Heavy Rain (2010)

Compré este juego cuando estuvo al mínimo precio histórico en Steam y me arrepiento de no haberlo comprado a su precio original. Una obra maestra 100%.

Todo el gameplay me hizo dudar de las decisiones que había tomado, nunca pude señalar quién pensaba que podía ser el Origami Killer porque de repente salían pruebas que refutaban mis teorías. El detalle de hacernos creer que Ethan Mars (el personaje principal y por ende nosotros) era el asesino debido a su esquizofrenia fue impecable.

Los controles eran un poco incómodos debido al cambio repentino del ángulo de la cámara. En un momento tenía una vista en tercera persona detrás de nuestro personaje (viéndole la espalda) mientras caminaba hacia delante y en el otro la cámara se movía hacia adelante de nosotros (viéndole la cara) y me hacía retroceder el personaje. Me costó acostumbrarme a eso. Lo jugué en la dificultad máxima pensando que iba a ser fácil pero me di cuenta que mis reflejos son en realidad una mierda.

Me encanta el hecho de que hayan 4 finales diferentes dependiendo de las decisiones que hayamos tomado en el camino. Amo con todo mi ser los juegos con narrativa modificada, son mi género de juegos favoritos.

Si estás buscando un juego con detectives con una trama oscura y donde tus decisiones tienen consecuencias reales te recomiendo este juego, sinceramente no entiendo cómo no lo jugué antes.

★★★★⯫ 4,5/5

I went into Heavy Rain with a pretty good idea both of the many jokes surrounding the game and the identity of the killer. This didn't at all diminish the fun of messing around with its plethora of odd interactive objects and trying to see any kind of lead in to who the killer is. The once-impressive visuals now look pretty janky and the button/directional inputs made me worry for the health of my controller's joystick, but it all comes together to make a great bad game to experience with someone else.

When you try to take it seriously, the story is quite a mess. Some seemingly important characters just... disappear. Nebulous character motivations gave me the feeling that I missed an expositional scene or maybe a deep heart-to-heart that occurred offscreen. It's often not really clear how anyone figures out where to investigate next. And with Scott Shelby it's kind of tough to figure out what he's even trying to do most of the game.

The gameplay is rough, these days. quicktime events haven't aged well and they make up the majority of the way you interact with Heavy Rain. Also, the Steam release seems to have bugged controls. After an hour or so I gave up and googling around led me to a Steam Input layout that mostly fixes the issues. Even then though, some of the prompts are misleading or involve rocking your joystick back and forth rapidly in a way that I'm sure isn't good for it. It's goofy to experience but also kind of concerning.

I feel like I ran out of things to say. I suppose it's worth pointing out that while the game is fairly linear you get to influence how you main characters' routes play out which is pretty cool. I like the way they all come together in the end based on your choices, even if again, the writing is pretty rough. It's not a great game by really any standards I think, but it's very fun to play with a friend and laugh together at it. That makes it worth a look in my book.

Interactive Drama - After losing his son Jason in a car accident years back, Ethan Mars finds himself in another difficult situation. His remaining son Shaun has been kidnapped by the rampant Origami Killer.

PROS:

++ Plot premise. I love murder mysteries and so I was quickly hooked to the plot. A race against time to save your son tugged at my heart and so I was emotionally attached with Ethan's dilemma too. After all that they had been through, I really wanted to save Shaun and Ethan so that they could live peaceful lives. (I failed, Shaun survived but Ethan gets shot by police) It had good potential, but that potential was never fully realized.

++ The trials. A lot of the memorable moments in this game were during the trials that Ethan had to go through in order to save his son. The scene in which he drove against the way of traffic, when he had to cut off his finger, when you had to choose whether you were willing to take the life of another for your son, and when you had to contemplate whether your son's life is more important than yours. I was most engaged to the game during these chapters.

++ QTEs. I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually love the QTEs in games like these. Yes, it can be quite excessive especially when it's required to do mundane tasks. But during fights, action sequences, and high-stakes scenes, these QTEs had me glued to the screen, and left my heart pounding. That in itself is a form of immersion.

