Heavy Rain aka "Quick Time Events: The Movie: The Game" (PS3, 2010)
In trying to think of things to say about this game there are largely two ways of addressing it, both of which I'll try to do properly over the course of how ever many words I'm about to type. I should quantify things first by saying that when this game came out, I loved it. I was so fixated with its impending arrival that I made up several of the
origami birds from the cover (which I think I was instructed in by that same link I just discovered six years later) and left them in various places around school. There was one sitting on top of the projector in my graphics class for about two months. I was very proud of that. Perhaps you might think my pride in disseminating the symbol of a child serial killer was misplaced, but no!
Heavy Rain is a game in which you control four characters who become caught up in the reign of terror of the Origami Killer, a title bestowed by the press to the perpetrator of a series of killings throughout some generic place in Pennsylvania where young boys who disappear then turn up a few days later in a field, drowned and with an origami figure of some sort in their hands and the faint scent of fabric softener in the air. Your characters are Ethan Mars, a man with a recently killed son and a recently abducted son, Madison Paige who is apparently a journalist who through a series of remarkable coincidences stumbles into the path of Ethan (more to come on this insufferable trout later), Norman Jayden who is an FBI profiler sent to help with the investigation into the killer and Scott Shelby, a private investigator who takes it upon himself to investigate the families of the killed children. The game progresses as Ethan is put through a series of trials to find his son, Norman's investigation follows the police as Ethan becomes an increasingly prominent suspect in the disappearance of his son, Madison turns up at the same motel as Ethan and senses a chance to be a money grabbing ***** by having a front-row seat to an attempt to find the Origami Killer and as Scott goes around the families of the recently bereaved who give him their only mementoes of their slaughtered children in the hope he can stop who did it.
With four characters whose actions are central to the game and the story progressing, there's an unavoidable link between gameplay and the storytelling. Through various scenes there's an assortment of quick time events to have you controlling the characters, with your success in pulling these QTEs off influencing the outcome of the story. This, while it doesn't sound like it, does add some sense of consequence to what is largely a completely procedural game mechanic. In judging the game from my first playthrough all those years ago, without the burden of knowledge, my failings in gameplay are largely what presented me with confirmation of the declaration on the back of the box that "your smallest decisions can change everything." I failed to survey the final crime scene properly as Norman, he couldn't figure out the identity of the Origami Killer. I've never seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so as Madison I didn't know the best way to survive an explosion is to hide in the fridge, she dies painfully in a fire. Ethan then, after some failings in his trials, turns up at where his son is kept, saves him... then rolls out and is promptly shot, unarmed by the assembled police. Now, this is a nasty as **** ending. It's exacerbated somewhat by the game freezing about 2/3 through when I played it the first time leading me to playing through it again while desperately trying to make all the same choices as I did before in order to get the same outcomes. This enforced heightened sense of consequence will forever cloud my judgement of the actual story of this game, and I will say that as a pure, standalone experience the game is unparalleled. If you don't know anything about it you can go into it, be consumed by it and overlook its many,
many glaring deficiencies and believe you've consumed something monumental. In a way, you have. It's peculiar being able to feel a connection to a game as procedural as this. The QTE thing makes it feel very disconnected in the way other games don't. The notion of freedom of choice, of your decisions having far reaching consequences, rings somewhat hollow given every character will reach a certain point or points through the course of the game regardless of what you actually do. If you 'fail' to run away from the police at certain points for instance you will end up being able to escape from jail anyway and carry on where you left off. While this is a necessary drawback in order to facilitate the game's actual existence it is somewhat jarring when you play through it multiple times to see the assorted endings and get the assorted trophies and seeing how little influence you actually have on events. My advice with that in mind then is to play it once, take your own ending from it as canon and be happy with your experience. My first ending, of catastrophic failure, and the experience therein sums all of that up.
As an aside, that sense of 'failure' being antithetical to the gamer's nature is something which acts as a drawback in this regard. If I play a game and am given an objective to complete in order to progress, I will do that. If I fail, I will be able to try again until I meet the terms of the objective, at which point I will progress. While there are occasions where doing things (or getting past certain points) in Heavy Rain in certain ways will allow me to experience a different resultant story, very often the end conclusion is so minimally different its impact is somewhat numbed in my perception of it. The main problem here is how little discrepancy there is around the success of quick time events - either you do it or you don't. Additionally, the view of having 'failed' as I did on my first playthrough is contrary to... well, the point of games, but I would argue this is a point in the game's favour as it challenges typical genre conventions. Perhaps not all that successfully, however.
