Hands-on | Heavy Rain

Format: PS3 | Genre: Interactive drama | Publisher: Sony | Developer: Quantic Dream | ETA: Q1 2010

By Phill Cameron

The camera is one of those things you ignore when it works right, and get so, so frustrated about when it doesn’t.

So when you finally get your hands on Heavy Rain, and suddenly if feels as if every single camera angle has a director behind it, it’s both wondrous and a little disconcerting. Heavy Rain is at once one of the most free-form and exquisitely scripted experiences I’ve ever come across.

Since Fahrenheit, we’ve not really had anything follow in these footsteps. There have been adventure games, of course, but nothing trying to recreate that action-based, story-driven experience that literally tries to place you inside the closest thing games have to a movie. So Quantic Dream, the developers of that slightly batshit insane game, are the natural choice for the spiritual successor. And it really is a successor, providing you with the finely detailed scenes that tell a very specific story. Except, this time, your choices seem to have a far wider range of effects, even if it is only in the slightly contained situation each scene seems to find itself in.

It’s a difficult game for me personally to get behind, even though I find myself doing so almost whole-heartedly. I feel that this tightly scripted experience is a dead end, only able to place you so far into a living, breathing world without it feeling constricted and false. I crave the procedurally generated mayhem of something like Spelunky, or the almost aleotoric excellence that is Dear Esther’s narration. These are things that will have me coming back, but what Quantic Dream have managed to convince me is that there’s more game in Heavy Rain than I could ever play myself.

//Epic fail
It all rests in this notion that they’ve all but done away with the fail state. You have four player characters, and each of them can die, without presenting you with an immersion-breaking and frustrating Game Over screen. You carry on, with the other three, or two, or one character that survives, merely missing out on the scenes that the other characters would have had. Perhaps it’ll even open up different scenes, because the focus shifts so much more heavily on the survivors.

And that doesn’t mean that you’ll miss one of the many, many prompts during a QTE and suddenly fail, that character dead and gone. In both the scenes we went hands-on with last week, there was the possibility of a fight (one far more likely than the other), during which each prompt is just another event – maybe a punch, maybe swinging a large industrial hook at a bad guy, or smacking him over the head with a bottle. Maybe you’re dodging a punch, or saving yourself from danger. The thing is, all of these can be failed, without failing. You just miss with that punch, or fail to dodge one from your assailant. It means the pressure is slightly off, and you can focus on getting the next one right. It also means the action is far more fluid and believable. You missed that punch because you missed that button press. You got smacked by that pipe because you didn’t hit triangle quickly enough. It removes the assumption and stigma that usually is associated with QTEs that you’re just watching a cutscene that you can’t ignore, and have to actively participate in. This is more than that; it’s actually a proper game.

That sounds like a strange statement to make, but it’s an important distinction. Yes, you’re just hitting buttons when you’re told to, but it becomes far more involving when you aren’t learning the order, and everything is a desperate reaction test to press exactly what it’s asking at exactly the right time. And that relies on the interface being as fluid as the action, so you aren’t fruitlessly searching the screen for that prompt, while at the same time not covering up the action with a huge circle.

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