++ Choices matter. There are tons of different endings and outcomes that are products of all the choices you make throughout the game. It's wholly possible for you to kill off characters fairly early in the story which adds to the importance of making right decisions.

++ Solid soundtrack. Gloomy and elevated the atmosphere.

CONS:

-- Faulty writing. The story has so many plot holes, and many aspects that are poorly explained. Why did Ethan have tons of blackouts in the beginning? How did the origami end up in his hand during his blackout? Why did Jason even walk so far away from his dad? How did Jason even die when it's clear his dad shielded him? Why is Norman's ARI so much more technologically advanced to everything else in that world? These and many small other details bothered me. There were also a lot of dialogue that sounded so robotic and unnatural, said in ways no normal human would ever respond with.

-- Unpolished characters. The four main characters (Ethan, Madison, Norman, Shelby) all had potential to be interesting and fascinating characters, but by the end of the story, they remained unpolished and raw. I really wished they were characterized better. Shelby was by far the most interesting character to me. Although his eventual reveal was kind of underwhelming, and was predictable. And I found his reasoning for conducting these killings to be a bit laughable. Your dad refused to help you save your brother, so you kidnap children and test their fathers to see how much resolve they have?

-- Poor voice acting. So many emotional moments were squandered because of laughable or flat voice acting. There were only a handful of well voice acted roles.

-- Clunky movement. The characters moved so slowly, and movement required R2 to be held down which was a really weird design decision. Also, the camera was quite annoying and often was too zoomed in for me to see what I needed to see.

-- Graphics aged poorly.

-- Long loading times.

I enjoyed this much like I enjoyed Tommy Wiseau's The Room. The storyline is absurd and the acting is hit and miss but I was throughly entertained throughout. Mind you the melodrama does hit occasionally. The opening is very dark and I was genuinely shocked by the plot twist. But mostly I was laughing my ass off throughout this. Officially and unironically now a David Cage fan. Playthrough below:

How do you even rate a game like this? It's fucking horrible in such a way that it bends over backwards into hilarity. Horribly written dialogue and terrible performances make it one of the most hilarious games I've ever played, and some of the endings are so fucking funny. David Cage's complete lack of self awareness somehow propels this into legendary status.

It's the best shit game I've ever played, play it with a group of friends while taking turns for maximum entertainment.

Heavy Rain is a interactive drama following the lives of a grief stricken father, a drug addicted FBI agent, a retired police officer, and an insomniac who gets into other people's business. The story of all four are connected through an unknown killer that kidnaps young boys.

Bringing a clichéd Hollywood story to life through a video game, players are left with deciding the fates of each character through QTE and decision making, each taking its own path, either success or death.

Each playable character brings an individual personality that both adds and subtracts from the story. Some character voice support comes off as flat and emotionless, adding little substance to the situations presented throughout.

Gameplay wise, you are mostly tasked with walking and interacting with points of interest that progress the story, which becomes tedious after while due to slow character movements and bland dialogs.

I absolutely loved this game the first time around, the second time around... not so much. The repetitive dragged out scenes make replaying this a hard thing to do. Reliving each segment is painfully dull with such slow movements and robotic acting.

I would say that only one playthrough is necessary to enjoy the game for what it is, because the more you play, the more annoyed you will become.

This game is atrocious. In almost every aspect is a parade of bad decisions to the point that I don't understand, first, how the developers deceived themselves into thinking it was a smart game, and second, how the hell it's got an 87% on Metacritic. I could've forgiven Heavy Rain if its only sins were its bad controls and uninteresting gameplay if only the story weren't such a trash fire, the voice acting weren't mediocre at best and the characters were just not all bumbling buffoons. However, some interesting aspects do shine through the patina of crap.

Having played Fahrenheit many years ago, I knew a bit of that I was getting into gameplay-wise. Heavy Rains features some, let's say interesting, control scheme that I'm generously going to call "skeuomorphic" controls. The idea being that instead of pressing a button to do an action, the player has to move the stick (or mouse) in some way that vaguely resembles the movement that the characters make. Need to brush your teeth? Move your mouse up and down. Need to open the car door? Move it to the left. This is not a bad idea in and of itself. I guess the impetus is to draw the player closer to the action to create a more immersive experience. In some cases it works, but most of the it's just another layer of annoyance between the player and the game.

