I can’t profess to know fully the timeline of triple-A gaming — just when exactly we reached the shift towards what we’re getting now — but something funny I found as I played through David Cage’s Heavy Rain is how it honestly predates a lot of the trends present nowadays. The core relationship (or, at least, one of them) is between a father and his son, the latter representing the father’s attempts and desires to be redeemed of his past sins. It’s a game that’s evidently attempting to be more than just a game, to prove that the medium can be seen as art, yet, rather than leaning into being a video game, instead tries to achieve this by trying to emulate Hollywood films, with a specific focus on cinematography, hiring screen actors, using mo-cap amongst other things. It got praise in its time for bringing the medium forward its approach of interactive narrative being seen as revolutionary by mainstream critics, showing to the world what the future of gaming could be (and, admittedly, while Cage did not invent interactive narrative, he did make games such as Heavy Rain, games where “your choices matter” a trend for years to come). You even watch your child die in the first half hour of the game. I’m not sure whether it’s necessarily counted amongst, say The Last of Us or 2018's God of War in terms of cinematic AAA gaming, but to some extent it did walk so they could run. For better or worse.
The game follows four particular characters, who, while not initially knowing each other, are tied together in their attempts to find the Origami Killer: a serial killer who entraps and drowns children during periods of extreme rainfall, challenging their fathers to Saw-esque torture games where both their, and their sons, lives hang on the line. You play as Ethan Mars, who, after the accidental death of his first son, Jason, now must race against time to save his second son, Shaun, after the two of them are chosen as the Origami Killer’s next victims. You also play as Scott Shelby, a former cop turned private investigator visiting the previous victims of theorigarmy Origami Killer, trying to unearth old clues to find new leads. You also also play as Detective Narmin Norman Jayden, an FBI agent investigating the origammy Origami Killer and attempting to find Shaun, while at the same time dealing with his crippling addiction to drugs and VR sunglasses. You also also also play as Madison, who, after being attacked by dream terrorists in her apartment, goes to a hotel, finds Ethan, and gloms onto him for the rest of the story. But every minute that passes is one less minute to save Shaun, and only through the four’s combined investigation may the secrets of the Origami Killer be revealed…
I’ll give it a few things: I do love all the ways individual scenes can diverge and reconvene and take into account most of the things the player does. While everything on an overall arc level tends to streamline and go down the one path, it’s kind of incredible just how differently individual scenes can diverge based on what happens, and just how many outcomes you can get. There was one early scene as Scott where a store I’m in gets targeted by a robber who doesn’t notice me. I’m encouraged to sneak up and grab a weapon, but then I fail the QTE, which leads the robber to see me and point his gun in my direction. What then follows is… a completely different scene, one where I can either try and talk the robber down, or try and stall for time until I can get close enough to attack. And this is all just from a branch that occurred when I fucked up a QTE. There’s also another moment where you can stumble across something you’re not meant to, finding yourself in a life-or-death confrontation with a completely different threat… or you can get what you need and get out without triggering that branch of the scene, your character not even having an idea of the bullet they just dodged. On a scene-by-scene level, a lot of the way the game constructs its interactive narrative is honestly pretty awesome, and I really loved looking up a lot of individual moments afterwards and seeing just how many different outcomes I could’ve gotten.
I’m also fond of how this game styles itself after detective noir, yet at the same time avoids the pitfalls I’ve seen other noirs trudge into. From the persistentheavy rain backdropping the game no matter where you are in this nameless American city, to the drab, grey, muted colour scheme that avoids the perils of low saturation, the game wears an aesthetic and wears it well, providing a little throughline that helps to suggest its colour and tone. I’m in addition a fan of the way they used mo-cap: not merely just to capture the actor's likeness and such, but also to choreograph many of the QTE action sequences. And not only are they pretty well-choreographed in their own right (they’re clear, they have a bit of slapstick style, you can easily tell what’s happening) but I love how seamless they feel with the many ways they can go. Every action by a bad guy, every action by you can succeed or fail based on the appropriate QTE, yet never at any point did the editing feel choppy or unable to handle a particular combination of wins and losses, providing an overall sequence that’s fairly unique in terms of how it specifically shakes out yet still flows without much interruption.
