All the suspense and grit of a good film, only with you controlling the characters.
Heavy Rain by Quantic Dream has been listening to this grumbling inner monologue of yours and decides to put your arrogance to the test by letting you take a shot at it. Because Heavy Rain is, at its core, nothing more than a long and immersive film that lets you, the player, direct the action. As opposed to levels the game is more divided into scenes, each of which lets you play as one of four main protagonists. This is the company's second stab at 'interactive cinema' following Fahrenheit of 2005, and the melancholic and occasionally hallucinatory qualities of their work still abound.
The main plot of Heavy Rain folds around origami – the serial killer who is endlessly hunted down to the culmination of the tale is known for his trademark origami, there's even instructions for how to make your own origami used to disguise the achingly long loading time when the game begins. The malleable plot where every minute fold and crease can alter proceedings drastically could also be likened to an origami figure, though that's probably much more a result of my years of studying literature which has left me so pompous my sweat could be sold as expensive Parisian cologne.
The idea of the heavy rainfall to which the franchise owes its name is also relevant, not only to make the setting a little more 'film noir' as it's hard to feel gritty emotional agony when sunlight is pouring down in torrents, but also as rain is directly linked to the victim of the Origami Killer, Shaun Mars, for whom every drop of rain brings him slightly closer to drowning. One of, and arguably the main, character you have control of is Shaun's father Ethan, a man who has been challenged to save his son through the completion of some pretty macabre trials. Ethan feels responsible for the death of his other son, Jason, who he let get hit by a car two years previous. His wife certainly holds him responsible, though he doesn't see her much anymore as they're divorced. And she took the nice house. So you can muster up a sense of the emotional resonance that each character has you vibrating along to, so much so that you can become so invested it's almost as if it's your own son that's slowly dying due to inclement weather, helped along by the realism of character movement and some award-winning voice acting.
You are also provided control of retired police agent and keen asthma sufferer Scott Shelby, FBI profiler Norman Jayden and insomniac and token attractive woman Madison Paige, and all characters are controlled through the same general means. Approaching an interactable object will prompt a button press, becoming more complex with the action they betoken, for instance opening a window might require no more than a clean upwards push on the analogue stick, whilst loading a gun would need a series of correct button hits followed by a violent pull back of the controller. At any time you can hit a button to view the thoughts currently channelling through your character's mind, which can provide a hint as to the next course of action or merely tell you their views on something. Immersion is heightened through nifty methods such as these thoughts or button actions shaking if the character is nervous or rushed, until in moments of blind panic thought choices are almost indecipherable.
This is more common in action scenes, where quick-time events are much more fast-paced, particularly in chases or fights. However for experienced players these will be more interesting than challenging, as puzzles are fairly easy especially with constant thought hints to lubricate the process, and QTEs rarely cause much of a sweat. This system does throw up some quite innovative moments though – one trial in which Ethan must sever the last digit of one of his fingers could have been treated as a simple mini-game of lining up directional buttons until the knife is in place like some brutal, masochistic Dance Dance Revolution, watched over by an evil PaRappa the Rapper in a Jigsaw mask. Instead it is almost painfully realistic, in that Ethan's breathing must be controlled, practice hacks must be undertaken, all this with a cold, mechanical timer counting down and difficulty dependent on which of the various blunt instruments you've picked for the job from the grim warehouse in which this is undertaken. You can choose to have a glug of alcohol beforehand to make the whole process easier, or to cauterize the wound after with a hot metal rod. Or of course you can choose to forget the whole thing and wander back to your motel, all 10 of your fingers smiling brightly back at you.
Naturally to allow for the emotional swell and growth which the game prides itself on, it can't be entirely action-based, and consequently some scenes are fairly banal. As opposed to other games where difficulty and action tend to build into a crescendo, it can be something of a lurching gear-shift when after a terrifying battle away from an insane surgeon intent on drilling into your womb, you suddenly find yourself pacing around a single mother's house trying to find some milk for her baby. "It's in the cupboard" will be the only information you'll receive, and the rest will be down to some fairly tedious guesswork which does undercut the pace slightly. The same is true of controlling Jayden, the surprisingly under-utilized FBI agent considering he seems to have built most of the future out of a pair of sunglasses and some drugs, where poring over information files with no apparent guidance of what to be looking for or indeed when you've succeeded in finding it can get tiresome and frustrating.
However as ever, the beauty is in the game's interactivity. In a movie you'd have no choice but to watch these mundane actions, but with this, you can perpetuate whatever change you wish, resulting in myriad different outcomes. Arriving at a crime scene, or trial to save your son, you can either lose yourself in the evocative suspense of it all or, if such is your decision, pop back in your car and drive off again. All 4 characters can be killed at varying points in the game, and endings can vary from effusively buoyant to suicidal.
For journalistic reasons I actually played through the story twice, once following every lead, exploring every minutiae and acing every quick-time event, and the second attempting the opposite, passing up any chance of excitement or story progression and deliberately failing every QTE, leaving the controller to vibrate fruitlessly on my desk whilst I read a comic or stared at my feet. I was pleasantly surprised – even the most dreary possible version of the game, where every encounter is averted and every risk ignored still provided a satisfyingly sumptuous ending, as well as the amusement of watching Madison at her nurse post treating Ethan bumbling all her quick-time events, leading to her punching bandages onto his wounds and trying to disinfect his eyes. That guy can't catch a break.
Overall, to create an experience as touching and darkly graphic as a good film, whilst accommodating every combination of moral choices dreamt up by the player must undoubtedly have been a monolithic challenge and yet Quantic Dream seem to have executed it perfectly, delivered with crisp graphics and a substantially meaty game length no less. With an adaptability that suits every gaming approach to provide a powerful and intimate venture, Heavy Rain is definitely a game that should be played, whichever way you want to.