Xbox 360
What’s most remarkable about Heavy Rain is that it’s remarkable before you’ve got the controller in your hands. The characters are captured to a higher level of detail than we’ve ever seen in a PS3 game. Every voice you hear, whether it’s someone you can talk to or just someone in a passing crowd, is coming from the lips of a virtual facsimile of the voice actor.
When a game takes the conventional third person approach and removes all conventional control, the results are usually disastrous. In Heavy Rain, however, this choice is made in order to add both fluidity and the potential for uncertainty to character movements. You see, it’s sort of a mix of traditional third person controls, (you move with the left stick) and driving controls (you control speed with R2).
Another common pitfall Heavy Rain deftly avoids is poorly done Quick-Time Events. QTE’s are when a game presents events in what seems to be a non-interactive cut-scene, but prompts to push certain buttons appear onscreen. Failure to do so quickly is, well, bad. However in Heavy Rain, the direction and manner in which you have to move your hands usually mimics how the character on-screen is required to move. The simplest example being, you shake the controller to shake an inhaler, and press R1 to pump the inhaler.
Such things normally fail by not making the player fully aware of when they need to be ready and when they can sit back and watch. In Heavy Rain you always have to be ready; in conversation, a swarm of shapes corresponding to controller buttons circles your character’s head, tagged with keywords that represent what sort of thing you’ll say on pushing that button.
The previous game from Quantic Dream, Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in the US), had a lot of similar ideas. For whatever reason, be it technology or direction, they weren’t executed quite as well as they could have been. It’s plain to see that both the lessons learned and march of technology have made Heavy Rain all the better.
Every choice in making this game seems to have come from the right places: Aiming to make games more beautiful, psychological, immersive and (the really tough one) grown-up.
The events within the two proper parts of the demo, Sleazy Place and Crime Scene, are fairly well described by their titles. In Sleazy Place, you’re an asthmatic private detective as he arrives at a sleazy motel-turned-brothel. It's business, not pleasure. He’s there to interview the mother of a little boy killed by the Origami Killer, whom the game is about finding and stopping. Things won’t go your way at first, or even second, but you’re given the chance to turn things around.
Next up, you’re an FBI agent at a Crime Scene. You’re job is to look for clues the cops just can’t see, using the unique tools at your disposal. This segment features some clever and amusing use of the shoulder buttons on the controller to simulate trying to keep your footing on a muddy slope, and yes, it’s raining heavily at the time.
These parts won’t take you too long, but by the end you will undoubtedly have formed a resolve to buy the full game at the very nearest opportunity.
At the end of the day, it’s high praise when the only bad thing you can say about a demo is “It’s too short”.
Ah, but there is one caveat worth bringing up. The greater portion of negativity directed at Fahrenheit was due to bizarre plot twists towards the end of the game. That’s the kind of 11th hour thing you’ll get no clue about from an hour-long demo.
Interestingly, one of the points keenly made by David Cage, the director of Heavy Rain, is that any character can die and the game goes on. This is usually followed up by saying that this has a suitably dramatic effect on how the game ends. This is a director who loves his job enough to spend years making a game that simulates it. Potentially creating something that lives up to the promise of early CD-ROM adventures? We’ll find out soon enough.