Unfortunately, before any of that, the first thing you get to experience is just how awfully the game plays. I’m not sure what exactly possessed David Cage to put tank controls in his interactive narrative but good god are they a mismatch. As opposed to moving via tilting the control stick, doing that merely has your character tilt their head in that direction, and you must instead hold down R2 to actually have your character move. This makes things so much more cumbersome than they need to be, between having your characters get caught on objects, getting stuck between camera angles, and in general having a hard time getting to the precise place they need to be to interact with something. The quicktime events… are better and also worse. On default they’re fine, even if oftentimes it’s really hard to see them given the way they fly around (and behind) things in the environment. Other times they don’t fare as well: there’s this one specific type of QTE you have to do which effectively requires you to pretzel your hands across the controller in a way that's so uncomfortable to hold for an extended period. Anything that requires using the Playstation Move controls isn’t exactly great. You’re told to physically move the controller down but because up/down are reversed (and this isn’t changeable) you're actually meant to move the controller up. You’re told to move the controller up and then you get in position to do so and then suddenly you pass the QTE without even trying. You’re told to shake the controller and you have to do it for so long that it could honestly qualify as a form of exercise. Legitimately by the end the motion sensors were auto-succeeding QTEs without any input on my part, which was great when I was trying to get somewhere specific but the game instead pulled me away from it over and over again. I’m honestly a fan of how long the QTE action sequences go on for — they’re the type of endurance test I think works fairly well, imo — but as a whole, this game does not control well. At best it’s stiff and clunky, and at points feels physically painful to have to interface with.
The story also has some pretty major problems. Amongst other, more minor things (this city apparently has at least four separate serial killers) the overall mystery... feels rather slipshod, at points. The game directly lies to you at several points regarding the identity of the Origami Killer, and while that’s not something I hate in theory, the game doesn’t have nearly enough grace or proper consideration to pull a twist like that off. There are little moments that you can point at, in hindsight, but as the game actively goes through with the reveal and flashes back to all the things the culprit did throughout the story, many of the things you see are either things you, the player, never actually got to see, or actively plays a completely different scene to the one you saw, leaving it feeling like the story was actively trying to trick you for the sake of its twist as opposed to providing you any sort of clues or natural progression (and, at the same time, bringing into question why the culprit would’ve done certain things the way they did if they were the culprit the whole time). The game will assume you’ve gone down branches you never actually took, with Madison referring to events that she wasn’t there for, having the contact information for somebody she never meets depending on certain events, and, at one point, being whispered the identity of the killer, reacting in shock… despite, due to what was likely a cut interaction, the killer being somebody Madison has never met before.
And honestly, you can tell that certain plot elements were cut mid-development, yet the vestiges are still present, and leave quite a lot of plot points that never conclude or get expanded on. Ethan explicitly has visions, gets teleported across the city, gets sent into psychic realms, and it’s brought up that maybe he’s not fully in control of himself… and the moment this is addressed as a problem is the last time it’s ever brought up, apparently because they wanted to excise all supernatural elements from the mystery (yet still keep the sci-fi sunglasses?), meaning there’s this whole aspect of the plot that just ends up going nowhere. The game keeps track of how many inches the titular Heavy Rain reaches in every new scene (just like Indigo Prophecy did by showing the temperature continually dropping) but this doesn’t amount to anything, it’s just some background detail that this city is receiving continuous, unending, apocalyptic amounts of rain while everybody runs around and tries to find this one serial killer. Jason and Shaun were aged up from 4/5 to 10/11… yet still act like they’re the former, making it really feel as if this game doesn’t know how children act. There was meant to be a whole backstory beat where Madison is trying to live with her memories of being a journalist for the Iraq war, but then this is never expounded upon, so Madison just has her first scene be this dream sequence of being stalked and attacked by two men in her home, which, speaking of, it’s kind of incredible how literally every scene Madison forces her into some archetype: either being subservient to a man, or being subjected to some sort of sexualized violence. She goes from potential assault victim to being Ethan’s wetnurse to being Ethan’s wetnurse again to potential torture victim to being forced to strip at gunpoint (and of course the way the game frames this is very classy) to very suddenly becoming Ethan’s love interest and giving the player a fucking incredible QTE sex scene. The very first scene she’s in you can interact with a clothesrack and then very suddenly she takes her clothes off and has a full-on shower scene. And meanwhile, unless you look at something rather specific in that same segment you don’t even get to know that she’s a journalist until the game’s almost over. She at least manages to be the main driver of the plot during the endgame — and manages to do so without the game relegating her into some sexist trope, barring her potential endings — but god, is the road to get there so Frank Miller-coded. And this isn’t even getting into the game’s two black characters.
