Review: Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain is a mystery-adventure game for the PlayStation 3. It was developed by Quantum Dream.

Quantum Dream put a lot of work into making the characters look as realistic as possible.

A serial murder, dubbed the Origami Killer, is abducting children and murdering them by drowning them in rainwater after five days. Ethan Mars, a traumatized father with mental problems; Madison Paige, a journalist with insomnia; Scott Shelby, a private investigator and former police officer; and Norman Jayden, an FBI forensics investigator with a drug problem; are all drawn into the investigation when Ethan’s son Shaun is abducted.

The story is a generic mystery, featuring a serial killer with weird rituals, and protagonists with traumatic pasts.

Parts of the story are shown somewhat poorly, with segments of the story explaining where, why, and how characters go to where they go and talk to who they talk are left out, only showing the characters arriving.

As for the mystery itself the game does not give the player enough information ahead of time to solve the case. Instead it dumps a lot of motive and back-story near the end. The game does not want the player to solve the case, if it did it would do a better job of cataloging the clues the characters find.

Despite all this the story is not bad. The characters, while shallow in history, all have developed personalities that make them fun to watch and use. The way the narrative switches between them is a rare way to tell a mystery, and the way it takes place over five days on a strict schedule is also impressive. And there is an interesting plot twist near the end that uses the way the game has been telling the story to good effect.

All the characters have been motioned capped and their faces modeled on their voice actors to incredibly detail. The faces almost always show clear emotion when they talk. Just as good are the backgrounds. Because the game only visits locations once, the developers had time to put lots of detail into all the buildings. Nothing looks copied and pasted; everything is where it should be. The player can walk into a house and figure out where to look for medicine because it makes sense, which does not sound impressive but it is.

What the game does is make almost everything interactive, but makes it a challenge to do anything. The player cannot press a button to flick on a light switch; they have to push the right control stick down. Or turn it half-circle clockwise to open a drawer, or shake the entire controller to brush Ethan’s teeth. Even walking requires holding down the R2 button while moving the left control stick. In addition, especially during important events, the player will have to perform more challenging controller tricks, like tapping a button rapidly, or holding down buttons in a sequence, or pushing the control stick really slowly.

And that level of interactivity is novel, but it is not fun. In the end it is still opening drawers/flicking light switches/sitting in chairs, stuff that can be done in real life. Likewise the more complicated button pressing is exciting; usually the player has to press them when the character is under duress and if the player fails the character gets into trouble. But it is not fun; it is pressing buttons quickly, like Simon Says.

But the worst part is when the buttons commands appear, they appear in white font and stay near the character, which makes them hard to see when the character is far away and near a light background. There was no reason to make them that hard to see.

When the game starts a chapter, the play takes control of a character as they arrive somewhere. The character either has to do some mundane tasks, talks to people, or do a couple of tasks under a time limit. If it’s not the latter at first it will be eventually. The game makes it feel like doing mundane things will have some affect on the game later, and sometimes it does. But the game does not want to go off the rails too much and could not program every possible outcome for every action, so most actions only have minor consequences that do not affect the overall game.

And then there are the quick time events. These are movie sequences when the game flashes button commands that the player has to press quickly or suffer the consequences. These are the parts that have the biggest chance of affecting the game, mostly in that they can kill the character and change the ending. These are also exciting, but a cheap way to simulate tension and game play. To give the game credit, it does give the player a second chance if they miss one or two buttons.

 Heavy Rain is best played through once for the story and to at least see the game play. But due to its linearity and the fact that once the novelty wears off the game play is not that fun, it is not worth full price. So, it’s a great rental.