Giant Bomb Review
107 CommentsHeavy Rain Review
4- PS3
by Brad Shoemaker on
A few technical hiccups barely temper the emotional impact of this tense, character-driven thriller.
This is essentially an eight-hour movie, or, if you want to be cynical about it, an eight-hour cutscene that you frequently take part in. Heavy Rain's plot unfolds from the perspective of four loosely connected, archetypal characters: the despondent, down-on-his-luck single dad Ethan Mars, already reeling from the loss of one child and the separation from his wife; overweight, alcoholic private eye Scott Shelby; Madison Paige, the feisty newspaper reporter who will stop at nothing to get the story; and the out-of-town FBI profiler Norman Jayden, who predictably creates plenty of friction by grinding up against the internal politics of the local PD.
Even if the broader story succeeds at drawing you in, I found the smaller, personal interactions to be uneven. Plenty of the individual scenes convey honest dramatic heft, but some of them feel awkward or forced, as if you're watching automatons going through their preset paces rather than breathing human beings acting through their own agency. When a child willfully breaks away from his father in a crowded shopping mall, you just know something bad is going to happen to him, even when your character gets close enough to grab and stop him. When two characters lean in for a kiss, you can't necessarily see a romantic spark forming from their rigid facial expressions and lack of romantic preamble. And while most of the voiceover is perfectly serviceable and even quite affecting at times, some of the pronunciations and phrasings don't sound entirely American, though its characters are.
This is getting into serious nitpicking, because Heavy Rain achieves a level of believable human drama most games can only aspire to. And it's probably too soon to expect every synthetic character to match the lifelike precision of the ones in Avatar. But the occasional awkwardness here made me ponder the idea that the uncanny valley encompasses more than simple skin shaders and eye movements. Maybe it extends around the things people say to each other and the reasons they do things, too. But at any rate, it's a sign of the story's overall strength that the game engages and sticks with you in spite of its rougher moments.
The first question that occurred to me early on in Heavy Rain was, Why am I doing this stuff? What's the point of making a character brush his teeth, urinate, or open the fridge to get a snack? It was around the time I piloted Ethan over to that fridge that I think I hit on the answer. Presented with the choice between drinking a beer or a carton of orange juice, I performed the analog stick action to pick up the beer. Then I was confronted with another action to make him actually drink the beer. I stared at it for a couple of seconds, then put the beer back down, and drank the OJ instead. Then I thought, maybe Ethan stopped to consider his distant, emotionally fragile young son sitting in the other room and thought better of drinking around him. Then I wondered: Did I just contribute to the development of this character in some tiny way through my own actions? I'd like to think I did. It was a strangely empowering moment, even if it was accidental.
The other is that often ballyhooed but rarely successful back-of-box feature, moral choice. The game foists a great number of tough decisions on you that most people would be loathe to even ponder, let alone make. Is the life of your child worth more than the life of a stranger? Is it worth more than your own life? Would you spare your bitter enemy from a grisly death? Forgive a lover's betrayal? The game flings these sorts of either/or scenarios at you repeatedly, and each choice has dramatic, tangible effects on how the story plays out, even if the effects aren't immediately obvious at the time. And I'm glad they aren't. Since you consider most of these choices under serious duress, the game forces you to make them in a matter of seconds, and then live with whatever the consequences may be. That immediacy adds to the game's gritty realism and the sense than I was contributing to the narrative, rather than just watching it unfold. I got a sour satisfaction out of letting my choices ride as the story went along, even when their ultimate effects were unpalatable.
Anyway, these technical issues are minor and only really glaring in contrast to the overall quality of Heavy Rain's plotting and presentation. Interactive drama, if you'd like to call it that, is certainly a young subset of game design, itself such an iterative process that most other games get the chance to build on the work of their numerous predecessors. Heavy Rain doesn't really have that benefit. It's coming out of mostly uncharted territory, and it's an impressive effort for that limitation. Interactive storytelling might not yet be able to evoke the same degree of raw human emotion as more traditional art forms, but this is a big step in the right direction.
