Black, White and Wet All Over: Heavy Rain Video Game Review

Adventure games have long been in decline in general, and largely dead on consoles. And yet here comes Heavy Rain, an adventure game exclusive to the PlayStation 3 console. And while the game has been hyped as a title trying to do something different, to break free of certain narrative and interactive shackles-that doesn't mean that people weren't bracing for the worst. It will be weeks or months after this writing before someone can decide whether Heavy Rain will be a commercial success, but it already appears to be a critical one, and with good reason: in short, Heavy Rain is a good game, and it deserves accolades for its strong steps in evolving the genre and how we play (and what we expect from) games.

The plot revolves around four people. Without delving too much into what happens in the game, suffice it to say that life has dealt them some bad cards the last few hands. There's Ethan, a young architect who lost his son a few years ago and transformed from a happy guy into a seriously depressed and estranged dude. There's Madison, a young journalist who suffers from insomnia and doggedly pursues her stories. There's Norman, an FBI profiler whose methods and attitude make him an object of resentment by others. Then there's Scott, the classic noir cop-turned-private eye. What links these four together is a string of murders by "The Origami Killer" (guess what his calling card is.) Ethan thinks his surviving son is a target, Norman's running an investigation, hoping to stop the killer before they strike again, and Scott's running his own operation into finding the murderer. You control all four characters during the game as the storyline progresses.

What makes Heavy Rain different from most games is that it is far more expansive in the possible twists to the storyline. Characters can die; in fact, the only way the game really ends is if everyone dies. Otherwise, everyone is affected by the death of the other characters and players continue on. It feels like one of those old "choose-you-own-adventure" books, with the corresponding desire to stick your fingers in the pages to bookmark pivotal choices so you can go back if you reach a less-than-optimal ending.

The gameplay is perhaps best likened to watching a film which you have control over. Things happen to the characters, but what choices they make and how fast they react is up to you. There's no head-up display like in most games; rather context-specific markers explain what buttons to press. The whole gameplay is centered around the use of quick time events or QTEs, where players have a short window to make a choice or press a button. QTEs have long been the bane of many games; I've never actually met someone who enjoyed them, especially as they can be frustratingly sudden and often result in an instant deleterious effect (like, say, death.) While I haven't played many games with the events myself, my impression after playing Heavy Rain: here, at least, they work. Because so much of the game is based on QTEs during action, you become accustomed to their use. The mechanism also dovetails nicely with the consequences-based reality of gameplay; if you don't react immediately, you miss out (with potentially lethal consequences.) The location and context of action cues and QTEs is also smartly placed, putting the indicators where players are likely to be focusing anyway, increasing response time and decreasing frustration that you didn't see the little indicator because you were too busy looking at that one dude's gun.

The other reason the QTEs work is that they are smartly integrated into the player's movement scheme; you use the PS3 controller's joysticks to move around, and occasionally to perform some actions. Unfortunately, Heavy Rain suffers from the inability of the player to adjust their camera on the fly. Third-person games have long had a problem with camera controls, and while nine times out of ten Heavy Rain's automatic changes work, there's still problems with the camera abruptly changing angles. You may walk through a door to another room, and the camera will move from behind your character to in front, in the process inverting your directional controls; it's jarring each time it happens, taking me out of the game for a brief moment.

In fact, the ambition of Heavy Rain is also its achilles' heel; because the game is a notch above average in most respects and is trying so hard to engage you, small details that would be shrugged off in other games become persistent and nagging in this one. The characters are brilliantly rendered, hands-down one of the best examples of facial fidelity in this generation of games; unfortunately it's held back by stuttering lip-synch and the fact that most of the actors sound like they're putting on American accents. Graphics clipping and unrealistic geometry intersection when navigating a crowd of people stand out, but it's more a testament to Heavy Rain's high aspirations than its flaws.

Ultimately, I'm not sure what Heavy Rain's importance is. It deserves accolades for creating a game where players can be emotionally invested in what's happening, and offering a real opportunity for a game replay that still surprises. It's an adult game (stripteases, murder, and the like are here, after all) but not in the sophomoric sense of most video games, where it's about killing the aliens/enemies before they frag you. While Heavy Rain's cinematic approach may not work for many or even most games, what developer Quantic Dream has shown is that this formula can work and deliver a meaningful game experience.