Wow, I don’t understand why people keep missing what is significant about Heavy Rain. The latest article I’ve seen claimed it and Wii Sports were not that different.
Now that we’ve all shouted “well, one has a narrative, for starters,” let’s get to the meat of this post. Why are people not “getting” Heavy Rain?
Believe me, this is not something that needs getting. Many people are not going to like it. The complaints seem to stem from the opinion that it is not a game, because the player has no agency in the plot, and the choices you make have very little to do with the story’s outcome.
But let’s step back from this for a second — this is an interactive movie — and so the goal isn’t to let the user control the characters to change story events, it is to let the user steer the characters into and through story events in order to heighten empathy.
Much of the Podtoid cast had their biggest problem with the selection of the Crime Scene chapter for the PSN demo. There was little you did except wander through an overgrown lot near some train tracks, and hit R1 several times to find a few hidden items. You can’t even leave the area until you find them all.
Yet the Crime Scene chapter could easily be seen as scavenger hunt, or even some sort of word search puzzle. Sure, it’s not a great game, but it is one. What Heavy Rain aims to do is have player live in between the lines of the script, sitting close to character intent and finding ways to transfer character emotion into the player by having them virtually walk a mile in their shoes.
It’s raining, it’s miserable. There’s a lot of officers getting in the FBI agent’s way, and he doesn’t want to be wandering around looking for evidence because it seems like he’s hiding something himself. The search game of the Crime Scene is a perfect juxtaposition to him because it is slow and tedious and allows the right kind of introspection on the character to occur as he is mostly alone with his thoughts.
If Heavy Rain fails, it will be because it is simply not a good narrative. If it can’t create a story worth caring about, and if it can’t offer characters that are believable or sympathetic when they are controlled, then no amount of interactivity can save it. It’s a movie after all, and there’s a specific story to be told. If it succeeds, then it should create a level of intimacy with its people & events that hasn’t been reached before.
I’ve heard the game reviewed as “emotionally draining.” Sounds like it did its job right.