By 2010 it was a long-established idea in games to reward progress with a bit of story cutscene. Uncharted 2 the previous year had reached an advance in how this approach was received by being most celebrated for the story told primarily through those cutscenes. Technical advances meant its characters could more believably capture the movements and interactions of real people, and love for it was more about those characters and their story than its adequate platforming and cover shooting. That progression of possibility meant an implicit opportunity. Perhaps now was the time for a mainstream breakthrough for a game which cut out the shooting and platforming altogether, to tell a story which didn’t have to limited by such considerations.
Step forward Quantic Dream, established purveyor of narrative games (and since also known for terrible sexist treatment of its staff). They had a vision of high quality prestige narrative games, and were ready for the big time. Sony certainly thought so with the publicity resources it poured into Heavy Rain and, well, I’m writing about it in this blog on best-selling games. Heavy Rain is, more than Uncharted 2, a technical marvel. The rain of the title is there for mood purposes but also for the sake of showing off how well it can be rendered, and it’s a safe boast. Likewise its loading screens are big close ups of its characters’ faces, the better to show just how much detail went into getting them as photorealistic as possible. It aspires to look like an interestingly-filmed TV series, and is advanced enough for it to be a reasonable aspiration.
In the absence of the kind of gameplay of other games with similar marketing budgets, and without being a walking sim, Heavy Rain gets you to choreograph the specific movements of your characters. As you walk around, prompts come up for possible actions in the form of a succession of boxes with buttons or arrows in for you to match, like the world’s least funky game of Dance Dance Revolution. The instructions are all in monochrome, I guess because green triangles, blue crosses and all would spoil the premium subscription TV feel. When there are a few prompts on screen at once it can prove rather a guessing game to work out the one you need, but they mostly work.
Quantic Dream also give some thought to how to make these actions on a controller match what’s happening on screen. It’s not always inspired (shake the controller to cut a pizza?) but can be very effective. Climbing up a muddy slope takes a series of unintuitive held presses, fingers twisted into shapes as awkward as the character’s feet. When a character is having an asthma attack, or struggling with an emotional reaction to a video of happier times, the prompt shaking rapidly and responding more slowly changes gives a real sense of urgency and difficulty. It’s a strong framework for a game focused on the impact of small actions, as is the way that the branching story structure takes changes as big as player character deaths in its stride.
Having focused on the technical successes and framework for storytelling, that leaves us with the story Heavy Rain uses all of this technology to tell. Ah. Spoilers for Heavy Rain and the Danganronpa series to come! In brief: sad dad Ethan Mars gets sadder still when his remaining son Shaun goes missing, courtesy of a deranged serial killer with a penchant for origami. He is joined in interacting with the case by a journalist, a private detective and an FBI bigshot with some augmented reality gadgets. Ethan gets sent some messages setting him sadistic trials and it’s a race against time for anyone to work out the identity of the killer to save Shaun.
Its big question is how far a man is willing to go for his children, and in that sense it’s a dad game a decade ahead of trend. I wondered if playing it now as a dad myself would give me a different perspective from my original thoughts, and it has: I liked it even less. Before Shaun’s capture, the game’s focus is on the death of his brother Jason and the impact on the family. It shows Ethan in his dark and crappy new home trying awkwardly to do the best for a subdued Shaun. The mood is designed to be a contrast to the bright happy family of the flashback intro where Ethan has a blank dumb smile on his face the whole time. The problem is that even before the trauma his interactions with his children suggest newly introduced aliens rather than anything resembling warmth or even familiarity. Heavy Rain has all the signifiers of a grown-up, psychological drama without the human interactions needed for it. All the technical advances in the world can’t save writing of dialogue at the believability level of “Jason wait for me, wait for your dad son”.
That’s before any of the more preposterous elements come in, before the flat handling of horrors, before the awkward interactive sex scene, before the sequences of arbitrary control inputs for action sequences. As the plot advances, the gameplay elements start to get in the way more too, as Quantic Dream find themselves re-treading other approaches in an attempt to give some new things to do. There’s a bit as the strands of the mystery start to come together where you have to prompt an old woman with memory problems to remember her son through showing her origami animals. “That’s not my favourite” is all she’ll say to a succession of animals before you get the right choice. It’s pure graphic adventure, which is not an inherently bad thing but a terrible fit for the otherwise urgent pacing (and lack of intelligent puzzles).
What happens when the identity of the killer is eventually revealed is somewhat infamous in itself, as it turns out to be the detective you have been controlling for large parts of the game, complete with tragic backstory as psychological explanation. Given that you can press L2 to see prompts relating to your character’s thoughts at any time, this is a rather clunky deception. In practice I remember it just feeling like one more box ticked for the sake of having an unexpected twist. It might as well have been anyone else in the cast, and it’s not like the floating words ever gave any sense of real interiority anyway. My reaction to it has since been clarified further by the helpful existence of another game which pulled off essentially the same twist to very different effect.
In the first case of school murder/trial game Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, it turns out to be the player perspective character Kaede who was the guilty party. She was driven to try to save hope through one of the series’s typically absurdly complicated murder device. At the trial you have to accuse yourself and await inevitable execution. The realisation felt sickening; I put down my PS Vita and came very close to walking away entirely. Granted, some of that was my reaction to the bait-and-switch of providing Danganronpa’s first female main character only to immediately remove her, but it was also because the setup was done so well. I couldn’t help but marvel at the trick even as I hated it viscerally. All of the information on what happened had been there, context-free but scrupulously fair in its own twisted way. Not just that, but after a short time in the company of the game’s characters and their big personalities, I was already sympathetic to many of them.
That is why the twist falling flat in Heavy Rain is more a symptom of deeper problems than standing out as a problem in itself. In Danganronpa V3, I already cared about Kaede and her cardboard-cutout classmates, so their fate affected me. After ten hours, I couldn’t say the same about any of the meticulously detailed empty vessels in Heavy Rain.
Top of the charts for week ending 27 February 2010:
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