Thoughts On Heavy Rain

So it has been a good minute since I last spoke to my blog followers. A number of reasons involved like me sleeping through the day (night shift worker), being busy (apartment and furniture shopping), and of course not doing playing new games (new to me). After all, how do you fuel a blog about gaming without having new games to talk about? You don't, and that was a mistake on my part.

The Origami Killer

This past week I finally jumped into my copy of Heavy Rain just about a year after its initial release. Heavy Rain was definitely one of the games that made me want to get a PS3 after Quantic Dreams put out Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit (sleeper hit) on the PS2/Xbox. I'm a bit loathe to use the term spiritual successor when referring to Heavy Rain, but maybe evolution is more apt? Heavy Rain is one of the few modern adventure games out there, and during pre and post release hype was often compared to playing out like a movie.

Did the game live up to its hype for me? I'm not quite sure. The big thing for this game as I remember were graphics in regards to character modeling, and especially facial reaction. I look at the characters faces and they are certainly detailed (the loading screen is a big close up of one of the games four protagonist), and they look just fine when characters are talking, but they seem off for me when I look at the characters faces as they're doing nothing. One of the things I liked so much about last year's hit Red Dead Redemption was how many little animations went into the characters during cut scenes to make them look real, and less like a motion captured video game model. I don't get that feel from Heavy Rain, but that's minor and no big deal as a lot of games on this generation of consoles are not able to or don't pull that off.

Protagonist Ethan Mars

 I am also a little bit turned off by the textures in the environment and clothing. Perhaps my A/V settings are not optimal but seeing a blurry sign hanging up in front of a building, or noticing that the rips and cuts in a characters pants are low resolution certainly puts a dimmer on what is for the most part a very nice looking game. I also was not a fan of seeing one of the characters bandaged up, and realizing that they were not able to somehow separate the layers and instead just replaced the body texture of the character (this may be a hard graphical limitation to over come). Not to be all negative, I do like seeing some of the interaction between objects such as seeing a person actually slide their arm through the strap of a backpack, or a character being able to pull a piece of paper out of an envelope.

Another big portion for a game driven so much by story is its voice acting and ability to carry the emotion of what is supposed to be such a heavy, and trying series of events for the main characters. The voice acting for me has been a mixed bag mostly because of the accents. I have to assume the game is set somewhere in the United States since of the main characters is a member of the FBI but so many characters have a French accent that it throws things off for me. I assume this is simply a by product of Quantic Dreams being a French development studio. It still throws off some of the immersion, and makes me wish they had gotten a hold of better voice actors since this was Sony exclusive IP.

Protagonist Norman Jayden

As far as the story is concerned I am hooked. The scenes with the father Ethan Mars are very emotional, and certainly pull on your heart strings (even if they do seem out of Saw). The most promising part for me is the idea of a branching story that allows for the game to continue even if one of the protagonist (of which there are four) dies. It provides an incentive to be careful the first time through knowing that the game will not just kick you back to a previous check point, and gives me incentive to replay each scene.

Looking back at what I wrote I see a lot of negative. Trust me, this game no where disappoints me the way Fable 3 did. It offers something different from the gluttony of shooters that generate so many sales in the video game industry. I'm enjoying my play through, and if you are like me and failed to play this title at some point last year then at least give it a rental t enjoy the experience.

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