In addition to the QTEs there are sections where you'll have normal(-ish) interactions with things and in places, here you can walk around and interact with your surroundings as necessary and desired. You can also listen to the characters' thoughts on whatever they're doing which helps add some personality and depth to them. In the case of Madison this often paints her as a shallow, awful person but we'll come to that later. I think that for a game which is going to fundamentally lead you down specified paths and establish a game/gamer relationship similar to that of a film/viewer, the attempts to add some personality and investment in who you're 'controlling' is quite successful. Given the means they had of doing it the available options allow for much greater levels of empathy and rationalisation with regard to their feelings and actions, so it gets points in that regard. The acting of the various characters is pretty good on the whole, although certain lines of dialogue suffer from the isolation effect in that they were presumably delivered and recorded with no context or flow, meaning they can sound out of place. These aren't that common though, but then that just means that when they do show up they're all the more noticeable. I think the best acting comes with Ethan, for instance a scene where he cuts off a finger is brutal. There's a disconnect here obviously since you don't chop your finger off but the way he screams, oh, it's bad. It makes up for any graphical or physical inadequacy.
Now, having seen everything, the things I have to criticise. My god. The graphics haven't aged that well. They're still good, they looked like they were from the future when I played it first, but now there just seems to be something lacking in the faces, around the skin. The sort of shapeless nature of the characters as you control them in free sections where you can walk around looking at things feels very uniform too. The four characters don't feel much different from one another in that regard. This isn't a large part of the game and isn't entirely important, but it is something to think about. I think the controls play a part in this too, moving the right stick up or down to the side has the same effect no matter who's doing it in terms of the speed of their movements. Watching Shelby amble around in his big shapeless trenchcoat at the same pace as Madison's motion-captured ass jiggles from side to side goes someway to stunt the sensation of realistic immersion. When controlling the characters in certain locations you have the option of listening to their thoughts. These thoughts relate to things they have recently experienced or the situation they find themselves in at the present time. This adds a greater amount of empathy with the characters (something you really discover when you're trying to get all the endings and play the game without listening to any of them and the whole things becomes completely unmemorable) but again, in attempting to achieve some air of comprehensivness which is so intrinsic to gaming (particularly the concept of exploration in order to overcome an obstacle) the thoughts can end up washing over one another in a situation if you're trying to consume everything. In order to experience a complete, cohesive narrative you would have to very deliberately play the game in a certain, specific way and the thoughts you lisen to would comprise part of that. To consume all of them gives the game a feeling of bloatedness. Rather than depict any sort of conflict in the characters which could certainly be the case on a number of occasions you're just bombarded with... stuff. It's ungainly. It's perhaps a necessary drawback, but it's still noticable as a deficiency, which is the problem.
The assorted listed gameplay issues aside, the other major criticism I have is of the story. Disregarding the point I made about the game
having to reach certain points in order to progress, some of the resultant plot holes and contrived events are so ludicrous they're infuriating. My particular favourites, and note that from this point on I'll be sort of spoiler-heavy:
Scott Shelby is the Origami Killer. While "investigating" with the mother of one of the murdered children he ends up in an antique store, talking to the owner about typewriters. The killer sent typewritten letters to the parents of the children he abducted, so they went to this store to see if they could learn anything. Manfred, store owner, goes into the back to look up a list of customers. There's a slight cutscene, then Manfred is pictured dead, on the floor, blood pouring out of his head with a huge typewriter on the floor next to him. Your objective now is to wipe your fingerprints from everything you touched so the cops don't come after you (remember at this point the player is supposed to be unaware that Shelby is the killer). Now, if you wipe everything and get away, fine. There's not much to trace you to the scene of the crime. If you miss something though, the cops turn up and take you for questioning. Disregarding that on my blind playthrough on this occasion I missed the door handle, the thing which would have fingerprints of everyone who was ever in the store since it was last cleaned, the cops turn up to a store with a dead owner and two people present at the time of the murder. The guy in the back with a caved-in skull. Two people in the store who saw him go into the back then saw when he never came out. Shelby turns up at the police station, says they tried to run because he knew they'd just ask some questions that would delay their investigation, and, er, that's that. The appalling police work is something which will come up again, but given the evidence here - how could you just let these people walk away, with no pertinent questioning done at all?
