Developer: Quantic Dream
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment International
Release Date: February 23, 2010
Heavy Rain is being portrayed by most of the gaming media (and media more broadly) as a seismic shift in game design, something totally unlike everything we've played before, an interactive movie that is the very prow of the Good Ship Progress. Some are even implying that Heavy Rain will drag the general public kicking and screaming toward accepting the notion that video games are every bit as legitimate an art form as film.
And pretty much every bit of that is total and utter bullshit.
First of all, Heavy Rain is nothing like a fundamental shift in how gameplay is approached. Not only did Quantic Dream use virtually the same gameplay system in its 2005 title Indigo Prophecy, but also Quick Time Events (QTEs) date back to Dragon's Lair. Yeah, the 80s. So really, this game is about as innovative as saying this whole "World Wide Web" thing might just take off.
To be fair, Heavy Rain does integrate the PS3's Sixaxis wireless control capability. But that's not really anything "innovative" -- Call of Duty 3 was a PS3 launch game that also tried to capitalize upon Sixaxis. It did so terribly, mind you, but it did try. And Heavy Rain executes motion control slightly better, though the overall game's controls are still a tad too vague and imprecise for what Quantic Dream is asking of the player.
But the real point of Heavy Rain, if you listen to David Cage -- the game's writer/driector/creator/producer -- is twofold: first, it's meant to be an interactive movie, not a "game" in the traditional sense. Second, that fact, coupled with the QTE structure, is supposed to allow Heavy Rain to create a level of immersion the likes of which has never been achieved by a game before.
If David Cage were actually a filmmaker (as he so obviously burns to be), he would be irredeemably terrible. Heavy Rain's story is at best a bland, poorly-structured ripoff of any number of mainstream thriller and horror titles. From the setting to the characters to the dialog, everything feels like I'm watching a kid standing around in his father's suit:. However, this on its own wouldn't be sufficient for me to condemn Heavy Rain so thoroughly: what really does Heavy Rain's story in is how smart David Cage thinks he is. The whole game is meant to be a sort-of whodunit: WHO IS THE ORIGAMI KILLER ZOMG!!! IT MIGHT BE ME! IT MIGHT BE YOU! IT MIGHT BE THAT BUM FROM TWENTY MINUTES AGO!
Except Cage completely ignores the basic tenets of any decent mystery/thriller story, and in so doing removes any possibility of actually caring about what happens. Instead of delivering upon what it promises, Heavy Rain veers off into a contrived set of stupid plot lines and a third-act deus ex machina so massive that I was actually blown away. And not in a good way. Indeed, that same device (and indeed the whole approach to telling Heavy Rain's story) creates and is supported by a series of plot holes so massive that they actually make me chuckle every time I think of them. The story's issues are not helped by the fact that the characters are two-dimensional at best, and I cared about quite literally none of them.
Worse, all of these flaws are exacerbated by a not-so-subtle attitude of near-masturbatory arrogance on David Cage's part, one that pervades every nook and cranny of Heavy Rain: "oh, aren't I smart? See, I can make it in Hollywood any time I want!"
That said, let's move on to Quantic Dream's claims of immersion, and I can report that Heavy Rain actually is immersive... sort of. The problem once again falls in large part upon Cage's arrogance. He is so busy trying to gain acceptance as a filmmaker that he resorts to literally every cheap hook to drawn in the audience, such as the "I get killed, but it's only a dream" and "camera-cut faux-character-death" to name just two. Do they work? Kinda, especially since it was revealed in advance that any of the four main characters you play as can die.
But it doesn't leave a great taste in my mouth, especially since I discovered that there are only a few points in which you actually have any serious input on the game's progression. Past that, you can basically screw up every input the game throws at you and still get a pretty good ending.
What's more, even in the few times that Heavy Rain actually succeeded in creating a sense of immersion in the game's world, I was strangely aware that it was artificial. When I was feeding an infant a bottle, I wanted to get it just right... but that wasn't because I actually cared about the kid. When I had to find one character's missing child, I wanted to find him... but not because it was important to me. When these precious few moments of "immersion" occurred, I knew on a level that's difficult to describe that this was all fake. I knew I wasn't really immersed, but instead experiencing a temporary, bootleg version of actual immersion. And at best, the few instances in which I was dragged into the game world were a product of the (serviceable, if unoriginal) soundtrack and my own occasional-anal-retentiveness.
To provide a counterpoint here, it is possible that Heavy Rain would have been a better game had it not been hyped so completely and relentlessly, but I want to note that I didn't actually pay a great deal of attention to this game's marketing -- I already knew I was picking it up, for reasons I'll get into later.
Put simply, Quantic Dream's vain, half-assed efforts at drawing the player into the story made Heavy Rain an exercise in detachment, cynicism and blessed shortness, rather than a meaningful pursuit that was over too quickly.
Heavy Rain does do something different, at least insofar as the game isn't a standard action/RPG/shooter title, and deserves some credit for that. Indeed, that's the whole reason why I bought this game new, instead of waiting three days for it to appear used on store shelves. That said, I can't think of a single type of person that I'd recommend this game to. For almost everything Heavy Rain tries to do or (more rarely) succeeds in doing, there are any number of different games that do it better. Ultimately, Heavy Rain is little more than an over-budgeted, over-priced vanity exercise, a vaguely-interesting notion thoroughly ruined by its creator/writer/director. Which is actually quite sad, because there are a few moments in playing Heavy Rain that I got glimpses of what might have been, and those just amplified my frustration at the rest of this trainwreck.
In one sentence: Heavy Rain is the dictionary definition of hubris.
(Nerd's Note: A lot of this echoes what Anthony Burch and Jim Sterling have been saying on Destructoid for the last couple weeks, though they've definitely said it better than I; it's worth reading their musings on this game [even Sterling's blatant trolling following his review]. Anthony Burch's discussion of Heavy Rain in the context of Roger Ebert's quote about video games is also worth investigating.)
