The New Flesh

Heavy Rain aka the other reason I need to buy PS3. Heavy Rain is in many ways the next stage in the evolution of the adventure game. First there were the text adventures, then the point and click adventures and now Heavy Rain. People have been struggling to say what genre Heavy Rain is but I think it’s fairly obviously a choose your own adventure but in graphical videogame. Narratively Heavy Rain is a traditional thriller, the son of one of the four viewpoint characters has been kidnapped by a serial killer and according to the killers modus operandi this means he’ll show up dead in exactly four days. It looks very dark and nasty like the film Seven and the stories of the four characters intertwine in a fashion that’s probably something like Magnolia.

The multiple player characters, although nothing new, is still a brilliant and underused storytelling device for a story based video games. The big problem with games is that your main character is always fine unless they’re not meant to be. The first time you watch Halloween you don’t know if Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is going to survive or not, you think she is but then you think quite a lot of things and John Carpenter is far too good a storyteller to let you get away with all of them so maybe she doesn’t. When you play Dead Space you know the dude in the lower left corner of your screen is going to survive because if he doesn’t then there’s no game and you know, he’s died a couple of times in the last few hours so if he dies again I’ll just reload and everything will be fine. Not so in Heavy Rain because you have four characters they can die, they’re each expendable, it’ll change the story but if you screw up and, as happened to me during the demo level, you “fail” an action sequence and the player character gets beaten to death by a car mechanic then that’s what happened and the story moves on. Maybe he was bound to die in that scene and it was just an illusion that my lack of familiarity with the PS3 controller killed him, I don’t know and that uncertainty makes it exciting. One things for sure, when I get the full game I’ll play that action sequence like my life depends upon it.

Now let me talk Quick Time Events since they’re the elephant in the room. The action sequences in Heavy Rain are controlled by QTEs and the problem is that in my opinion most QTEs suck. However I’d argue that while these are QTEs they have a couple of vital saving graces, firstly they aren’t replayable and secondly they’re unique to the context of the events. Combined that means that during a play through of the game you never know what button you might need to press next, you never have to learn the sequence and you never repeat it until you produce it perfectly because if you screw it up then the moment is gone. When my character got beaten to death that was it. Full stop. No second chances, the moment is gone, the game goes on to the next scene with whatever the consequences your failure. There’s no practising and getting these things right and being held back until you do get them right, basically no awful QTE grinding. There’s just a story that you can control in a fairly meaningful fashion using controls that adjust dynamically to the actions the in game character wants to make, push right to roll right, move the six-axis sharply down to smash a bottle over someone’s head etc. I think it’ll work really well, I couldn’t get the full impression in the demo because I spent the whole time trying to remember which was the triangle and which was the square but I think once I can “touch type” a Playstation controller like most PS3 owners it’ll work really well. I’m really looking forward to this and you’ll probably be hearing more about it here in Q1 next year when it releases.