Madison goes to a motel because she's an insomniac and can't sleep. While there she meets Ethan as he comes and goes from the trials set up by the Origami Killer to give him information on his missing son's whereabouts. After she tends to him while he's injured a few times, their heads lean in, an apparent mutual tenderness fostering between the two. You're then given the option of kissing her (and subsequently sleeping with her) or not. Why in the name of **** would a man who's trying to save his at risk son even contemplate wasting time in doing so by having sex with this person? Not to mention the fact that he's quite injured by his trials up until then. If you go through with it he ends up finding out that she's a journalist who's researching his story, and you're given the pictured option to forgive her for it or not. As far as entirely manufactured relationships go, there's no real forgiving possible.
By the way, one of his injuries is the result of crawling through broken glass in a pipe thing in an electrical plant. How on earth could Shelby have set up what must be several hundred feet of broken glass throughout a space Ethan barely fits into, when Shelby himself is probably twice the fatness of Ethan?
After the Ethan/Madison tryst (or not) Madison leaves the motel and discovers the police have turned up to arrest Ethan. Ethan can then flee at this point, as several SWAT team members and a helicopter chase the limping man across the roof. If you reach the end of this chase and choose to not surrender, you jump off the roof and steal a passing taxi. While the police who're on the ground at the motel not fifty feet away stand and watch. Of course, the incompetent Lieutenant Blake comes down from the roof just in time to see you drive off and shake his gun ruefully. No idea where the helicopter went.
Once Madison's research takes her to Shelby's house, he returns and traps her in the burning apartment to destroy all the evidence. Now, disregarding that we see him start the fire in a barrel before Madison turns up at the empty, barrelless apartment, once she escapes from the secret door behind the wardrobe she has to get out - or hide in the fridge. Yet she can open the window and contemplate jumping. At this point she doesn't consider calling for help, why would she, the street's empty. Except when the apartment eventually explodes, the next scene sees her staggering across the street to her motorbike while several cars and pedestrians have stopped to gawk at the flames. Solid.
Special mention must be made to the aforementioned Blake for the least thorough police investigation ever. At one point we see a presentation from Norman on what he's found of the killer so far and what sort of suspect he thinks they should be looking for - Blake starts shouting at him, calling him names and saying WE GOTTA GET OFF OUR
ASSES AND FIND THIS GUY. That sentence encompasses the entirety of his investigative powers. Seriously. He bases his belief that Ethan is the killer on... I don't even know what, actually. I think the fact that Ethan went blank and didn't remember how his son went missing. The pinnacle however has to be the potential ending where Ethan turns up at the empty warehouse where his son is. If Madison and Norman haven't made it Ethan will go in, save his son and then walk out to the assembled police who have been instructed to shoot on sight. Except Ethan walks out, makes no gesture at all and he just gets shot. With no subsequent consequence to Blake or the police in the ending. Mental.
Madison, well, apart from risking the life of the son of the person she apparently begins to care about, god, she's annoying. Aside from the gratuitous nudity involving her, playing through this game again made me truly realise why there's complaints about gender representation in games. Hers is awful. There's a chapter where she goes to a club to investigate this guy who might be linked to the origami killer because he rented out a place which was the scene of one of Ethan's trials (Norman turns up immediately afterwards, as it happens), she dances to get in close with him, she does a dance for him upstairs, her thoughts switch between a mixture of understandable fear and disgust and some variety of "you go girl, you're so sexy and you beat the big bad man!" She's patronising, she's shallow, she's just... completely unlikable. She's also largely quite inconsequential when you think about it. Nothing she does matters or has any meaningful impact on the story aside from potentially saving Ethan from an unlawful death.
I think there are a lot of things Heavy Rain does very well and an equal number of things where these things inevitably lead to some issues arising. For the positive aspects the style of the game engenders and the subsequent enjoyment you get from it, these same things can be drawbacks. Like I said earlier - if you play it once, blind, unknowing and buy into it, you'll get an experience you could scarcely have otherwise imagined. In that regard it's extremely good, and I would hope the impending PS4 re-release sees this genre get more exposure and hopefully more focus in the future, as I think if it's refined properly it can produce some extremely successful and great games. I'd also hope the graphics look better. To consider this game right now however, it six years old and still as something of a sole achievement in its field, it's impossible to really focus solely on the positives and disregard its flaws. The question then comes down to that depicted - do you reject it or forgive it for them? That's something you'd have to make up your own mind on, I suspect.