Something that struck me is that the audio quality is, uh, quite bad. And this is from somebody a bit too hard of hearing to notice stuff like this. Oftentimes I’d find that the music, or the titular heavy rain would overpower everything else in the mix, making it impossible to hear anything the characters were saying unless you turned the volume down. The mic quality — particularly for the kids — is rather spotty. Every time I listened in on a character’s thoughts I legitimately thought something was wrong with my setup because it sounds so rough: the echo effect is so loud and tinny and the same channel as the unaltered line and it legitimately feels like the line is playing twice at once instead of merely being an echo filter. And this doesn’t even get into the voice acting. Most of the cast seem to be British or otherwise European playing Americans and it really shows. Everybody seems to be in a perpetual state of fighting with their accent. There are pretty consistent intonation issues across the board: nobody pronounces “origami” consistently, or even correctly. There are a couple of decent performances among the muck — Madison pretty consistently does a good job, Norman tries his best despite being the most hamstrung by accent issues — but a lot of the other performances either strike me as either… bad direction or screen actors not quite being used to motion capture/voice acting. People meme the whole ‘press X to Jason’ thing but it’s clear that there’s some sort of miscommunication between intent and execution: the direction was evidently ‘call for your son’ but absent context it feels more like Ethan’s trying to get Jason to set the table more than he is desperately trying to find his son in the middle of the crowd. So many performances feel kinda apathetic or robotic or like they have a really bad cold, including the two main characters guaranteed to make it to the end. It’s very funny that, among other things, this game mostly predates the trend of using non-voice actors in voice roles (at least for video games — Aladdin and Shrek had long pushed voice actors out of film roles) because it showcases a lot of the pitfalls that doing so can lead into, not to mention all the other, persistent issues with this game’s audio.
…It feels weird, in the end, to place this lower in rank than the two other Quantic Dream games I’ve played thus far. If, in part, because of what Heavy Rain has going for it. As opposed to Beyond: Two Souls, which plays it rather boring except for the parts that maybe don’t stand out for the better, or Indigo Prophecy, which honestly reads like David Cage got concussed halfway into writing it, Heavy Rain does a decent amount well. It builds up a tone, its action sequences are well choreographed especially considering how many permutations of them are present, and it’s really cool to see just how its choice-and-consequence is structured on a scene-by-scene basis. It’s a pity, then, that all these good parts stuck in an overall package that… struggles, between its awful control scheme, its poorly edited mystery, the rough audio quality and how David Cage really needs to drink Respect Women Juice. Sure, compared to everything else, and considering its place in history, Heavy Rain has a lot I’m personally willing to bat for, but under the deluge, after the storm, when the rivers and the creeks have burst their banks and dealt irreversible damage to the ecosystem… it’s rather difficult to care about the water amongst the mud. 3/10.
The game follows four particular characters, who, while not initially knowing each other, are tied together in their attempts to find the Origami Killer: a serial killer who entraps and drowns children during periods of extreme rainfall, challenging their fathers to Saw-esque torture games where both their, and their sons, lives hang on the line. You play as Ethan Mars, who, after the accidental death of his first son, Jason, now must race against time to save his second son, Shaun, after the two of them are chosen as the Origami Killer’s next victims. You also play as Scott Shelby, a former cop turned private investigator visiting the previous victims of the
I’ll give it a few things: I do love all the ways individual scenes can diverge and reconvene and take into account most of the things the player does. While everything on an overall arc level tends to streamline and go down the one path, it’s kind of incredible just how differently individual scenes can diverge based on what happens, and just how many outcomes you can get. There was one early scene as Scott where a store I’m in gets targeted by a robber who doesn’t notice me. I’m encouraged to sneak up and grab a weapon, but then I fail the QTE, which leads the robber to see me and point his gun in my direction. What then follows is… a completely different scene, one where I can either try and talk the robber down, or try and stall for time until I can get close enough to attack. And this is all just from a branch that occurred when I fucked up a QTE. There’s also another moment where you can stumble across something you’re not meant to, finding yourself in a life-or-death confrontation with a completely different threat… or you can get what you need and get out without triggering that branch of the scene, your character not even having an idea of the bullet they just dodged. On a scene-by-scene level, a lot of the way the game constructs its interactive narrative is honestly pretty awesome, and I really loved looking up a lot of individual moments afterwards and seeing just how many different outcomes I could’ve gotten.
