Heavy Rain: The most overrated game ever made
Heavy Rain is insultingly ignorant of intelligent or even competent storytelling and direction. The dialogue is terrible, the story is almost retarded (for lack of a better word), and the direction is shallow. Some gameplay moments are genuinely credible as ways to help identify the character's emotions, but that doesn't count for much when those emotions come out of a ridiculously and sometimes childishly constructed narrative, and also when the gameplay is generally clunky, frustrating, overly complex (sometimes under-developed or lacking focus) and inaccessible. It's a shame when the technology is incredibly impressive.
Don't get me wrong, I am all up for games like Heavy Rain trying to push the medium forward and incorporate storytelling (and there is nothing wrong with linear gameplay either), but this was a horrendous effort in terms of writing, direction, and design, despite most people being hypnotized by the production values and pretentiousness, leading them into thinking it knows what it's doing. One person I used in a Heavy Rain experiment once said it is a game that lets you play the mundane and unimportant things and not the things that push the story, making you, as a player, redundant.
Someone in one of the world's biggest games companies once asked me "don't you admire that they tried to do something different?" and I replied "Yes I absolutely do, but they already had Fahrenheit's mistakes to learn from, which was their own previous game, and storytelling is an ancient device so integrating it into an interactive game just requires someone capable of it, which Mr Cage is not". And it frustrates me once more that the game poses as a masterpiece when it fails to be a good film or a good game, unless you are trying to impress children.
If Heavy Rain is trying to draw in new audiences to gaming then it sorely fails. I did an experiment with non-gamers playing Heavy Rain and most people couldn't get through the first door due to awkward control and bad instructions. The game even confused me at times and I've been playing games all my life. This subsequently meant that no one could get immersed in the story, let alone touched by it, because they were too frustrated trying to control the characters. This contradicts the many attempts to immerse the player through story and direction because the controls are blocking the player from interacting naturally. This is absurd when the same results could be achieved with much simpler controls and a more competent use of camera.
Ironically, the highlights of the game come from a mishmash of film influences but it seems unaware of the underlying themes that made the original source materials engaging and meaningful and so these end up feeling very obscure and reminiscent of the no-limits madness of a child's playtime. For instance, the game becomes something like ‘Saw’ half way through, throwing the protagonist into crazy tasks, but for what reason? This just seems so randomly inserted - it’s an absurd concept with no payoff to justify itself.
I don’t deny that Heavy Rain’s heart was in the right place, and someone certainly has to push this medium forward, but it feels a shame that it could have been so much more if professional storytellers were involved and accessibility was taken into account to support the attempts at immersion and identification. There is also a lot of filler that is irrelevant and this all damages the experience.
I guess the best way of summing it up is that this is not the work of an artist but instead of an art student. If anything, what Heavy Rain does is show what is potentially possible when learning from it's many amateur mistakes. There are moments unique to the medium of games here that would work well if telling a superior story. People who were disappointed by this sometimes laughable experience may be weary of playing something by a greater interactive storyteller in the future though, and so publishers are less likely to fund games like this in the future.
Someone in one of the world's biggest games companies once asked me "don't you admire that they tried to do something different?" and I replied "Yes I absolutely do, but they already had Fahrenheit's mistakes to learn from, which was their own previous game, and storytelling is an ancient device so integrating it into an interactive game just requires someone capable of it, which Mr Cage is not". And it frustrates me once more that the game poses as a masterpiece when it fails to be a good film or a good game, unless you are trying to impress children.
If Heavy Rain is trying to draw in new audiences to gaming then it sorely fails. I did an experiment with non-gamers playing Heavy Rain and most people couldn't get through the first door due to awkward control and bad instructions. The game even confused me at times and I've been playing games all my life. This subsequently meant that no one could get immersed in the story, let alone touched by it, because they were too frustrated trying to control the characters. This contradicts the many attempts to immerse the player through story and direction because the controls are blocking the player from interacting naturally. This is absurd when the same results could be achieved with much simpler controls and a more competent use of camera.
Ironically, the highlights of the game come from a mishmash of film influences but it seems unaware of the underlying themes that made the original source materials engaging and meaningful and so these end up feeling very obscure and reminiscent of the no-limits madness of a child's playtime. For instance, the game becomes something like ‘Saw’ half way through, throwing the protagonist into crazy tasks, but for what reason? This just seems so randomly inserted - it’s an absurd concept with no payoff to justify itself.
