In the world of game storytelling, coming up with a good concept is one thing – telling it well is the other. I’m a sucker for a good story, and Heavy Rain focuses on just that. After seeing David Cage talking about it at Eurogamer 2009, I was anxious to get hold of a copy when it came out just recently. I preordered to make sure, and it turned up a day before release – excellent. After a fairly lengthy install (in which the game actually teaches you a little origami, cool!) the game was ready to play. So I sat down, turned off the lights and dove in.
The game follows four main characters. Ethan Mars, perhaps the “lead” character, is a fairly regular guy who finds himself torn as his son goes missing, presumably taken by the notorious Origami Killer – a mystery character who kidnaps children, and then dumps the bodies 5 days later, unexplained. Ethan will do almost anything to get him back, leading to the game’s tagline – “How far would you go to save someone you love?“. It really is that – the more Ethan works toward saving his son from the Origami Killer, the more difficult his choices become. And these choices become your choices – you can really find yourself wrapped up in the world, and I often found myself thinking.. “What would I do, given that choice to make?”. It’s very much about taking this into mind, and the more you invest yourself into it, the more enjoyable and tense the game becomes.
As for the other characters – there’s Madison Paige, a photographer who becomes closer to Ethan as she meets up with him during his quest, Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler working with the police to try and work out who the Origami Killer is, and Scott Shelby, a Private investigator looking to find out information about the murderer by seeking out and talking to people who’s lives were ruined by the Origami Killer and his previous victims. All of the characters suffer from their own personal problems – Ethan suffers blackouts leading him to question his own sanity, while Madison is an insomniac plagued by vivid nightmares. Jayden suffers an addiction to a drug “triptocane”, which is seemingly tied to his over-use of the “ARI”, a sort of ‘reality altering’ set of glasses that allow him to access virtual reality aspects and manipulate the way he sees the world around him – to aid his work, and help him focus. Shelby is an asthmatic, to complete the set!
The game generally works in two styles of play (Fahrenheit players will feel familiar with this) – the first being the more “exploratory” sections which involve walking around, interacting with people and objects at your own pace to a degree. This is where the bulk of the more “laid-back” scenes occur, such as walking around Ethan’s home at the beginning. The game uses a system with minimal HUD – where the only symbols you will see are the ones that tell you what you need to do in order to interact with the object in question – a Down arrow on a door handle indicates you must move the right analogue down to interact with it, or a curved arrow indicates a more rolling quarter-circle motion. Unlike Fahrenheit, however, the game makes much better use of these different actions, making them different depending on the action; getting a grip on something - such as taking hold of a huge bag of shopping with both arms - means holding several buttons at once, and releasing them too early or accidentally can result in dropping it. Some actions require you to do things slowly and carefully, or slamming the motion controller in a certain direction, to bang on a door for instance. Obviously its never 1:1 control, but it feels that theyve really tried to make each input relevant to the corresponding action. Also, in most cases the speed at which you perform the motion affects the speed at which the animation will work in game, which helps it even more.
The other main style of gameplay are action sequences – somewhat like really long QTE events. The characters will move by themselves in a more cinematic movie-like fashion, and you will have to react to the button prompts as they appear on-screen. The beauty of this, however, is that missing a button doesn’t necessarily result in failure, only the flow and outcome of the scene – missing a button one time may mean the enemy will get an upper hand in the fight, but get the following commands right and you could get some good punches in to reverse the state of affairs. Sometimes there will even be options – such as which way to turn or what action to do, meaning you have to make split second decisions that can affect the outcome of the event.
Often these sections have a couple of different outcomes, and it depends on your performance to how the scene commences. Sometimes this will affect the plot minimally, but other times it can be bigger things, such as character deaths. At some points, characters lives will be placed in your hands – at one point I actually killed a man by accident, and the character felt remorse for it later on. However, interestingly, some of the main characters can also die – if put in a life-threatening situation it’s possible to fail and for the character to meet their demise. The story will continue however, and in my playthrough of the game I did in fact lose one of my characters due to not acting fast enough. Don’t worry, however – these instances are fairly clear, and you won’t lose a character simply due to one slip of the hand on an action scene or anything like that. Usually you have a fair amount of chances to turn things around – but you can’t guarantee they’ll all survive if you don’t act!
There’s not a lot I can say about the story without spoiling anything – it’s very much a personal journey where you should take each moment as it comes. The events along the story are done particularly well, Quantic Dream managed to really capture the characters’ emotions and instilled a real sense of despair or confusion in characters’ like Ethan, including some of the non-playable characters who are done equally well. With more than one possible ending, which I’m pretty sure is not always guaranteed to be a happy one, your performance during the game can affect the final scenes and decide the fate of the cast. Thich means you’re never secure to come out on top if you don’t really go for it and think about your actions. Although the game does have some parts that can change, it’s not a totally open story - so some critical events will always occur in the same order, in one way or another. There are odd scenes that can be different, and of course the characters can “drop out” of the story and the ending can change, but generally there’s an overall plot that will be followed to a degree. Although this is a good feature, it doesn’t mean you can re-play the game and have a completely different experience each time, more than each person who plays will have the plot tailored to them, and the outcome will be a result of their own choices and actions. It’s certainly interesting to re-play – especially to change the fates of those who lived/died, but the first time you play it will always be the best.
There were a few plot holes/continuity errors in places, which were a shame yet not game-breaking, I think perhaps this is to do with the slightly different storyline possibilities perhaps getting a few elements confused. If you don’t think about it too hard it’s not bad, and believe me the story is still well worth playing – but there were one or two moments I thought “how did that character know that?” or in hindsight a few of their actions didn’t make total sense when I knew more about the characters’ histories and motivations.
Overall though, the game was an incredible experience and it’s quite hard to explain how much I enjoyed it without going into detail about certain scenes! The game really does throw you into an emotional journey, and so long as you really go for it, the game is gripping and it really does make you think about your own morals and ideals. Really, the ultimate question is, how far would you go to save someone you love?
-Leon
