you truly forget you’re in your own living room and instead make you think and act like you really are snooping around a dark alleyway, or wherever you happen to be. And rarer still are games that can maintain that sense of complete immersion all the way from “New Game” to the ending credits. Heavy Rain tells a powerful and deeply emotional story, and the decisions you make during its course truly have a major impact on the direction and ultimate conclusion of the tale.



Throughout the ten-hour game you alternately take control of four different characters, all everyday people with emotions, motives and flaws like anybody else. At the outset of the game, none of the characters know each other, but as events unfold, your choices cause their paths to intertwine in various ways.

The first pair of shoes you drop into are those of Ethan Mars, a thirty-something architect with a loving wife and two sons, one of whom is turning ten at the outset of the game. Though you spend a roughly equal amount of time with each of the four main characters, Ethan could be considered the main protagonist, as his younger son soon becomes the latest victim of the Origami killer, a faceless psychopath who, over the last three years, has kidnapped and drowned eight young boys, leaving his macabre calling card at each scene -- a folded origami animal in the victim’s hand and a fresh orchid on the chest.


Heavy Rain’s story revolves around a single question, posed to Ethan by the villain fairly early on: how far are you willing to go to save someone you love? The Origami killer keeps his victims alive for three to five days before drowning them, and it is in this short window of opportunity that the entirety of the game unfolds, as Ethan scrambles to save his son by overcoming a series of sadistic trials set up by the murderer.

Ethan’s path eventually crosses those of Madison, a young journalist; Shelby, a tired old private eye; and Jayden, an FBI criminal profiler. Whether Ethan interacts with the others directly or indirectly, and under what circumstances, is determined entirely by your choices and reactions. It is even possible for one or more of the main characters to die, should your choices lead to that, and the story will continue without them, focusing instead on the survivors. Events that the deceased character may have triggered or played a major role in won’t happen, and the story is impacted accordingly.



The seemingly infinite possible permutations the story can undergo sing tributes to the wildly impressive skill with which the tale is written, but it also takes shape as the game’s biggest demerit. Due to the extreme non-linearity of the story, you may run into some inexplicable plot holes, wondering how two characters know each other even though, in your particular game, they’ve never met. Certain major plot points may be minimally explained or not explained at all -- again, depending on how you shape the story; as certain events unfold, others are delayed or rendered impossible, which can occasionally lead to confusing dead-end plot paths, though this is not a common occurrence. Though this issue can be jarring if it happens to you -- and it may not -- it is, in my opinion, forgivable given how ambitious the plot structure is and how well it is developed in general.

Total immersion

On the technical side, the game is equally impressive. Quantic Dream made an excellent call in going with a full, live orchestra to provide the soundtrack. The music is wonderfully composed and expertly matched to each scene, whether it be further intensifying the most profound sorrow or providing a mellow backdrop to a boring waiting room. The voice acting is equally top-notch; superb talent shines through each and every character, further adding to your image of them as real people.

Beautiful character models move fluidly and realistically; according to an unlockable “making-of” movie, the team spent 174 days filming motion-capture actors, and it shows. The action in the game unfolds entirely through a series of quick-time events, requiring you to press and/or hold certain buttons, flick the right analog stick or even shake or rotate the entire controller, depending on what’s going on. A typical scene may involve as many as fifty different button presses, and each and every one of them is linked to different “succeed” and “fail” animations, leading to a staggering number of possibilities in any given situation.

Never once did I experience any graphical errors -- no slowdown, no pop-in or texture issues. Lighting is brilliantly animated and used to great effect, lending extra emotional punch to each scene by casting the characters or objects in mood-appropriate shadows or brilliant luminescence.



I’d like to go into a bit more detail on the control scheme, as it was a huge factor in my enjoyment of the game. Heavy Rain is, in my opinion, the first console game to make full and effective use of the PS3’s motion-sensitive capabilities. The basic movement controls -- utilizing R2 to walk forward and the left stick to change direction -- are clunky and awkward at times, but not so bad as to warrant any severe criticism. The actions you’re required to perform with the controller mirror those taken by your character, and while many may view this as nothing more than a cute gimmick, it works to tremendous effect in this game.

You frantically tilt the controller from side to side while driving to dodge oncoming traffic, flick it left or right to scroll through pages in a file, or raise it and swing it downward with wild force trying to kick down a door. During hand-to-hand combat scenes, your actions mimic those of your often desperate character -- raising your hands to block a baseball bat or thrusting the controller forward in a last-ditch effort to tackle your bigger and stronger assailant into submission.

My excessive use of adverbs and adjectives here is neither accidental nor superfluous; the game really does draw you in so deeply that you feel fully and personally invested in the well-being of the characters. One particularly memorable sequence with Ethan left me with an elevated heart rate and eventually exhaling a breath I didn’t even realize I’d been holding; in real life, I don’t have any children, but for those few minutes in the game I truly felt as though I were desperately fighting for my own real son rather than a collection of pixels and a voice actor. By the game’s climax, you’ll be ignoring your cell phone and not even thinking about your next meal; after all, the characters you’ve spent the last ten hours with are real people too, and their problems are bigger than those of whoever is calling you.

Summary

Heavy Rain is a storytelling masterpiece. I have four friends who have played the game all the way through, and all of us experienced different endings with radically dissimilar paths along the way. The one constant factor, no matter how you reach the finale, is the impression Heavy Rain leaves on you for hours, even days, after the credits roll. In a few places, it stumbles over its own ambition, but given its resounding success overall, no real grudges can be held. In closing, Quantic Dream, I applaud you, and have only this to say: bravo, and well done.