I’m also fond of how this game styles itself after detective noir, yet at the same time avoids the pitfalls I’ve seen other noirs trudge into. From the persistent
Unfortunately, before any of that, the first thing you get to experience is just how awfully the game plays. I’m not sure what exactly possessed David Cage to put tank controls in his interactive narrative but good god are they a mismatch. As opposed to moving via tilting the control stick, doing that merely has your character tilt their head in that direction, and you must instead hold down R2 to actually have your character move. This makes things so much more cumbersome than they need to be, between having your characters get caught on objects, getting stuck between camera angles, and in general having a hard time getting to the precise place they need to be to interact with something. The quicktime events… are better and also worse. On default they’re fine, even if oftentimes it’s really hard to see them given the way they fly around (and behind) things in the environment. Other times they don’t fare as well: there’s this one specific type of QTE you have to do which effectively requires you to pretzel your hands across the controller in a way that's so uncomfortable to hold for an extended period. Anything that requires using the Playstation Move controls isn’t exactly great. You’re told to physically move the controller down but because up/down are reversed (and this isn’t changeable) you're actually meant to move the controller up. You’re told to move the controller up and then you get in position to do so and then suddenly you pass the QTE without even trying. You’re told to shake the controller and you have to do it for so long that it could honestly qualify as a form of exercise. Legitimately by the end the motion sensors were auto-succeeding QTEs without any input on my part, which was great when I was trying to get somewhere specific but the game instead pulled me away from it over and over again. I’m honestly a fan of how long the QTE action sequences go on for — they’re the type of endurance test I think works fairly well, imo — but as a whole, this game does not control well. At best it’s stiff and clunky, and at points feels physically painful to have to interface with.
The story also has some pretty major problems. Amongst other, more minor things (this city apparently has at least four separate serial killers) the overall mystery... feels rather slipshod, at points. The game directly lies to you at several points regarding the identity of the Origami Killer, and while that’s not something I hate in theory, the game doesn’t have nearly enough grace or proper consideration to pull a twist like that off. There are little moments that you can point at, in hindsight, but as the game actively goes through with the reveal and flashes back to all the things the culprit did throughout the story, many of the things you see are either things you, the player, never actually got to see, or actively plays a completely different scene to the one you saw, leaving it feeling like the story was actively trying to trick you for the sake of its twist as opposed to providing you any sort of clues or natural progression (and, at the same time, bringing into question why the culprit would’ve done certain things the way they did if they were the culprit the whole time). The game will assume you’ve gone down branches you never actually took, with Madison referring to events that she wasn’t there for, having the contact information for somebody she never meets depending on certain events, and, at one point, being whispered the identity of the killer, reacting in shock… despite, due to what was likely a cut interaction, the killer being somebody Madison has never met before.