On top of the controls not always registering correctly, the camera and movement are exasperating. As is par for the course with fixed-camera games, the direction of movement is only vaguely related to the buttons on the controller/keyboard and it's easy to get disoriented between camera switches. Moreover, interaction prompts appear and disappear seemingly at random if the character is not standing in some exact spot and even looking in some narrowly defined direction.

The upshot of all this is that the frustrating controls often ruin what would otherwise have been tense or meaningful moments in the story. In an early example, a depressive scene of you having to take care of your son in a sad and dirty house turns into and infuriating battle against the camera as you navigate your way around the house trying to complete your chores within the time-limit.

The surprising thing is how much of the mood and atmosphere still comes out on top. The fact that moments that are supposed to be tense are actually tense in spite of the controls and despite of being surrounded by the most ridiculous story shows that something, somewhere, there's a spark of quality.

Because, don't get me wrong, the story is spectacularly bad.

The plot revolves around several characters you control which are all embroiled in the mystery of the Origami Killer, a serial killer who drowns 10-year-old kids and leaves the body in a "wasteland" (no, it's not Fallout 3, that's game's word for an abandoned lot) with an orchid and an origami figurine. I couldn't tell you why they call it the Origami Killer and not the Orchid Killer, or why having only one gimmick was not enough for him.

The player controls each of them alternatively. Ethan Mars is a father who wants to rescue his son after he was kidnapped by the killer. Norman Jaden is a drug-addicted FBI agent brought to help with the case. Scott Shelby is a private eye who is also investigating the case. And Madison Page is a journalist who has insomnia. What?

Yes. Madison is a completely useless character that serves only as filler, as gratuitous nudity, and gratuitous female abuse. It's a microcosm of the issues with the whole game. We are introduced to her in a completely unnecessary scene in which she is attacked in her home but it was only a dream and even though the player has access to her (and everyone else's) thoughts, is never clear why she does what she does. She doesn't call an ambulance when she sees a guy cut, burned, bruised and missing a finger. She doesn't call the cops when she sees that the guy has a box full of origami and a pistol. In a game in which "decisions matter", the player is forced to decide only between stupid and unexplained actions.

How the game takes agency away from the player is further exemplified by Shelby's investigation. Every time the player gets to control him, he is following a different, random, lead which was never even hinted at in the previous scene. Again, the player can hear his thoughts and still it's a mystery why is he going to a party at a rich guy's mansion and how he got the invite that enabled him to get in, just to name an example.

But the most obnoxious case of the game robbing the most basic agency to the player is the fact that, when Ethan receives a box with Saw-like instructions on how to save his kid, the player is never given the sensible choice of going to the police with the information.

The whole story is not only full of examples of people not acting as people, but it's got more plot-holes than you can drown a child in. The identity of the killer doesn't make any sense. I'm not talking about motivations, here but just physical impossibility. There's neither time nor space (literally) for him to do all those Saw-like torture chambers, not only for Ethan but for the 8 other fathers of the previous victims! One of them involves the killer paying for two whole years of a car's parking and maintenance. For another, he must've had to crawl into a tiny dark pipe while evenly distributing shards of broken glass, even through dead ends!

Usually this is the point in which suspension of disbelief would kick in, but the reason it doesn't work here is, ironically, the immersion of the skeuomorphic controls. In order to justify them, the game has a lot of filler represented by minute actions that other games would gloss over. The player has to make characters brush their teeth, shave, go to the bathroom, shake a juice before drinking it. That kind of in-between tedium cements a naturalistic style and works really well to ground the player, but it also tells the player that the game operates in real-world logic, not story logic. This is not Jack Bauer spending 24 hours without going to the bathroom. It's Ethan Mars, whose face gets cut if he shaves to fast.

