Heavy Rain

I've heard for years about Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. There's so much admiration for David Cage and his penchant for story telling. Creating emotional connections between the player and the character. I am familiar with his style, finding it totally fascinating but also totally infuriating. I played through Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) twice. I even liked the second half. It almost felt like Cage created a formula with Indigo, and followed it nearly beat for beat with Heavy Rain. Sure, it's got some different spices on it. But digesting it felt incredibly similar.

Let's quickly go over the presentation. The soundtrack is fantastic, Normand Corbeil taking an approach not unlike Hans Zimmer, where slight variations are made to 2 or 3 really catchy pieces. Sometimes, a song feels shoehorned in and doesn't match the atmosphere, but for the most part everything clicks and sounds brilliant. But holy shit, is the voice acting ever bad. Like, the most awkward, goofy reading of scripts I've ever heard in a video game. Poor delivery and insanely silly sounding pronunciations. It kind of hurts the games otherwise very serious approach a lot. What doesn't hurt is the graphical overhaul. Heavy Rain on PS4 is VERY impressive. Really, really impressive. Facial animations can look a bit funny, but the close ups are crazy detailed.

With that out of the way, the two big bullet points are the story and the QTE gameplay. The story never quite goes to the places Indigo went. But there are still multiple perspectives, cat and mouse situations where missed details can get characters caught in a mess, crimes and criminal investigations, branching paths, life or death situations, and once again -- chapters played from the perspective of children. The characters are quirky, but not to the degree of Deadly Premonition which came out the same week. That game knew it was weird. Heavy Rain might not be aware of its weirdness. I won't say that there is NO character development, because that would be an extreme exaggeration. Still, there's not a lot of reason to believe these characters care enough about one another to go to some of the lengths they go. I like the interactions between Ethan and Norman, and Scott also has some good moments. Madison has no personality but she gets involved in some pretty compelling things. It all just seems to happen too quickly after a fade to black. Why does everyone always have to have a love interest? It's gross. Yes, I'll admit that when I lost a couple characters, I sat stunned for a minute. I thought about my choices after the credits rolled. I played through a few chapters again. I thought the first killer encounter was a red herring, but it wasn't. And while I am happy with the final reveal, that part still feels a little bizarre.

And here's where the paths really branch ;). Playing the game: the controls and interactive cinematics aka QTE. First and foremost, I know what a QTE is. Heavy Rain is not 100% QTE. It's more like 60%. The other 40% is walking around an area looking for prompts. Climbing a ladder is not a QTE. Picking up an item is not a QTE. Those are prompts. A QTE is a sequence that displays a series of prompts in rapid, usually timed succession. I really dislike how prominent the QTE is in this game. I don't totally hate them, I just find them distracting. And some of the same issues with the QTE are actually just as big an issue with the simple prompt. What the hell is this command that is on the screen? Heavy Rain not only fails to properly explain all of the commands and what they do, but sometimes button presses are hidden behind characters. Sometimes camera angles block them. Sometimes they're inconsistent or just don't work. The most problematic for me were the half circles and the simultaneous L1 and R1. There was a constant confusion of whether it was a mashing situation or an alternating. The most failures however, came from the axis commands. Shake up and down, shake left and right, and my favorite -- twist left or right. It doesn't get more left than upside down. There is actually no more left. The quick jolts up and down were the only ones that didn't feel awkward or unresponsive. Since very few of the QTE segments have a real impact, success or failure doesn't change much. In specific chapters, failure changes the path and outcome of the game. I saw two pretty different endings after making a few small changes 2 or 3 chapters back. And this is another issue. Replaying Heavy Rain is not user friendly. Even with chapter select, the player is forced to watch the same events unfold over and over. No skipping cutscenes.

The other 40%, the walking around part, is pure adventure game. Interacting with the environment can be tough at times because R2 moves forward, like literally "accelerates" the main character. These aren't PS1 Resident Evil tank controls though. I could handle those. I had trouble with the head movement, which is mapped to the left stick. I walked in and back out of a room 3 or 4 times on occasion because I just couldn't grasp the scheme. I struggled with a few places where I had to walk through crowds. I just COULD not navigate through. I also struggled to turn my head just enough to pull up a prompt for some interactions. Exploring was my favorite part though. Discovering. Yes, I enjoyed some of the action sequences. Very theatrical. But this might have been better suited as a straight up adventure game with normal ass controls and cutscenes.

Other than a few bugs upon startup, all involving the strange strobing text and frame rate drop (fixed by restarting the PS4), I saw only one issue. I was allowed to catch up to the red balloon at the beginning of the game. I had to google where to go next because the game was stuck. After that, everything ran smoothly. I enjoyed the experience at times, disliked it at others. The characters were a bit wooden, but the story developments themselves were interesting enough to keep me invested. I only review games that keep me thinking about them after I drop the controller. So the fact that I even took the time to do this should speak volumes about Heavy Rain, even if my opinion doesn't sound overly positive.