If we’re talking about games that defined what we must now call the ‘previous’ generation of gaming, it would be remiss not to devote an article to Quantic Dream’s ground-breaking interactive drama Heavy Rain.

I say ‘interactive drama’ and not ‘game’ because to call Heavy Rain a game would be misleading. It’s basically a ten hour movie, with which the viewer can interact, deciding the actions of the protagonists. It was a polarising game for it’s stilted and often frustrating ‘gameplay’, which is just a glorified series of QTEs.

Heavy Rain features several main characters, whose stories intertwine as the plot progresses. It begins incredibly slowly with Ethan, an architect living in a perfect home with a perfect family who spends the first twenty minutes of the game pottering around his house, or playing with his children in the garden. You can almost see the huge Sword of Damocles hanging over the family.

Inevitably, disaster strikes when Ethan’s eldest child Jason is hit by a car. Ethan’s life then swan dives into a nightmarish existence dominated by anguish and pain. He is plagued by blackouts, and when his remaining son is kidnapped by the ‘Origami Killer’, a demented serial killer who abducts children, places them in storm drains and gives their parents a limited amount of time to save them before they drown in rainwater, things only get worse for him.

The Origami Killer forces the parents of his victims to undertake harrowing tasks in order to get a step closer to saving their child, and Ethan is the latest player in his sick and twisted game.

At the same time Ethan is attempting to track down his son, we also follow Madison, an insomniac who checks into motels because they’re the only place she ever gets a good nights sleep. After bumping into Ethan, she becomes embroiled in the race to save his son.

The third of the four protagonists is Scott Shelby, a private investigator and ex-cop who has been hired by the families of the victims of the Origami killer to track down the murderer. After visiting the mother of a victim, who has spiraled into prostitution after the death of her son, they reluctantly team up to scour the city for evidence together.

The final character is FBI agent Norman Jayden, who has been assigned to the Origami Killer case and uses incredibly futuristic technology to track down the murderer. He’s probably the only law official in the entire city who actually wants to get to the bottom of who the killer actually is.

It’s a stylish game, set in a gritty city of grays and blacks where it seems to rain constantly, and it provides the perfect backdrop for the incredibly bleak and thrilling story. It reaches a level of sophistication that other games just don’t shoot for. It does let itself down somewhat with Madison, the female protagonist, who in her brief and fairly inconsequential time on screen almost gets raped three times, has to do a sexy dance to seduce a gangster and falls in love with someone almost immediately after meeting them.

The gameplay is annoying, but it’s not annoying enough to detract from the fantastic story. Moving the characters around is awkward and imprecise, and you’ll spent plenty of time gritting your teeth with frustration as a result.

If you really hate quick-time events, Heavy Rain might not be for you. As the game progresses, the player is challenged with increasingly complex QTEs, and failing said QTEs can often result in a protagonist dying, and when they die, they die permanently.

One failed QTE can completely change your individual game. If you manage to keep all the players alive, and you make the right decisions, you are treated to an unbelievably happy ending, but miss one button during a quick-time event and you’ll be greeted with a number of increasingly bleak endings.

Heavy Rain was a game that helped defined the previous generation because it was unarguably original and truly cinematic. It was released at a time when the PS3 was lagging behind the Xbox 360, and it was exactly the kind of exclusive Sony needed.

It was ground-breaking graphically, and it was unashamedly crafted in the vein of ‘film noir’, and whilst video games attempting to imitate the movie industry might not always be desired, Heavy Rain is a shining example of games telling engrossing, character-driven, edge-of-your-seat stories that anyone interested in interactive dramas has to play.

© 2014, zero1gaming.com. All rights reserved. On republishing this article your must provide a link to this original post