These range from mundane (slowly pushing the stick downward to drag a razor across a character's face) to frantic (holding down five separate buttons in sequence to loosen a rope binding your wrists while the car you're tied up in is lowered into a junkyard crusher). Enough about watching the game how do you play it, and how does playing it contribute to its story? Your interaction with the grimy world of Heavy Rain is limited to walking around in it (most of the time) and using combinations of buttons, analog stick movements, and Sixaxis gestures when prompted to perform context-relevant actions. The game doesn't shy away from mature imagery and subject matter. But at any rate, it's a sign of the story's overall strength that the game engages and sticks with you in spite of its rougher moments. Maybe it extends around the things people say to each other and the reasons they do things, too. But the occasional awkwardness here made me ponder the idea that the uncanny valley encompasses more than simple skin shaders and eye movements. And it's probably too soon to expect every synthetic character to match the lifelike precision of the ones in Avatar. This is getting into serious nitpicking, because Heavy Rain achieves a level of believable human drama most games can only aspire to. And while most of the voiceover is perfectly serviceable and even quite affecting at times, some of the pronunciations and phrasings don't sound entirely American, though its characters are. When two characters lean in for a kiss, you can't necessarily see a romantic spark forming from their rigid facial expressions and lack of romantic preamble. When a child willfully breaks away from his father in a crowded shopping mall, you just know something bad is going to happen to him, even when your character gets close enough to grab and stop him. Plenty of the individual scenes convey honest dramatic heft, but some of them feel awkward or forced, as if you're watching automatons going through their preset paces rather than breathing human beings acting through their own agency. Even if the broader story succeeds at drawing you in, I found the smaller, personal interactions to be uneven.
You could probably finish the game in two or three sittings once it gets its hooks in you and starts to drag you along. The flow of the plot is broken up into brief scenes starring one or more of these primary characters along with all manner of supporting cast, and it's only an hour or two before you start to see enough connections between people and events, and the story picks up the momentum to propel you rapidly from one scene to the next. None of these four characters are particularly happy people, but you can't help getting attached to them as their paths cross and converge in pursuit of the murderer. For reasons personal, professional, or both, they're all connected to the Origami Killer, the enigmatic psycho who's been murdering children in the area for the last two years. Great cinematic presentation underpins every scene.
Heavy Rain's plot unfolds from the perspective of four loosely connected, archetypal characters: the despondent, down-on-his-luck single dad Ethan Mars, already reeling from the loss of one child and the separation from his wife overweight, alcoholic private eye Scott Shelby Madison Paige, the feisty newspaper reporter who will stop at nothing to get the story and the out-of-town FBI profiler Norman Jayden, who predictably creates plenty of friction by grinding up against the internal politics of the local PD. This is essentially an eight-hour movie, or, if you want to be cynical about it, an eight-hour cutscene that you frequently take part in. The particulars of the storyline are wildly flexible according to the influence of your guiding decisions, and they play out within a narrative framework that succeeds at creating a deep emotional resonance even when it's held back by characters and events that aren't always perfectly believable. Like the company's last game, Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain lets you carry out the ordinary actions of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinarily sordid, life-or-death sequence of events that's set in a soaked, dreary urban landscape. But in case you're still wondering, it isn't headshots or double jumps. Heavy Rain bills itself as "interactive drama," a term that right away ought to clarify the focus of this grim thriller from QuanticDream. You'll go through a lot of hell to catch a killer.
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