Heavy Rain is going to divide people, lets get that straight right away. Its labelled as an "interactive Drama" for a start, which is bound to put people off. The Hundredth Idiot Team are quite divided on it too, with our own Editor-in-Chief describing it as boring looking. This seems a crying shame, as this is one of the most edge of the seat experiences i have ever had.
Heavy Rain tells the story of four characters and their individual hunts for the Origami Killer, a serial child murderer those victims are drowned then dumped around the city. The characters are an eclectic bunch, you have the Father, The Private Detective, The FBI agent and the Photographer. They all have different reasons for their paths and its interesting to see them slowly entwine as the story progresses.
You control each character as they move around the scenes, interacting with items using a combination of stick movement and button pressing that is supposed to slightly simulate the activity itself, and interestingly you can also access their thoughts to give you insight into what they are thinking.
Its the interaction of objects though that i think has polarised opinion about this game. Watching trailers beforehand its clear to see there is a lot of micromanagement to contend with, from washing your hands after having a slash, to shaking the orange juice before drinking it from the bottle. But its these seemingly mundane activities the game forces you to make that connect you to the character you are playing, causing a level of empathy toward that person previously unseen in other games. Its a neat trick, and one that is needed to get you through the series of what are essentially just quick time events. These aren't just god of war style quick time events though, you cant just have another jab at the X button if you miss it the first time, a mistake can be the difference between life and death, or the story branching one way over another.
This is to me, the main selling point of Heavy Rain, the feeling that at any point you could die, and rather than losing a few minutes of game time and having to backtrack, the game carries on without that character, the others having to plod on regardless, causing the story to change accordingly. Its what made me sit up on the edge of my sofa and really think about what I was doing when it was clear there was an important scene. There are times in the game i'm pretty sure I made the wrong decision, but I had to live with the consequences and let the story unfold. Upon finishing it I immediately saw that the way I could have done things "better", but hey, that was my story, that's how it played.
Not many games deal with such a sensitive subject matter as the murder of young children, and its a brave move by Quantic Dream. Some scenes are truly disturbing and i defy people to to play through this game without feeling some tug at their heartstrings. Most of this is due to the highly thought out storytelling, but its also down to the graphics. Never before in a game have i seen such lifelike characters. The eyes ooze emotion in such quantities its obvious to the player what the people are thinking, the body language conveys so much that you almost forget sometimes that these are just polygons and pixels. The scenery and attention to detail is big budget Hollywood film quality, made more apparent by the equally polished camera work, "Interactive drama" really does sum it up, its like you are playing a movie.
There are issues though. The graphics glitch out quite a lot, which totally takes you out of the immersion and sometimes ruined scenes for me. Controlling the movement of the characters wasn't without its problems too, I spent far too much time either walking the way I had just come because it seemed to randomly flip my direction, or just walking into scenery because its not quite responsive enough. Again the only main gripe to these problems was the fact it removes from the feeling of being there and doing it, and its a game that needs to suck the player in to work properly. There is also the legitimate argument that this game is just a series of quick time events, some people see this a "choose your own adventure" book, when what they wanted was a James Patterson novel, but its much more that, its a winding and varied story that sucks you in and sometimes, spits you back out again.
There are games to cater for people that want action without consequences and stories without plots, this is not one of them.