I don’t deny that Heavy Rain’s heart was in the right place, and someone certainly has to push this medium forward, but it feels a shame that it could have been so much more if professional storytellers were involved and accessibility was taken into account to support the attempts at immersion and identification. There is also a lot of filler that is irrelevant and this all damages the experience.
I guess the best way of summing it up is that this is not the work of an artist but instead of an art student. If anything, what Heavy Rain does is show what is potentially possible when learning from it's many amateur mistakes. There are moments unique to the medium of games here that would work well if telling a superior story. People who were disappointed by this sometimes laughable experience may be weary of playing something by a greater interactive storyteller in the future though, and so publishers are less likely to fund games like this in the future.
In depth Playthrough
I wrote down my thoughts when playing through the game and then went back to assess them after having finished the game, to see if any of my doubts could be abolished. My instinct was that the game was not deserving of it’s pretentious presentation that leads people to believe that it is a commendable piece of storytelling that has the consciousness and depth of a professional storyteller, and it certainly wasn’t deserving of an ‘art’ status. (between taking the notes and writing them up a fair bit of time went past so there could be some inconsistencies with story details etc, but don’t let that fool you.)
Origami
When the game was installing I was told to fold some card into an origami figure, which relates to the subtitle of the game ‘The Origami Killer’. I wondered how symbolic this would become and if I would gain anything by folding it via some fourth wall breaking tricks. After finishing the game, I realised it could potentially have been a way to identify the player with the origami killer that they play (by the way this is one of the most retarded things in the game - your character turns out to be the killer, which is so illogical it hurts, and it is not even revealed in an intelligent way, neither can replaying the game reveal this in a clever way either). The problem is, Origami as a concept doesn’t even have anything to do with anything in the context of the game! It’s an empty symbol, and this feels symbolic of the whole game: just shallow nonsense.
Opening
In the opening sequence I immediately started judging whether there was substance to any shot composition as the game would have you think. Angles kept switching, not really revealing any real information other than a man waking alone in a double bed. The music supporting this leads me to think that he is alone, maybe having lost someone. Moments later this is thrown out the window when we are told he is happily married. There is no strategy to misleading us, which means that this was just bad direction. The first moments of a film (which this is trying to be so I will make many comparisons to film) traditionally set up the themes for what is to follow but this start is pretty redundant. The only credit to the opening sequence is that this sunny suburbia will play in contrast to the rest of the game’s overly bleak, rainy, grey setting. But this is basic art direction.
There are lots of pointless things to do around the house to introduce us to the clunky motioning of analogue sticks to match on-screen actions, to try to form some kind of identification with the characters, when all they actually do is take us out of the experience due to their poor implementation. If you’re not a gamer then you are doomed from the start of this game. One person I saw playing it couldn’t get out of the first room and stopped playing. So why be so unconventional in control if it’s not for the purpose of inviting new audiences to your game? Next, I’m having a shower and the camera makes sure my buttocks and pubic hair are on show to assure me that this game is somehow mature and that there is nothing to hide. However, when I get out of the shower there are tacky camera tricks that hide my penis behind furniture. It’s terrible and contradictory. On drying my hair with a towel I must shake the controller, but if you stop the character just stays frozen with a towel on his head whilst the camera randomly cuts between two different angles of the same fucking thing. It’s pathetic. He also has no armpit hair despite all the efforts to make him realistic with his pubic hair.
Before I go further let me discuss a 3D animation theory I’m slightly familiar with called the uncanny valley. Basically, the more realistic we try to get with character models and movement without being perfect, the less realistic it seems to us as humans. So the whole attempt of this game trying to be photo-realistic is utterly pointless. A game like Uncharted 2 doesn’t look photo-realistic but stands to be more realistic than Heavy Rain because it’s consistent in it’s presentation. This is something that will frequently jar with the game even in aspects like how real the hair looks and how this makes the rest of the character less believable.
