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Video game review: ‘Heavy Rain’ for PlayStation 3
Even if you’ve been playing video games most of your life, there are a few words and phrases you’ve likely not heard associated with the entertainment medium. Among them: “Emotional resonance,” “sacrifice” and “parenting.”
In the PlayStation 3 thriller “Heavy Rain,” a lot of unwritten rules about video games are broken and ultimately the game works because it takes huge risks that pay off. But to call it a pure video game at all isn’t quite accurate. The French studio behind the game, Quantic Dream, has described it more as an interactive movie with some gameplay elements included to guide the narrative.
Whatever your take on it (and some hard-core gamers will find the game’s simplified “Quick-Time Event” mechanics frustrating and limiting), “Heavy Rain” is a firm step forward for video games as an art form. It’s a dark, haunting game about a serial killer who targets young boys, drowning them in rainwater. At the game’s opening, you play a young father of two boys, Ethan, who suffers a devastating tragedy. Later, you guide Ethan through a series of grueling, “Saw”-inspired trials in order to save the life of his son Shaun.
Other characters join the mix, including a journalist, a drug-addicted FBI agent on the case and a private investigator who says he is trying to solve the crimes committed by the “Origami Killer” on behalf of the victims’ families. It’s not a particularly long single-player game (about 8-10 hours), but because of the subject manner, it can be draining when played at long spells.
There are plot twists. There are innovative bits of gameplay that at times frustrate and at other times enhance the mood of the game and your immersion into its story. There are also jarring plot twists, moments that will wrench the guts of any parent and moments of transcendent beauty — sometimes the games hazy, rainy, sepia-soaked palette makes it as gorgeous as anything we’ve seen in a console game before.
But other times, the voice acting, clichéd supporting characters (psycho rich guy’s son? Check. Victimized hooker with a heart of gold? Check.) and laborious plotting make it no better than a sub-par episode of “Law & Order” (with less competent acting).
When “Heavy Rain” works, however — when you feel the panic of a father losing his son at the mall or find yourself trying to extract vital clues from a nursing home resident as a child’s life hangs in the balance — it engages your emotions in a way that few games have before. That’s where the game places its largest bets: that it will come across as compelling instead of silly, resonant instead of contrived.
Through a combination of well-executed motion capture techniques, great art design and a game interface that mostly stays out of the way, “Heavy Rain” is a short novel that gets under your skin and demands completion.
There are a few major missteps that bring it back down from its lofty ambitions: the game’s only playable female character, Madison, is sexualized so often that she ends up mirroring the busty, butt-kicking video game vixens that game designers were clearly trying to avoid emulating. To gather information she tears her clothes and does a strip tease for a sleazy drug lord, and at one other low point in the game, she has sex with a major character who may be a killer for no particularly good reason. (The sex and stripping scenes never go beyond PG-13 levels, but they still feel gratuitous.)
Clumsily at times, the game is striving to be a truly adult interactive entertainment experience. Its themes of sacrifice, its pitch-perfect take on the grief of a mourning parent and its jarringly realistic character models make it a more mature endeavor than almost anything we’ve seen before in the video game industry. Its multitude of possible endings and the consequences of bad choices or failings as you play also make it more interesting than the hard-boiled crime thrillers it’s inspired by.
Not everyone will want to suffer through the darkness of “Heavy Rain,” but as game designer Peter Molyneux said at South by Southwest Interactive, it’s certainly brilliant in parts.
Those parts are plentiful enough in “Heavy Rain” to make it a milestone for video games.
‘Heavy Rain’
$60, for PlayStation 3
Rated M for Mature
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