Who'll Stop The Rain?: Cinematic presentation drowns Heavy Rain

I knew Heavy Rain was going to be an artsy game as soon as it instructed me to take a piece of paper and fold it into an origami bird. Shortly thereafter I got to see a man’s naked ass. By the time the game’s female shower scene happened – with the camera swirling around the girl’s breasts in intoxicated filmschool closeup – Heavy Rain had sunk so far into pretentious territory that I could tell without looking it had been made by the French.

Like a deconstructionist’s wet dream, the story of Heavy Rain is a multi-angled mystery – a search for a serial killer that’s told from the perspective of an FBI agent, a private eye, a journalist and the father of one of the victims. This might be interesting if books, movies and the Internet hadn’t already been telling stories from multiple viewpoints for years. It would also help if Heavy Rain wasn’t so full of bad writing, ranging from hackneyed clichés (the local cop and the visiting FBI agent just can’t play nice) to outright oopsiness (a graveyard caretaker observes that it, “looks like a storm is comin'” when four inches of rain have already fallen).

The flawed writing hurts Heavy Rain more than it would most videogames because Heavy Rain is presented as an “interactive drama.” Long stretches of the game are spent watching digital actors performing, and then making choices that range from mild story-changers to tedious time-wasters. In one scene, I needed to remember to clean up all my fingerprints at a crime scene, while in another I was given the choice or drinking either the orange juice or beer in the fridge.

As if they knew that pressing buttons to scramble some eggs wasn’t going to enliven Heavy Rain, the designers have periodically inserted fight and flight sequences of TV cop-grade action – roll aside from the incoming punch, grab the knife on the counter, slide across the hood of the oncoming car. Only occasionally did these scenes transform into something engaging, most notably during a torture session in a madman’s basement. For once I was trapped in the victim’s perspective, risking my life on my actions.

But for a murder mystery, Heavy Rain is pretty safe. I was continually aware that I was living through four characters, taking four different paths through which this story, like all whodunits, reaches its single inevitable destination. With no tension of getting lost, either fatally or procedurally, Heavy Rain is nothing but an empty exercise in cinematics – a convoluted figure that ultimately turns out to be flat and square once it has been unfolded all the way.

THE GOOD: Heavy Rain was animated by motion-capturing live actors, resulting in a subtler and more believable presentation than the usual hyperactive puppetry that passes for CGI filmmaking.

THE BAD: Heavy Rain is plagued by a few glaring bugs. The worst was when, during a climactic scene, my character couldn’t exit a burning room or be hurt by the flames. With so little interactivity in the game, the designers could have spent more time making sure it all worked.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Heavy Rain is a slow, dull, soggy mess.

Heavy Rain

★★✩✩✩

Rated Mature; PlayStation 3

This article appears in Mar 11-17, 2010.

Was prejudice really necessary in this review? Sure, the French have their nuances that for better or worse define them as “French”, but it seems a bit over-the-top to label the French as pretentious, or at least vocalize that opinion in this review.

I work with a gentleman born and raised in France, and he was none to happy when he read this review. It should also be noted that he’s a veteran of the games industry, and therefore takes his gaming seriously. So he was excited to read your review of ‘Heavy Rain’. His excitement was quickly cut short by the time he reached the end of the first paragraph, once he realized that this wasn’t a game review so much as a lynching of the French.

Sure, we’re all entitled to our opinions for what makes for good/bad entertainment, but the need to attach geographic angst is taking it a bit too far.

Can’t we all just get along?