Not quite right
Someone once said once you've done 90 percent of the work of making a game you've got 90 percent of the work left. Heavy rain is proof of that addage. For as close as it comes to creating a sort of interactive mystery-thriller experience small annoyances really eat at the game.
The game really brings the power of the PS3 to bear and creates a pretty cool game world. And it has you do some pretty mundane things throughout the game. It begins with the player waking up and having a shower, getting dressed and having breakfast. This means that when you're presented with a fight or a life or death situation then it really makes it hit home more.
The story is there's a guy kidnapping kids and leaving a flower and an origami figurine. You four different characters throughout the story seeing things from different angles. An FBI agent, a tormented dad, a P.I. and a journalist. These start out in pretty different circumstances but throughout the game they all see things from different perspectives allowing you to see a lot of sides to the story. Near the end they all find out what's going on and race to the end.
Much has been made about the game's use of choice and it does some good things and some bad things. I loved that dialog was on a timer and would proceed at a reasonably natural pace not giving you the time to just sit there and consider all the possibilities. I also thought the ability to bring up an internal monologue and hear the characters thoughts as they were walking around was a brilliant touch. I'd love to see other games steal these features.
Personally I found myself unable to deal with failure in the game. Characters can die if you fail quick time events. And the story just continues on. Maybe this is just a personal failing but I didn't really like that. Having the player character killed may as well have just been a game over screen because I didn't want to play anymore with one of them dead.
The voice acting also is very weird and characters sometimes just sound out of place. In one scene you're a little boy with a decidedly french accent living in a trailer park in America. Sometimes just people's tone seemed off, for the emotion they were trying to have. In most games I could just brush this off but this game is putting so much emphasis on the story that it feels like a bigger deal here.
Some of the environment interactions are also just bizarre. Sometimes i found myself doing things that i certainly didn't anticipate because it wasn't quite clear what i was telling the character to do.
This really is a good game and a unique experience but it showed me how big the uncanny valley is at times and how much work it's going to take to bridge it.
