Making definitive statements about Heavy Rain is incredibly difficult. I could quite honestly state that it is one of the most impressive and important games that I’ve played. I could just as easily say that it is an incredibly captivating experience, with some of the more memorable characters and moments to grace the medium to date. But for every positive aspect, Heavy Rain is a game that simultaneously undermines itself with massive plot holes, clumsily implemented red herrings and narrative threads that are left hanging in the wind.

DANCE MY PUPPETS

How much you enjoy Heavy Rain will depend on the way in which you approach it. For me, Ethan – the main of four playable characters – was a simple beast. I had decided early on that he would be the kind of father who would do anything to save his son from the Origami killer. Anything. Having this approach, I was not so upset at the tight linearity of the story. In fact, for my first playthrough I was a hoop-jumper, doing my best not to fail any of the quick time events and keep all of the main characters alive. I failed right at the very end, but that made the death of a certain character all the more impactful for me, and gave me the impetus to try and replay the sequence again (you can choose to replay chapters or parts of chapters).

Alcohol: it goes better with a gun

It’s during this first run through that the magic lies; look too deeply into Heavy Rain (or any game for that matter) and the cracks and limitations start to show. Firstly, most scenes are heavily linear, to the point where even if you fail the QTEs characters will pull through, saved only so that they can potentially die at certain predetermined points in the narrative.  Secondly, a lot of Heavy Rain takes you to places that no game (except perhaps The Sims) has attempted to go before; namely, the monotony of domestic, everyday life. The  first hour of Heavy Rain will see you guiding Ethan as he showers, shaves, brushes his teeth, wonders about his home, helps his wife with the shopping and plays outside with his two boys. The first time, this is wonderful, but upon subsequent plays it can irk that you have to sit through all that boring stuff once more. This becomes particularly apparent when you’re forced to go through every little QTE in order to move the story forward.

SHAKE THAT THANG

The QTEs themselves are implemented about as well as they can be. I find them extremely annoying in most games, but by some act of intelligent design the QTEs in Heavy Rain seem almost perfect. Button/direction/shake windows are tight but not to the point of frustration, and they almost always auger and mimic the actions that happen on screen when you press them. In something of an original addition to QTEs, the game is littered with complex actions that require you to keep multiple buttons pushed in.

Surprisingly, these are almost always satisfying to pull off. An interesting thing about the QTEs, and the game in general, is that as you do them it almost feels like the game is deliberately pulling you out of immersion – yet later on, when you’re not playing the game, if you think back on what you’ve done so far it almost feels as though you actually did all of those things, despite only pressing a few buttons. The QTEs, by the act of being mini trials, embed each moment in your mind so that on reflection the experience feels much more involved than it is.

The same can’t be said for the game’s perplexing movement system. In order to move you must hold in R2 and press the left thumbstick in your intended direction. It’s clumsy, stupid, confusing and frustrating, but deliberately so, designed to pull the player away from the comfort of intuitive movement systems so that you must think carefully about what you want to do. Many will hate the controls, yet in the end there is not so much movement needed that the odd multi-direction-dance-as-the-camera-changes will completely ruin the game for you.

Said one mannequin to the other...

ZOMBIE BED TIME

At its heart, Heavy Rain is a serial killer thriller, and when it works it is a deeply emotional gaming experience. Some would argue that it’s not a game at all, and they're pretty much correct, but it doesn’t detract from the feelings you will get playing as these characters. The implementation of the mundane roots you in their world and manages to override the many instances of hammy dialogue and the minced third act. As an eight hour interactive film, Heavy Rain manages to engage the player remarkably well.

Character models certainly aren’t perfect, and in some instances they are downright creepy. Early in the game, I felt quite uncomfortable as I played as Ethan, a dead, staring mannequin standing over his equally unemotional son in a dingy apartment, declaring that it was time for bed. If the voice acting was fantastic, such dissociation could perhaps be overcome, but unfortunately much of the delivery is average. Still, as I have stated, the sheer amount of time that you spend with these characters, combined with the feeling that you have lived a small part of their lives, manages to draw you in quite deeply, if you let it.

The most impressive element of Heavy Rain is the game’s many and varied environments. The attention to detail for each location – homes, shopping centres, train stations, night clubs, garages, crime scenes – is beyond anything we’ve seen before, so much so that the not-quite-human characters seem out of place in them. Heavy rain is ubiquitous and permeates almost every scene, adding an incredible atmosphere that is also integral to the plot. An almost obsessive amount of detail has gone into each location and I sincerely hope that some of this rubs off on future developers.

Gerald shows the nice FBI man the importance of stretching before operating heavy machinery

You may notice that I’m not saying much directly about the plot and that’s because I really don’t want to spoil the experience. Let me say that I was deeply invested in the game over a few days. I wondered what would happen when I wasn’t playing, and while the ending was something of a disappointment (although nowhere near as bad as Fahrenheit’s) I still feel like the entire experience was fantastic. For me, the exploration of new gaming environments and the illusion of freedom of choice more than made up for the plot holes. Sure, the illusion disappears on your second playthrough, but then some people never watch the same movie twice.

While it doesn’t quite reach brilliance, Heavy Rain is an incredibly impressive and important game. Sweep aside its easily criticised faults and you have so many ‘firsts’ for gaming – QTEs done right, the mundane made interactive and interesting, a serial killer plot with meaning – that if you consider yourself in any way a ‘gamer’ then you should play this game at least once. I’m still feeling guilty about an action that I did during my first play – not to mention the look of shock that my fiancée gave me. If that doesn’t tell you that this game can affect you emotionally, then perhaps the latest shooting/zombie fest would be more to your liking.