Heavy Rain

It's been nearly three years since I played the game, but the disappointment of the Heavy Rain experience was so extreme at the time it's hard to forget all the biggest details. It should be made clear that one of my favorite games as a kid was 1997's Blade Runner, the "real-time" detective game on PC that made a real effort to present a world that reacted to your actions, and gave you plenty of options to progress through an otherwise linear story and tailor the game to your own personal intuitions. Suffice to say that big budget gaming's slow adoption of that narrative technique as a viable way to create games has been perhaps my favorite trend of PS3-generation gaming. When Heavy Rain was announced, I was so positive it would be my favorite game of the year, if not across the entire generation. But it only takes about an hour of Heavy Rain, sometime during the infamous "Jason!" sequence, to realize that this is a game that was not very well planned out.

At it's surface, much of Heavy Rain worked fine. The graphics were unsurpassed by its peers, and when given the choice between one difficult decision or another there was genuine emotional resonance, particularly when it came to the characters of Ethan and Jayden, but these moments were often fleeting and eventually overcome by the obnoxiously morose world view presented by David Cage. The moment the game really lost my interest and became a series of flaw-finding set pieces was in Ethan's journey to the abandoned warehouse, wherein he crawls through at least a mile of sewage piping somehow covered entirely in glass. The fact of the matter is that any man would have bled out or fainted due to system shock from that experience, and yet it's glossed over as one simple trial of many. This sequence is followed by the high voltage electric maze which, contradictory to the game's entire premise, cannot be failed. After suffering numerous death-defying encounters with those incredibly frustrating electric fields the game will simply cut to a scene of Ethan escaping this maze that had completely conquered him and by all rights should have fried him to a kabob and sulking out the easy door. You come to realize at that moment and throughout the rest of the game that while Cage has created a number of scenarios in which the stakes seem extremely high, he often places melodrama at a premium over realism and choice. Again, that doesn't fit comfortably into a game that seems to thoroughly framed within the confines of choice, going so far as to allow you to be a terrible party organizer or let Madison and Jayden die.

Eventually, the story becomes excruciatingly laughable, and the shiny veneer of the graphics and novel gameplay crumble under its weight. You begin to question everything, even up to the beginning of Act 2 when Ethan's wife has left him due to their son being an idiot and getting killed by the least impactful car crash of all time (seriously, that car must have been going five miles an hour). My ending was so heavy-handed I was laughing throughout. Madison was long dead (having been sliced across the throat after failing a QTE, which was the most natural-feeling moment in the game), Ethan killed himself in his hotel room, Jayden overdosed on his hallucinogen and Shelby chuckled down the road, his motivations still shaky and double life eternally dubious. Despite being a game that encourages multiple playthroughs by its very nature, Heavy Rain was a game I knew I'd never play again barely half way through it. If Cage's intent was to torture his players as thoroughly as he tortured Ethan Mars, then he succeeded. But being that he made a game, not a movie, it's hard to believe that's the case, or commend him for it.