Getting back to the game play, the opening continues, allowing me to do a variety of boring tasks with no pay-off. I can’t go downstairs until I get dressed, which feels contradictory to the illusion of freedom in all the pointless chores I can do. The camera angles quickly become disorientating, misleading, shallow and annoying. I pick up a kids’ toy RC car and get ready to have some real fun by driving around the house, but instead I’m subjected to a cut scene of it. It becomes apparent that this is the kind of game it will be (I’m not suggesting they do let you play with the car as it would feel out of place in the style of the gameplay, but it’s just a tease that reminds me I could be playing better games). I go to play with my kids and get given the choice over whom to play with first: generic 1, or generic 2. Since this doesn’t come into play later (it’s not like whoever I favour will die, for instance) I just don’t get the pointless, limited interactivity here and the development time these small things cost, when they could be allowing me to have some real interaction elsewhere.
I am open to a game that is limited in this respect if it will justify greater storytelling or other aspects, since I support developers challenging the traditional form of games. However, since the story is an amateur mess it fails in it’s primary goal, leaving only the gameplay to fall back on, but we’ve already established there’s not much of this. The amateur direction actually highlights its flaws by shoving the story in your face at every moment forcing you to acknowledge it like a child’s tantrum, and this is why many game critics believe it to be serious. Good storytelling allows you to forget about the story and become unconsciously moved and engaged by it. Greater game narratives hide in the background and engage their audience modestly like Call of Duty 4 (to much people’s disbelief). Uncharted 2 is a maturely told story. Where Heavy Rain forces bleakness into the atmosphere by hitting you with constant rain and grey colours, Uncharted 2 stays relatively bright and then hits you with a similar style to Heavy Rain but only at a point in the narrative where you are struggling to help another character who has been shot in the stomach. They have held back on the aesthetic tone so that it will have maximum effect when placed against this point of the story.
The famous “Jason!” scene comes next, which is probably the highlight of the game as you wrestle through the crowds to get to your son. Pressing the “Jason!” button works well as the more you press it is a direct result of your own panic. If the rest of the game was this thoughtful then this would be a very different review. When you get stuck in a crowd of people the game uses controller input as an effective extension of your character by making you feel helpless as you try to move around and the camera works well for once to obstruct your view. Some people I’ve seen play this though found themselves too frustrated trying to move about to get involved with the emotions of the story, and hadn’t been engaged with the family characters in the opening sequence. This may have something to do with what the director Cage said in an article I read - that they didn’t think casting was of huge importance, the ignorance of which just makes me angry.
We get an opening credit sequence after this that doesn’t seem to convey any theme other than depression. As mentioned before, this section of a film usually sets up your tone and themes. The contrast does play strong, as your character becomes the cliché noir character who doesn’t shave now. You do some more mundane tasks including putting on your seat belt in the car and releasing the hand brake before the game takes over from you and drives the car off into the distance. Now again, I understand that this isn’t that type of game where you can drive a car around for fun and I respect that as being the right choice for this particular game, but doing all the mundane tasks up to driving off is just pointless and a bit of a tease. You’re giving your audience mixed messages by giving them some control but not all in these types of situations. You’re going to confuse your audience and lose them. Maybe you could argue that the reason we are doing the boring things in the car such as putting on seatbelts is because the character himself is depressed and so we don’t get to experience the fun stuff as a connection to him, but then being able to drive the RC car earlier on would have been an effective way to highlight this change of character.
Introducing characters and more interaction…
As a single Dad there is a nice scene where you must go around the house making your kid dinner and making sure he does his homework etc before it’s time for bed. It feels like the clunky control’s fault but the clock will always turn quicker than you can manage your time to in order to make you feel a bit hopeless, which is nice. There is more pointless interactivity such as turning on lights with no effect. On going to get something out of the kitchen cabinet though I made a conscious effort to close it afterwards thinking about if the kid was to get in there and take something. This made me think but I wonder if the designers ever considered this option. I like that because my character is a pushover, if I don’t make a choice over dialogue options, an easy one is automatically chosen for me signifying me caving in to pressure from the kid who wants to stay up and watch cartoons. The game is full of little touches like this, which are nice but not enough to stand on their own. Then the big gimmick moments have the game stand up and hit it’s head on the ceiling.
Small errors can usually be looked over but some do take you out of the experience such as the TV show I was watching in the beginning of the game is still on as the kid watches TV two full years later. It’s a detail that is very prominent in the scene so it’s very jarring.
