For those that don’t know, Heavy Rain is an interactive drama. Almost every action has a consequence, be it small or large. The game, for the most part, forsakes “typical” gameplay in favour of a series of cutscenes which can be interacted with, using context sensitive button presses (sometimes, more than one is available, and you have a choice). However, contrary to widespread belief, this is not the entire game. A large portion is spent in free move mode, where you can interact with certain objects in the environment using, of course, context sensitive button presses. One might think this would ruin the immersion, but it serves to do exactly the opposite. None of the button presses are illogical, if that makes any sense. It makes you feel like you are the character, going through each of their actions.
In “Sleazy Place”, you play as highly overweight and asthmatic private detective Scott Shelby, as he finds and questions Lauren Winter, a hotel prostitute whose son was abducted and killed by the Origami Killer. The first thing that strikes the player is the incredible quality of the graphics. Even having seen trailers, and screenshots, nothing compares to seeing the game running on a PS3. The graphics are crisp and crystal clear, the characters and environments are extremely detailed, and there’s not a framerate hitch to speak of. The hotel receptionist doesn’t know this “Lauren Winter”, until a picture of Abraham Lincoln on a piece of green paper jogs his memory. Scott Shelby goes up to Lauren’s room and, if you push the right buttons (literally), you can question her about the disappearance of her son. This is all fairly calm, and slow. There’s a powerful atmosphere, but the timing of Lauren’s voice makes the conversation sound somewhat unnatural. She sounds like she is reading from a script, and in some sort of hurry to get through it. Scott, however, speaks perfectly naturally, as if the voice actor really is a private detective questioning a reluctant witness.
There’s also a strange bug here which I encountered on one playthrough, where Lauren continually repeats an odd animation which involves quickly turning around and phasing through a bed, before teleporting back to her starting position and doing this again, all of this while talking in a mournful voice about her son’s death. Where her slightly off voice acting only hurt the atmosphere a little, that bug downright ruined it. But hopefully it’s just an issue in the early build, and will be wiped out by the time of the retail release. Heavy Rain is a game which depends a lot on its atmosphere, with a constant air of something amiss which is just out of reach, a mystery waiting to be solved.
After Scott leaves the room, he begins to walk down the corridor, and has an asthma attack. You have to search for the correct pocket and activate his inhaler. Now, this was perhaps the one thing in the demo which really disappointed me, and I hope it’s just a temporary thing: I left Scott leaning against the wall, panting and trembling, for a good fifteen minutes, and he just stayed there. He didn’t collapse. He didn’t die of suffocation, or even go into respiratory arrest. He happily leaned against that wall until I gave him a puff from his inhaler, at which point he slowly recovered. This doesn’t really fit in with the game’s idea of every single action having a consequence at some point, unless the fact that I left him panting for fifteen minutes impedes his ability to do something ten hours later.
This next part is where the atmosphere changes. A strange, rough-looking man barges into Lauren’s room, and being the responsible detective, Scott follows. A fight between Scott (the highly overweight asthmatic, remember) and the rough looking man (with a tattoo on his chest and huge biceps) ensues. This is surprisingly immersive. The game has you pressing different buttons at different intervals, sometimes tapping them, sometimes holding them down. Now, this may not sound highly exciting, but anybody who has played the demo will know what I mean - it’s as exhilarating as any action sequence in any typical game. Now, if you press pretty much every button perfectly, the man runs out and Scott looks none the worse for it. If you miss quite a few, Scott will have a few bruises. And if you place your controller on the floor and let the man beat Scott to a pulp… Scott has a few more bruises, is bleeding a little… and the man still runs out. Now, remembering how I described Scott, and how I described this mysterious man, all of these scenarios seem rather unlikely. But the purpose of a game is to entertain, and that particular sequence is very entertaining, and a nice contrast to the earlier part of the demo.
In the second level, “Crime Scene”, you control Norman Jayden, a seemingly nervous FBI agent who is investigating the scene of a murder by the Origami killer. In this level, Norman is outside and it's pouring. Now, when it is raining heavily, or perhaps just when playing as Jayden, because it was raining heavily in the first section of "Sleazy Place" (the tutorial), the game appears to change to a much blurrier, less crisp and clear view. Not to say the graphics are bad at this point, they are just... different from the previous level. After a rendezvous with the police officer who is on site, Lt. Blake, where Norman can ask certain questions about the murder (and get rather vague responses, as Blake doesn’t seem to know much), Jayden dons a pair of sunglasses which allow him to scan for clues. This level has far more emphasis on the free moving, clue finding aspect of Heavy Rain. For this reason it’s not as story focused or real-time as “Sleazy Place”, but it's just as interesting in its own way. These sunglasses of Norman’s have all sorts of handy features: from a shoeprint, he can reach an FBI record, which in turn contains information about the name, profession, criminal record and so on of the person. Unfortunately, this Origami Killer isn’t sloppy, and he’s left no such tracks. The most Norman can find out (after climbing a hill with a very interesting and, again, immersive, quick-time sequence) is that the killer dragged the body down from a main road into some sort of dump.
From what I’ve played (and this is my first experience of the genre), Heavy Rain is a delight. It’s completely different from any game I’ve played. It’s no less exhilarating or action-packed than your typical game, it just delivers the feeling and packs in the action in different ways. If you’re not scared to give a new type of gaming experience a try, keep an eye on Heavy Rain.
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