An ambitious foray into using video games as a story-telling medium that fails as a "who dunnit" mystery.
I have little doubt that the trend will continue, that video games will overtake both print and film as the primary source of stories for the citizens of western civilizations. If they haven't already (P.S. they have).
Game developers, however, are not quite at the level of story quality found in these other mediums. In fact, it's most slash, shoot, or simulate, so making Heavy Rain, a story-focused game, took some cojones. I give props to them for that.
Let's get into the nitty gritty then shall we...
Technically speaking, the game is top notch. Graphics, sound, voice acting (except for the two following phrases: "Jaaaaason... Jason" and "Seaaaaaan... Sean" -- you'll see what I mean when/if you play), etc, etc. It all works.
Now while I called this a story-focused game, the interaction remains pretty exciting. It's essentially ALL button-prompts, yknow those things made famous by God of War: X, TRIANGLE, CIRCLE... medusa gets her head ripped off. However, these are a little more in-depth: hold X, Triangle, Circle, LET GO OF X, SHAKE YOUR CONTROLLER, DO A HOOK MOVEMENT, ALTERNATE R1 AND R2, and they can get pretty harrowing. I played this entire game side by side with a friend of mine and through some of the hairier moments, we were definitely on the edge of our seats. I never felt out of control of my character. Exceptionally well done, given the unorthodoxy of such limited control.
I'm all about the dialogue in my games, or movies or TV or books for that matter. If it sucks, I tend to judge very harshly. It wasn't particularly great in Heavy Rain, but it was never awkward, which is all I really want.
But then I come to the reason that I gave this game a 7.5 and not higher...
The plot of this game is essentially a mystery about a serial-killer told from the perspective of A) Norman Jaydun, an FBI agent; B) Madison Paige, a well I'm not really sure TBH, a reporter? she's the required hotty; C) Ethan Mars (cool name) who is the father trying to save his son from the ORIGAMI KILLER and D) Scott Shelby, a private detective, aka a bad mofo who has to beat someone around pretty much every scene.
It really boils down to a "who dunnit"; who is this mysterious origami killer? Well it just so happens I'm a fan of mystery stories and it just so happens that I know Knox's Golden Rules. See in the late 1800s / early 1900s, mysteries were hugely popular, but they started getting out of hand. In some stories, it'd all be going along and then suddenly IT WAS HIS TWIN BROTHER or THERE WAS A SECRET PASSAGE. Some sort of unfathomable plot development that made the mystery impossible to solve. Knox thought this was rubbish, and he was right, so he made a set of rules that mysteries were supposed to follow in order to give them any meaning.
Without spoiling anything, I can only say that Heavy Rain fails on multiple accounts. The primary mystery - "who dunnit" - is practically impossible to solve because the game cheats.
Unfortunately this is more than a small esoteric complaint. The story cheats heavily in other areas; it's rife with suggestive plot points or character actions/memories that are never decently explained. At the end, my response was, "But what about....?" "And what about...?" and "What about...?" I felt mislead; as a mystery, the author had cheated on me and consequentially, the mystery aspect of the story was a real let down for me.
In summary, for our tl;dr, Heavy Rain is an ambitious story-driven game whose story I found lacking. But otherwise, GG