I’m then playing a chubby private investigator who turns out to be the killer in the dumbest plot twist ever. The idea of switching between characters doesn’t sit well with me as I find you can’t identify with a single character. There’s a hilarious scene where he suddenly has an asthma attack (good to see they haven’t done the most simple research into these things). You interrogate a hooker over her dead son. There seems to be the effort of a production designer here as the room suggests a life of innocence as an aspiring ballerina but since this is never explored except for one throwaway shot later, and doesn’t have any role in any layer of transformation for her, it’s pointless. It’s not exactly subtle production design either.
Jumping to another character becomes one of the most boring and anti-enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had playing a game. You’re an FBI agent searching a crime scene across a HUGE brown wasteland for clues, but because the director is so intent on believability, you can’t run and only walk. This is so tedious it was painful to finish. LA Noire has many moments like this but they are smart enough not to make the crime scene the size of a football field, and even though they have a run button, I like walking around because there is concise exploring to be had. I don’t care if the designers fancy themselves as pretentious, failed, experimenters, how could they forget they were still designers? In this field you meet a cliché wanker cop character who will play out his one-dimensional existence later in the game. I had to go all the way up a muddy hill for a couple of clues, and then there was another tedious quick-time button mashing event to get down the hill, but if I fucked it up and slipped I just got down the hill faster with no repercussions. This is just bad design as it links “gameplay” to bad context.
The BAFTA winning music (this game also won a BAFTA for best story which confirms that the game BAFTAs hold no significance at all) plays the same downer music whenever things get boring, which is all the time.
The choice of dialogue system can be interesting sometimes by becoming harder to read if the character is under stress and other gimmicks. But then I’m asked by a character to say how I’m feeling. This feels very wrong, as I can’t speak for him on these terms as usually dialogue choice is used to find out information or to request something. I’m not engaged enough to feel the emotions of my character. Since the one goal of the main character seems to be to keep his son happy gameplay is connected to your character’s desires and so when your kid finally smiles you feel rewarded as a player also. This is the kind of stuff that I’ve wanted to see in games and one of the few things Heavy Rain does well, but this will not carry a game.
You are then introduced to the fourth playable character through the most pointless arrangements of shots. She is a woman and we can strip her and put her in the shower in the most pathetic scene yet. Again they are trying to be bold by showing her breasts and bum to declare some uncensored authenticity but feel that showing her vagina is crossing the line. It’s childish. Once more we couldn’t be further detached from her now we are ogling her. Then there is another quick time event where we run away from some burglars in her apartment, before dying at the end. It turns out to be a dream so I could have just died at any point. This is cheap on reflection. Also, this scene has nothing else to do with the game. It’s black and white evidence that random scenes are being thrown in by a creative that doesn’t know what he’s doing, and I pity anyone that call it genius.
The fail continues…
Later on you are the FBI agent again and are led into a nutter’s apartment with a hundred crucifixes hung from the ceiling. It’s one of the most recollected scenes by fans as the tension builds that this guy could pull a gun on you and so when he does most players shoot him as you are being pressured to. Then it turns out the guy was just pulling out a crucifix. You do feel a bit bad over this, but it’s a cheap shot as the circumstances weren’t smart enough to make this out to be a huge mistake on your part. You misjudged a character that had no depth to him or large significance to the main story and had every warning that you could get shot. It’s been done much better elsewhere without the advantage of interactivity as an extension of emotions.
Back as the private investigator you have to look after a baby by rocking the controller to rock the baby etc. Games tm, a British magazine creamed over this stating that it put you in the shoes of the character, but in reality that’s just bollocks. Motion controls as an occasional addition to the use of buttons in the game stand out like a sore thumb and do nothing but draw attention to themselves. I also get the impression that journalists like this just love seeing situations in games that are uncommon, which is pretty much any scenario where something doesn’t get shot. Just because the game explores aspects of life such as this doesn’t make the game mature or the work of someone who’s exploring life as opposed to action flicks. At least the story tangent that the baby’s mother is suicidal is an interesting concept and effective. What’s unfortunate is that as a detective you explore all these side-dramas that have been developed somewhat but are merely distractions from the main story that I should be caring about. This shit wouldn’t stand in a cutting room.
