Heavy Rain
AN ATMOSPHERIC MURDER MYSTERY THAT FREQUENTLY SHOOTS ITSELF IN THE FOOT.
HEAVY RAIN IS an adventure game of sorts, with a heavy focus on Shenmue- style QTEs. That means a lot of button-tapping and stick-waggling, whether it’s one character shaking a carton of orange juice before taking a swig or another swinging a fist in a punch-up. Occasionally you can wander around freely, and the environments are beautifully detailed. But most of the time you’re watching cutscenes, deciding how they play out via a series of timed, reaction-based button prompts.
What makes Heavy Rain worth playing despite its amateurish, hole-ridden plot, inhuman dialogue, and inconsistent tone. It’s actually one of the most twisting, structurally complex, and reactive interactive stories on PC. While a Telltale game will let you carve your own path to a single ending, with only slight variations, it’s actually possible for every main character to die in Heavy Rain. And the final outcome will be wildly different depending on the many choices you make across its ten or so hours of play.
The plot is Baby’s First Thriller and the characters are humourless and hard to love, but there’s no denying that this is an interactive story in the truest sense. For one, it’s incredibly pretentious. It thinks it’s telling a searingly mature, provocative story, but cheapens this constantly with schlocky Saw-inspired shock horror, the frequent and gratuitous sexualisation of Madison Paige, and one of the most rushed, unconvincing, and cack-handed romances in the history of fiction.
Heavy Rain is almost a decade old, originally appearing on PlayStation 3, but was recently remastered for a PS4 release with improved textures, models, and lighting – which is the version we get on PC. The story is genuinely interactive, with many branching paths and sudden deaths, as well as a slew of different endings. In that sense, I really enjoy playing it. But as a piece of storytelling, and as a murder mystery, it’s really quite poor. When you’re laughing at scenes that were meant to be powerfully dramatic and emotional, you know something has gone wrong.