And honestly, you can tell that certain plot elements were cut mid-development, yet the vestiges are still present, and leave quite a lot of plot points that never conclude or get expanded on. Ethan explicitly has visions, gets teleported across the city, gets sent into psychic realms, and it’s brought up that maybe he’s not fully in control of himself… and the moment this is addressed as a problem is the last time it’s ever brought up, apparently because they wanted to excise all supernatural elements from the mystery (yet still keep the sci-fi sunglasses?), meaning there’s this whole aspect of the plot that just ends up going nowhere. The game keeps track of how many inches the titular Heavy Rain reaches in every new scene (just like Indigo Prophecy did by showing the temperature continually dropping) but this doesn’t amount to anything, it’s just some background detail that this city is receiving continuous, unending, apocalyptic amounts of rain while everybody runs around and tries to find this one serial killer. Jason and Shaun were aged up from 4/5 to 10/11… yet still act like they’re the former, making it really feel as if this game doesn’t know how children act. There was meant to be a whole backstory beat where Madison is trying to live with her memories of being a journalist for the Iraq war, but then this is never expounded upon, so Madison just has her first scene be this dream sequence of being stalked and attacked by two men in her home, which, speaking of, it’s kind of incredible how literally every scene Madison forces her into some archetype: either being subservient to a man, or being subjected to some sort of sexualized violence. She goes from potential assault victim to being Ethan’s wetnurse to being Ethan’s wetnurse again to potential torture victim to being forced to strip at gunpoint (and of course the way the game frames this is very classy) to very suddenly becoming Ethan’s love interest and giving the player a fucking incredible QTE sex scene. The very first scene she’s in you can interact with a clothesrack and then very suddenly she takes her clothes off and has a full-on shower scene. And meanwhile, unless you look at something rather specific in that same segment you don’t even get to know that she’s a journalist until the game’s almost over. She at least manages to be the main driver of the plot during the endgame — and manages to do so without the game relegating her into some sexist trope, barring her potential endings — but god, is the road to get there so Frank Miller-coded. And this isn’t even getting into the game’s two black characters.
Something that struck me is that the audio quality is, uh, quite bad. And this is from somebody a bit too hard of hearing to notice stuff like this. Oftentimes I’d find that the music, or the titular heavy rain would overpower everything else in the mix, making it impossible to hear anything the characters were saying unless you turned the volume down. The mic quality — particularly for the kids — is rather spotty. Every time I listened in on a character’s thoughts I legitimately thought something was wrong with my setup because it sounds so rough: the echo effect is so loud and tinny and the same channel as the unaltered line and it legitimately feels like the line is playing twice at once instead of merely being an echo filter. And this doesn’t even get into the voice acting. Most of the cast seem to be British or otherwise European playing Americans and it really shows. Everybody seems to be in a perpetual state of fighting with their accent. There are pretty consistent intonation issues across the board: nobody pronounces “origami” consistently, or even correctly. There are a couple of decent performances among the muck — Madison pretty consistently does a good job, Norman tries his best despite being the most hamstrung by accent issues — but a lot of the other performances either strike me as either… bad direction or screen actors not quite being used to motion capture/voice acting. People meme the whole ‘press X to Jason’ thing but it’s clear that there’s some sort of miscommunication between intent and execution: the direction was evidently ‘call for your son’ but absent context it feels more like Ethan’s trying to get Jason to set the table more than he is desperately trying to find his son in the middle of the crowd. So many performances feel kinda apathetic or robotic or like they have a really bad cold, including the two main characters guaranteed to make it to the end. It’s very funny that, among other things, this game mostly predates the trend of using non-voice actors in voice roles (at least for video games — Aladdin and Shrek had long pushed voice actors out of film roles) because it showcases a lot of the pitfalls that doing so can lead into, not to mention all the other, persistent issues with this game’s audio.
…It feels weird, in the end, to place this lower in rank than the two other Quantic Dream games I’ve played thus far. If, in part, because of what Heavy Rain has going for it. As opposed to Beyond: Two Souls, which plays it rather boring except for the parts that maybe don’t stand out for the better, or Indigo Prophecy, which honestly reads like David Cage got concussed halfway into writing it, Heavy Rain does a decent amount well. It builds up a tone, its action sequences are well choreographed especially considering how many permutations of them are present, and it’s really cool to see just how its choice-and-consequence is structured on a scene-by-scene basis. It’s a pity, then, that all these good parts stuck in an overall package that… struggles, between its awful control scheme, its poorly edited mystery, the rough audio quality and how David Cage really needs to drink Respect Women Juice. Sure, compared to everything else, and considering its place in history, Heavy Rain has a lot I’m personally willing to bat for, but under the deluge, after the storm, when the rivers and the creeks have burst their banks and dealt irreversible damage to the ecosystem… it’s rather difficult to care about the water amongst the mud. 3/10.