Then you’re playing some golf as you talk to an antagonist. You basically hit buttons to see an animation of you hitting a ball so that you can ignore the conversation going on. This seems to be more evidence of the director just imitating what he sees in films with little thought as to why they’re there. Take the latest War of the Worlds film for example. Tom Cruise plays catch with his son, and as they have a heated argument, they start throwing the ball harder until it goes through a window, highlighting their internal emotions through their physical actions. The golf has nothing to do with the emotions in the conversation and is instead there only to make the scene a little less dull.
My FBI character died (at the hands of another one-dimensional “character”) and the game kept to its promises of continuing the story in the absence of that character, but then I realised that this isn’t a good gimmick. I was annoyed that I lost a character because it felt like I failed and that I was going to miss out on a chunk of the experience had he stayed alive. So this concept led me to feel uncomfortable. I see that by continuing the story despite dying you can avoid having to replay a level, which can take you out of the experience and become tedious, and that death in games in a concept inherited from the arcade era as a way to get more money out of a player after a game over. But then why make people have to replay the game 22 times to see every ending? This is repeating anyway. Also, if they wanted to immerse players then why design a game around horrible controls (which is why I died anyway)?!
The story has gone all over the place at this point and has made me put my head between my legs many times, like how everyone and his dog is evil, and the infantile idea to turn the main character’s story into a psychological thriller as he races through a hilarious game like something out of ‘Saw’ that comes out of nowhere. The other scene that people praise is where you have to cut off your finger. The concept can only be described as idiotic. It is quite disturbing but is there a bad way to direct a scene where someone cuts something off? It’s cheap.
Then the two characters throw any hope I had left out the window by deciding they love each other and having clunky sex that comes across as overwhelmingly cheesy as you must do the undressing for them. This also happened in David Cage’s previous game Fahrenheit where the two characters decide after a day of non-sexual interaction that they love each other and then have sex on a train when only one level before this the guys girlfriend died. I can’t get my head around how someone could write this stuff. This cannot ever be argued as good writing and directing, even in a primary school debate. And then my private investigator escapes from a car that is sinking in the sea, but he seems to have forgotten he has asthma, which I think the writer has too, and hopes the audience will also.
The End
The game approaches a climax and locations and scenarios start to get a little more independent rather than borrowing from films. I have never been against this game as an experience to be looked upon with fresh eyes, as a movie you sometimes interact with rather than a game with limited control. But the way control is sometimes jokingly offered as a restricted way to interact with the fun-looking sequences is a tease as I mentioned earlier and it just stands to make you have less fun that just watching a film or just playing a game. And if this is just a movie with some interaction, then it needs to stand up as a movie, which it doesn’t to any competent quality.
So the game came to an end and it was enjoyable but pretty dumb. My infuriation is mostly over how insulting this game is to storytelling at points, and how the game press who are unqualified to review narrative are sending out a message that games are allowed to be this poor when it comes to story. There was a trailer of the game a year or so before release that showed a scene where the girl you play is sneaking around a house in a scene that was far more engaging than anything in the game. But the scene was only made for demonstration purposes. How did they go so wrong? Are some of these criticisms slightly bitter? Possibly. I am infuriated by the way the game presents itself as changing the face of games when it gets so much wrong. What annoys me most is that everyone thought of this concept about 10 years ago so it’s not like Cage is a mastermind, this game was just the first to get finances together to do it, then didn’t take the most important aspect seriously (story) and screwed up the original point of games, which was interactivity. Anyone who argues that there are answers to my criticisms through multiple playthroughs will not get very far. The game needs to make me WANT to play through again. I have no interest in doing this. I have not been intrigued as to the alternatives and the game should be able to stand on one playthrough to start with. Alternative endings seem a little redundant to me anyway as opposed to different perspectives on a single ending for instance.
It’s not the worst game in the world by far, but it is an average game wrapped up in a bunch of shallow and pretentious gimmicks that fool the generally casual gaming audience that they are looking at art. There are some good and interesting moments balanced by tons of terrible ones. I would recommend people to play it for the unique experience but this has been overrated by critics who just want some justification that their games are more than ‘just games’. Innovation can be found hiding in more conventional looking titles that will not abandon the old and are not up themselves enough to reinvent the wheel. Many games I have praised in my writing elsewhere have much more to offer in substance, but they are allowing the game to speak for itself first, and their ego second.
