Basement Couch

Ethan spends most of the game getting beaten up and being sad sack.

“Everything is a quick time event!” That’s the easiest way to explain Heavy Rain’s game play. Brush your teeth? Quick time event. Play with your kids? Quick time event. Escape from a burning building before a bomb goes off? Quick time event.

Everything, from the action packed to the mundane requires your attention and participation. I’m going to be honest here, you’re going to hate this about Heavy Rain during the first two hours. The beginning of Heavy Rain is some of the most boring gaming you’ll have to do for a while. At least the first six hours of Final Fantasy XIII had monsters to fight. The first two hours of Heavy Rain is all helping your kid do his homework and cooking him dinner. You’ll doubt yourself. I promise you during the one and a half hour mark you’ll wonder “Is this all Heavy Rain is?” and consider stopping. But have faith. After this slow start the real game will pick up.

The real game is awesome.

Heavy Rain gets a lot of mileage out of its quick time event schtick. A great deal of craft went into making it immersive. When choosing what to say the options float around your head. The more impulsive the decision the larger and more in focus it appears. This means you can go with your gut and act on impulse or risk taking a longer time to think about your options. And sometimes you’ll just hit the wrong button by mistake. In real life, people say things by accident sometimes. Heavy Rain not only simulates conversation. It simulates every stupid conversation I’ve ever had.

Another example of the immersion is the combination of buttons you must press to complete certain tasks. An easier one like climbing up a muddy hill might take several buttons on the controller which can all be reached by a single finger. More difficult tasks like escaping from being tied up require your fingers to contort uncomfortably across the controller. This is really effective with adding to the tension.

The characters’ walking around looks ridiculous in Heavy Rain, though. The character only moves forward if you hold the R2 button. You steer them with the left control stick. This has the effect of making every character move like an indecisive robot seconds after some of the most expressive motion capture performances I’ve ever seen in a video game. There had to have been a more elegant solution. For a game so focused on story and characters performances, I’d expect publishers Quantic Dream didn’t want this strange juxtaposition of human and robot either.

Heavy Rain's fight scenes are incredibly impactful as characters scramble to stay alive during a quick time event.

What really won me over with Heavy Rain is how dang intense it can be. The game offers little mercy if you screw up a quick time event or take too long to make a decision. So I was constantly on edge about getting someone killed because of a mistake. And I DID make mistakes. Plus, the game only lets you move forward, always auto-saving what you last did. So this isn’t like when you are in a difficult part in a game and you can reload to try again if you die. In Heavy Rain if a dude shoots you or you fall off a bridge or get hit by a car you are DEAD. Dead for perms’. Thus, when a do or die situation comes up it totally knocks the air out of my chest, whether I survive or not.

For example, at one point I was tied up in car with a knocked out passenger that was sinking in a river. It totally sucked! I had to do difficult combinations of button pressing and some quick decision making if I wanted to get myself or the passenger out alive. After that portion of the game, which you may or may not experience during your own play through, I had to put the controller down and walk away. I had to let myself unwind.

It was awesome.

As for the story, it’s not a perfect tale. Thinking back on it now I can see some plot points which were never concluded. For the most part, though I really enjoyed it. The twist towards the end totally got me and turned out to be a very emotional scene. The Origami Killer’s motivations and past make him an interesting serial killer. He’s not just the dude from Saw with a little boy fetish.

Though he does set traps… and he does like little boys…

The voice acting fluctuates from distractingly strange to pleasantly new. Most of the voice actors in Heavy Rain speak English as their second language. This is particularly awkward with main character, Ethan. He enunciates words pretty dang strangely sometimes. But, as a huge bonus, the use of foreign actors means you won’t be able to recognize a single video game voice in Heavy Rain. There’s no Nolan North, there’s no John DiMaggio, there’s no Mark Hamill. It’s all new voices, which helps the experience feel more cinematic and fresh.

Scott Shelby is really good at calmly talking to people who might kill him.

The characters of Heavy Rain are pretty good too. My two favorites were Scott Shelby, the P.I., and Norman Jayden, an FBI agent dealing with a drug addiction. That’s another great thing about Heavy Rain, you get to decide how your characters act. I liked Shelby because of how soft spoken and wise he was. If you play Heavy Rain you may make him a total jerk. You may even still love him! Everyone gets their own personalized Heavy Rain story, which is special to them. All the characters will be special to you as well.

Except for Madison Page, she’s basically there to be naked and remind you of the uncanny valley.

Speaking of which, let’s talk graphics.

These character models are amazing. Faces look like normal faces thanks to the publishers insane amount of facial scanning. Even side characters in the game are people pulled off the street to have their faces scanned for Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain is one of those games like Shadow of the Colossus which people will continue to reference in years to come. Its achievements in story, immersion, and choice mechanics will be held up in reverence to the non-gaming public as evidence of the medium’s validity. But in the end, that’s all nonsense. Just play the game. Just enjoy the game. Because you should. And you will.