So when when a game goes into so much trouble to ground itself in reality, then it cannot blame the player if they can't believe that someone could kill a guy silently in just a couple of seconds without any kind of blood splatter. Which, yes, it's a key plot point because the story is dumb as a rock.

finished it recently on ps4 many years after finishing on ps3 and dude, i didn't remember how i'm divided with this game. 50% of me LOVE this game and the other 50% hate the controls. but guess i'll go with the loving part because my god, this is one of the best stories i've ever seen.

and i grew up with a crush on madison.

I remember first playing Heavy Rain senior year of high school, I borrowed it from my math teacher. With the special edition of Become Human being the free PS plus game of the month, I got to revisit a game I remember having a fondness for.

The first thing that nostalgia glossed over is the graphics. Granted for the time, they probably looked alright. Like any game that attempts photo realism, it’s a victim of looking severely dated as technology improves. The faces they use in the loading screen hold up pretty well, but the in-game models look a step above Fallout New Vegas characters. The lip syncing isn’t quite great either as most of the characters’ mouths sort of make the general movement that allude to actual speaking. If you pay attention to it, which you will in this talking heavy game, it can be a little distracting. Some scenes have some added creepiness thanks to the character’s silent, dead eye stares. Another thing that dates these graphics to the early 2010s is the prevalent sickly brown/grey filter that every game and movie had back then. Heavy Rain is a mix of ugly to look at, but also decently atmospheric because this is supposed to be a sort of gritty, neo-noir story.

This is a David Cage venture, so calling it a game is a little insincere since he makes “interactive experiences”. You know the rigmarole, don’t expect anything above QTEs. For all the hate QTEs get, sometimes rightly deserved, they have rules they follow here. It’s not just randomly pressing square or tapping left. When you are in a fight you can pick up on the system; face buttons are used to block incoming attacks while the directional movements on the right stick are used to attack. Heavier attacks, like tackles or more intense moments like recklessly driving use the Sixaxis controller. I remember the Sixaxis commands being a little temperamental on my old PS3, but I didn’t have any problems with it on the PS4. When you aren’t quick timing it up, the game is reminiscent of a TaleTell game. You drive your character around by holding R1 and use the analog stick to ‘mess with the set dressings’. It can be a little awkward to steer your character around, but once you get used to it you can deal with it.

Looking at this compared to Cage’s newest game, Detroit: Become Human, and you can really see the long way he’s come. The writing in this game is a little rough and some of dialogue is stilted due to both the script and the subpar voice actors. Cage couldn’t afford named actors like Clancy Brown yet. Most of the voice actors sound like they are from Europe. Some of the ways they speak also sounds less like an American dialect and more like how a European might say it. It’s not awful, just seems a little off. (They call a 'yard' a 'garden') Other things that seem off in this city, that I’m not sure is maybe supposed to be New York City, are some of the architecture, doors that have the knob in the middle or toilets that have the flushers as a button on top the tank.

As mentioned, the story of this game is going for a neo-noir feel. Think along the lines of Seven, True Detective, or those type of gritty, nihilistic crime tales. In pursuit of a playable movie like experience, there are some cool camera angles and memorable set pieces; the fights in the junkyard and on the conveyor belt, the Blue Lagoon. You control 4 different characters as they all work to catch a serial killer named “the Origami Killer”. The Origami Killer captures young boys and drowns them in rainwater. How you play effects the endings you’ll get, and there’s the illusion that any of your characters could die at any time, but only two can die before the ending. The good endings tie everything up in a nice bow and some of the bad endings are downright depressing.

One of the characters you play is Ethan Mars, the father of the current kidnapped kid. His levels see him being tested by the killer ala Saw style to learn where his son is being held. This Edward Norton looking guy also has this crisis of conscience as he has these blackouts & he thinks the Origami Killer may be a split personality of his. Ethan’s voice actor is one of the better of the main characters. I’d say second best. Being my name is Ethan, it is always weird when characters are named Ethan and characters are saying it all the time.
The character that says his name the most is Madison, whose voice actor is on the awful end of the spectrum. At the start she also seems like the most superfluous character. Her first few levels are solely taking care of a beat up Ethan after he returns from his trials. Towards the end she finally starts to use her journalistic skills to investigate the case by visiting the Origami Killer’s serial killer friends. She feels like she is a failsafe in case Ethan fails or quits too many of his trials otherwise she could’ve been an NPC that’s part of Ethan’s story. Also, we get another instance of David Cage showing his type, a short brown haired girl.

