Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain is the most recent video game from French developer Quantic Dream, and continues development along the same lines as their previous title, cult favorite Indigo Prophecy, making gameplay take an extreme backseat to storytelling.  Heavy Rain aspires to be an interactive story, and by and large it succeeds; often times during a playthrough, I didn't feel like I was playing a video game, but that I was a part of a story-telling experience.  However, Quantic Dreams is a victim of its own success--once I stop thinking of Heavy Rain as a video game and start thinking of it as a story-telling medium, I start to compare it's story not to other video games, but rather to movies and novels, and that's where Heavy Rain starts to suffer.  It is the definition of a rental game--something that everyone should experience at least once, but not something that you'd want to keep around for long. 

Heavy Rain's story weaves in and out of four characters' lives as they struggle to catch a serial kidnapper and killer of children.  The game is set in a near-future American metropolis and shot in a very gritty film-noir style.  However, the developer made some very odd choices for their universe.  The cars that populate this world range from classic 40's vintage coupes to 80's-style sedans, and the technology of the universe is very low-key and a blend of 50's vintage and modern conveniences, and extremely effective for the dark story that they are trying to tell.  However, one of the main characters in the game uses a super-futuristic virtual reality simulation/forensics-lab-in-a-glove get-up that just clashes horribly with the setting.  Similarly, quite often the voice actors would let loose with the most atrocious accent, which for a game clearly set in America was particularly grating.  In a typical video game, you'd be too distracted by stabbing guys in the face to mind the clash, but when the only thing keeping you involved is the story itself, Heavy Rain can't afford jarring missteps like these.  While the voice acting was spotty, the sound effects and music are brilliant.  Similarly, other than the super-tech sunglasses gaffe, the art style for the setting is wonderful.   

The game is basically split into two segments--a free-roaming segment in which the player is controlling the character moving through the environment and interacting with it through button-presses and right analog stick movements, and a more static scene environment where the player cannot freely move the character, but rather interacts with the scene through dialogue choices, Quick Time Events, and similar set-piece options.  Backgrounds are beautiful in both segments.  The character models for the free-roaming segments are not great; they look and control reminiscent to a high-rez version of classic Resident Evil games, which is inexcusable in a modern game.  When I see a character getting hung on a corner and walking ceaselessly in place, I die a little on the inside.  However, in the static scene environments, the character models are much more interesting.  The character body models are unremarkable, with pretty good body animation coupled to terrible hand animations (which is really bad when one of your main characters likes to fold his fingers together).  The faces for the main characters are often eerily realistic, with some scenes having the best facial work I've seen in a game animation engine.  Except for the teeth, which are just creepy bad.  Most of the minor characters suffer terribly in comparison, with their flat, lifeless faces animated next to the main character's lively, detailed face.  It's a stepping stone towards truly expressive faces, which Quantic Dream has rightly figured out are a must for any story-driven dramatic game, but there is considerable work to be done in consistency.
 
The main gripe comes with the story.  Again, Quantic Dream is a victim of its own success.  In a typical RPG or adventure game, the story would be considered fine...not outstanding, but fine.  However, Heavy Rain has successfully gone so far towards an interactive story-telling experience that the experience is more reminiscent to me of a movie than a normal graphical adventure game.  If you compare Heavy Rain to a movie, the story comes up woefully short.  First of all, gratuitously killing kids to build suspense and emotional sadness from an audience is a hack plot move for the lazy and untalented.  The whole plot of Heavy Rain is driven by the in-game killing of three kids, set against a background of killing ten kids.  While it does get the player emotionally involved in the story, it's cheap and unimaginative manipulation rather than an artful involvement in the plot.  The biggest shortfall comes from an overreach on Quantic Dream's part to try to make the identity of the killer a shocking twist ending.  In order to pull of their twist, they commit the cardinal sin of mystery story-telling--they lie to the audience.  It is typical in mystery novels to mislead the audience by not showing them something critical, or implying something that turns out to be misinterpreted, but at one juncture in Heavy Rain, the game actually shows you something as real that doesn't happen the way they show you.  I can't get into more detail than that without spoilers, but imagine watching The Sixth Sense and seeing Bruce Willis knock a guy down to foil a robbery, only to be told later in the movie that the guy really didn't get knocked down and the robbery really didn't get foiled because Bruce Willis is a ghost.  Would that make you feel like the writers did something clever, or something lazy?  Quantic Dream also end up making the motivation for the serial killer wholly unbelievable.  The Origami Killer has a motive that doesn't fit in with any motivation of any serial killer, ever.  It's just flat-out silly.  There are also huge plot points included as red herrings that are left wholly unexplained, leaving the audience to believe that they were just thrown in to fool the player without thought as to how they got there.  The writers seemed to be going for L.A. Confidential, but got Clue without the humor.  
 
Heavy Rain does do a lot of things quite well.  The gameplay difficulty settings are well-made.  If you want to play this game like a choose-your-own-adventure, you can play on easy where you are capable of succeeding at any action your character attempts, so you can drive the plot the way you want.  On the  other hand, if you like hot Quick Time Event action and contorting your fingers to hold seven buttons down at the same time, you can crank the difficulty up.  One choice Heavy Rain got exactly right is the unusual save system.  There is no going back on the story.  If you make a choice that you don't like the consequences of, you're stuck with the results and the story goes on.  You can backtrack to an earlier chapter, but that overwrites your file and all your progress--no making separate saves to explore different paths.  It's a risky choice, but it's one that pays off big-time for Quantic Dream and one that should be emulated in later additions to the genre.  The rigid save system makes the game feel like a story rather than a game; if tragedy occurs in the story, you don't just back up and try again, you cope and move on.  It's a real revelation for the genre, and the impact on the feel of the experience is huge.
 
If Quantic Dream is going to continue to make interactive stories along the lines of Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, they need to make a serious investment in storytelling, and small stumbles in storytelling can bring the whole game crashing down.  Heavy Rain has many such stumbles, but its importance cannot be denied.  It is light-years ahead of Indigo Prophecy in all areas, both technically and plot-wise.  Heavy Rain is a game that should be played by anyone interested in interactive storytelling, but it should not be seen as a destination for the genre; rather, it is an important milestone that hopefully will show developers what works and what doesn't, and the biggest thing that doesn't work is having your story written by someone who's not an experienced professional writer.  Here's hoping that the next effort will lead to something outstanding, with a plot and characters that can stand proudly next to movies rather than relying on the "video game curve" to excuse amateurish writing and poorly localized voice talent.  Also, here's hoping that the next effort has more DLC support, as otherwise the game is too limited to warrant frequent replay.