Heavy Rain: The Adventure Game’s Magnum Opus.
Welcome to another Perch of StaticFalconar. This is part of a series of blogs on gaming retrospective in 2010.
Heavy Rain actually doesn’t do anything new. The whole interactive adventure game has been around since Dragons Lair and even before in stuff like choose your own adventure stories. Since the gameplay is mainly moral choices and precision of pressing buttons there is going to be much more work in putting together a good story over what the viewer will see. Unless the player actively tries to see every single outcome (and that point, some of the magic does rub off), there would be much work that the player will never experience.
This is why the game took 5 years and why a very strong storyboard was needed. Yes its sad some stuff got cut out, but the work required of it is just so much. This is probably also the reason why most of these games are regulated down to click and point adventures with a very linear story telling instead of what is heavy rain.
At this point I thought I had more to say about the topic, but apparently not. The reason why games like Heavy Rain will never have as big of a budget or dev cycle to be as grand as heavy rain is too apparent. Its just too bad, the GB staff thinks that the one and only hurrah this type of game is going to get in a very long time: “is just a nice concept that could be learned from, but not necessarily a great game in execution.”. Perhaps there wasn’t paranormal shit to explain the loop holes.
Personally, the game had felt very complete to me as in the first play through I was very amazed and dazzled by all the smoke and mirrors. Loopholes and pace of the story aside, the game as a game was perfect. I wouldn’t be surprised if the director’s cut edition with Kinect support (jokes), isn’t already out that includes all the paranormal shit and fills in the loop holes. Of course, for most people that would be too little too late.
Oh wells; Tomorrow, SC2.
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