Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain is almost ready for release – apparently the game has now gone Gold (as in the final version has been pressed – source crankygamersuk) and there is a demo available on the US Store. So is this game much more than an interactive movie with quick time events chucked in for good measure?

According to some sources in the gamingzombie community the game is basically Dragon’s Liar (the interactive Laser Disk cartoon that graced the arcades in the 1980s – it looked amazing but the “game” involved nudging the joystick at the right time.. once every 5 minutes). Surely there’s more to it than this?

However, at least a few of us are excited about Heavy Rain, despite a title that reminds me of Chubby Rain from the Bowfinger film (if you’ve not seen this you’re an idiot and deserve to be shot like a rabid dog). Lord Nate Dog has been raving about Heavy Rain having played through the demo twice he reports that the game is “totally different” and “unlike anything in your current games library”. So if nothing else HR sounds like something different and in my book (seen it all before, several times) then uniqueness of concept is something to be applauded, whether or not it’ll make a good game is a different matter.

So what’s this Heavy Rain all about then? Is it going to be a passive experience intertwined with a few button presses?

The Story – Origami for Beginners

As far as I know you play for different characters in the game and they are all tied with the story of the pursuit of the serial killer known for his love of paper folding (and presumably brutally killing people). There’s a FBI profiler named Norman Jayden, a retired private detective named Scott Shelby, an architect named Ethan Mars, and a photo journalist named Madison Paige.

The game’s Director David Cage describes Heavy Rain as “a very dark film noir thriller with mature themes”. So we can expect to see some blood, guts and maybe some frontal flesh polygons, whether the way the actual story is that grown up remains to be seen, but I get the feeling the game is going for the right side of sophistication rather throwing in some gratuitous T and A.

The Game play – Quick Time

This is where I have some concerns – no matter how great the story is if you’re not doing much other than the occasional button press then surely this would have been better as a film or at least machinima rather than a game.

“According to a demonstration given to Edge magazine, the game will use a unique control scheme. A trigger button on the PlayStation 3 controller will move the character forward. It will take advantage of the button’s analogue function, allowing the user to control the speed of the character’s movement by pressing harder or softer on the button. The left analogue stick will control the movement of the character’s head and the direction the character moves in relation to where the character is looking.”

This doesn’t sound too bad – it still sounds like an interactive movie but the interesting thing about the game is not the control scheme but how getting QTE wrong takes the story down a different path.

One example given is during a suspect interrogation – Mad Jack is suffering withdrawal symptoms from drug addiction, there is QTE to give him a fix – if you fail to react in time he dies and the story then goes down a different path. 

This is the USP of the game and something that’s very difficult to pull off without it feeling like you’re just taking different branches down a dialogue tree. It also remains to be seen how many of these events there are throughout the game. The more there are then the more scenarios there are for the game to handle, but this would then make each person’s story different.

I’m also interested to hear how the death of your character can affect the game – apparently if you die then you take control of the next person in the story and the death of each character feeds into the overall story. Ambitious stuff. Without doubt but as gamers we’ve heard a lot of these promises before which play out very different in reality. I just hope they pull it off without letting us see the strings being pulled in the background as this will ruin the game’s immersion. It would be great to play a game without having the games mechanics so visible espicially where the story, rather than the gameplay is driving the experience.

Download the Demo

The demo for Heavy Rain is out on 11th February on the Playstation Store – if you check it out then let me know what you think. The game is officially released in the UK on 24th Feb 2010 from all good retailers.

If you want to play the demo right now then go here and follow the instructions here kotaku.com/5464839/want-the-heavy-rain-demo-right-now-heres-how