The third player character with another poor voice actor is FBI agent Norman Jayden, who bears a striking resemblance to David Dukovni. I didn’t realize this when I played the game back in high school, but Norman’s voice actor is trying to do a Boston accent, poorly. It makes his levels a little extra hilarious. As an FBI agent, he’s approaching the case with the technology and know-how. It’s more like an episode of Criminal Minds trying to use his psychology to profile the killer. Norman also has ARI, glasses that give him Eagle Eye vision to examine crime scenes. Apparently these glasses give him a drug addiction, because all these characters have some type of medical flaw. Norman is paired with a local detective, Blake, who is the typical bad cop who uses brute force to solve his issues and isn’t much for book learning. He’s the asshole character, but they do give us an insight into his thought process. While most of his outbursts are just general assholery, some of them come from a warped sense of duty. He is bending the rules because he wants to save this kid that has four days to live. Also, he can’t pronounce Origami.
Then there is the final player character, Scott Shelby. I think he has the best voice actor by far. He’s got a sense of humor and quick wit and delivers his lines well enough to come off as a likeable character. He is inserted in this story as a private eye hired to investigate the killer by the family of the past victims. Compared to Norman’s high tech approach, he has the beat the streets approach, doing old school police work. As I’ve stated before, I love a good private eye story. His levels usually involve visiting some unique locations and halfway through he picks up a sidekick, one of the young mothers of a past victim. Their back and forth makes Scott feel like an actual person, not just a video game character.

Here comes the spoilers. You are left in the dark as to who the killer is for most the game, you get some hints about his past, but there’s not like a parlor full of suspects you are trying to pin this on, save for your four player characters. In Norman’s levels you do arrest a few people you suspect of being the killer, but they are dead leads and finally the police force settles on Ethan Mars being the killer. When I first played this I figured the Origami Killer would be some fifth person, not one of your main four. I was wrong, as we learn at the end the killer is actually Scott Shelby. Having one of the characters we’ve spent the last 2 hours playing turn out to be the killer raises a whole host of issues. At first, it is a pretty clever plan Scott has. He uses his job as a private investigator to collect all of his old evidence and since he’s a retired police lieutenant we can assume he knows how the investigation will be conducted, but this gets muddled when Lauren enters the picture. First there’s a moment where we lose control of Shelby while he kills a clockmaker who knows too much. Then there’s the Kramers, maybe the point is that Scott has to go through the motions with Lauren and also create a convenient scapegoat. It’s just, he’s doing an awful lot of work to figure out he’s the killer just to lead on the player. That’s the biggest sin of Scott’s levels, so much of it seems like it exists just to mislead the player, including Scott pretending not to be the Killer in his inner monologue. It’s also odd that Scott is one of the more personable and helpful characters. Maybe that was Cage’s heavy handed attempt to mislead us, “This guy is too nice to be the killer.” or maybe it was one of those attempts to show that serial killers aren’t always the creepy, filthy guy we think of. Scott could be a normal functioning human most his life, but when it comes to fathers it just makes something click in his head and turn into a killer, more of a sociopath than a psychopath. I think sociopaths are the ones where they could either be serial killers or Fortune 500 CEOs.

All in all, this game is starting to show its age and the poor voice acting isn’t doing Heavy Rain any favors. Still, there are some good narrative bones here even if the execution is a little rough. Had this game been made now, by a different developer or even by modern Quantic Dream, or if this had been a straight up movie, I think it would feel much better.

Having now played two games by David Cage, I feel as though I understand what he is: a weird alien being who is blessed with a good sense for storytelling but doesn’t understand how human beings interact on a basic level.

The behaviours of people in these games are always a laughable mix of worn out cliches and weird quirks. Yet behind it all is a well thought out, excellently structured story that is worth experiencing.

I wish Cage had a co-director to reign him in and point out all the bad voice acting. But ah well, this is still a pretty enjoyable game!