Just like its namesake, “Heavy Rain” is gloomy.
French developer Quantic Dream has created a deep and dark tale of serial murder for Sony. The culprit is the Origami Killer, who leaves folded paper animals with the bodies of his victims, all young boys. It’s your job to find a missing boy before he turns up dead.
You play as four different people: the boy’s father, Ethan Mars; drug-addled FBI profiler Norman Jayden; private detective Scott Shelby; and journalist Madison Paige. Each character’s experience is markedly different. Ethan spends most of the game dealing with a series of gut-wrenching challenges designed by his son’s kidnapper. Shelby spends a lot of time talking to parents of previous victims, often downtrodden souls on the wrong side of the tracks. Jayden uses a high-tech pair of glasses to look beyond the surface of crime scenes, checking DNA, footprints and pollen samples and then analyzing them in a cool display system. And Madison has some incredibly intense encounters with some decidedly slimy characters.
You direct their every movement through a complex set of controls. You might brush your teeth by shaking the PS3 controller or open the fridge by twisting the joystick.
Things begin to get complex when you start interacting with nonplayer characters. Conversations play a huge role in the game. Whenever you approach another person, questions, comments and actions swirl around your head, providing several possibilities for interaction. Your choices will determine which direction your character takes, and could affect the entire course of the game.
In “Heavy Rain,” actions are just as important as words and these involve an incredible amount of button-pressing and stick-twiddling. Everything from eating a snack to changing a baby’s diaper requires a combination of presses and twiddles. It can get very tedious. Sure, the stick motions frequently match the sort of action your character’s performing, but these procedures start feeling like the pointless motion-for-motion’s-sake controls in many Wii games.
During intense sequences, the button-pushing sessions can get very demanding. Prompts can jiggle and blur or require a rapid succession of presses similar to those used in the “God of War” action games. Since failure can send you onto an alternate story track, this is a big deal.
Despite occasional flurries of activity, the control system tends to slow the game down quite a bit. And it doesn’t help that the characters usually move at a near-glacial pace. This is definitely not a game for adrenaline junkies.
However, those interested in a good story should love “Heavy Rain.” Sure, there are a few gaps in logic — let’s just say that previous investigators didn’t do a good job of following all the leads — but I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next and how the characters would react.
The graphics are excellent. While the character animations are often relatively stiff, the facial renderings are incredible. The environments are gritty and realistic — aside from the presence of live chickens in an American grocery store.
The realism is enhanced tremendously by voice acting that’s almost uniformly top-notch.
In the end, “Heavy Rain” might be gloomy, but it’s incredibly satisfying.
Platform: PlayStation 3
On the Web:www.heavyrainps3.com