Narrative Flood

Heavy Rain

Unfortunately I can’t take my own screenshots of this one. It’s sad, but I’d play more console games if I could screencap them more easily.

Ah, Heavy Rain. One of the most story-heavy games in recent years. Arguably the most cinematic game ever made. An incredibly ambitious attempt to take the world of adventure gaming into two new, largely unexplored countries: AAA console action and psychological drama. I applaud the effort. I really hope we see more games follow in its footsteps.

Bit of a shame it’s not very good, really.

In terms of atmosphere and visuals, I really have no complaints. It looks great. It sounds… okay… even if some of the voices are distinctly clunky. There are some absolutely phenomenal set-pieces, most of which speak for themselves. The opening scene of our lead character, Ethan, desperately pushing through the crowds at a mall in search of his lost son is genuinely heartwrenching. The rain splashing down on the city lends it phenomenal ambience. Many of the individual scenes and moments are truly inspired, not least because of the choices you get. Talk down the gunman or just shoot him? Surrender or fall to your death? Chop off a finger in the name of saving your son, or take the door marked ‘Coward’ and face the consequences? Individually, there are some superb scenes, brilliant fights, and even a few genuinely difficult choices (although not as many as I wanted) that force you to make snap decisions with long-term ramifications. And yet…

For all the people involved with Heavy Rain’s creation, one more staffer was desperately needed: someone looking at the story from outside, with the power to slash the script into pieces with a big red pen. Tonally, it’s a complete mess. The gimmicks badly hurt the action. The story may have cost millions and millions to put together, but it’s broken in so many ways that there’s really no excuse for someone not to have caught. Ultimately, I ended up very disappointed with it.

Don’t worry, I’ll flag up the part of this write-up where big spoilers begin (although assume that the comments will be open-season), but just to be extra safe, here’s the jump.

Moderate spoilers and no bitching about QTEs ahead…

Multiple solutions to situations give Heavy Rain its best feature by far. It’s just a shame they don’t always tie together very well.

Heavy Rain’s biggest problem, and there are many, is that while it’s meant to be one coherent story, much like Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, it’s clearly been designed as a series of individual bits with the focus firmly on ‘what would be cool right now?’ That obviously inspired many of the better sequences, no argument there, but it’s a complete tonal nightmare. One of the worst cases without any spoilers attached comes right at the start, with the introduction of FBI agent Jaden. We meet him as he approaches a crime-scene, beautifully rendered with driving rain and policemen searching a patch of wasteland for clues on the mysterious Origami Killer. We’re shown his MO, how he drowns his victims in rain-water, places an orchid on their chest, and places a little origami figure in their hand. Good stuff. The head of the investigation, Blake, is gruff, tired and angry, but shares what he’s got. And then, Jaden goes to work, trying to solve this gritty murder mystery by…

…putting on a pair of magic clue-detecting VR goggles.

I shall repeat that. Magic. Clue-detecting. VR. Goggles.

Okay, so this is just a conceit thrown in to make finding clues easier, right? Wrong! When he gets back to the police station, he’s given a crappy corner office. Back on go the magic 3D goggles, and suddenly you’re investigating this world’s Hannibal Lector from… from Mars. No kidding. A virtual desk, in the middle of the Martian desert. On Mars! Not a problem for a futuristic cyberpunk type adventure, but Heavy Rain is set in 2011! Never, ever do you see anything even remotely that funky again. It’s… just… stupid. The only justification for it is that the FBI character was so monumentally dull that he needed a gimmick to avoid players falling asleep during his sections, but this… this wasn’t it. Maybe a personality transplant? Call Kaiden Alenko!

Wow, this is so much easier than actually investigating stuff…

Matrix Cop isn’t the worst of it though. All of the characters are maddeningly inconsistent, their stories fragmented and often completely broken to the point that I almost wonder if anyone wrote up a critical path document. Take Madison Paige, the sole female playable character (and oh yes, do I have problems with how she’s handled in this game…) All of the characters are suffering from some problem at the start of the game, whether it’s Matrix Cop’s addictions or main character Ethan’s regular blackouts. In Madison’s case, it’s insomnia. Her first chapter is about her trying to get to sleep, which just happens to involve wandering around her apartment in her pants for a while, before realising that she’s not entirely alone. Some scary men in black burst in and grab her and cut her throat and… she wakes up in a sweat. Sigh. The next time we see her, she’s checking into a motel in order to get some sleep, and that just adds insult to her blatant lack of injury. Not only is “Oh, it was all a dream!” the absolute cheapest way of building drama in the history of terrible narrative, she was asleep! She was dreaming! You can’t have insomnia if you’re asleep!

Not that it matters. Just like Scott Shelby the private invetigator’s asthma, which crops up at the start when he has to walk up some stairs and is made out to be a huge deal, that whole plot element is jettisoned and we never hear about it again. Fantastic writing there.

Taken individually, a lot of these issues would be nitpicking. The problem is that Heavy Rain keeps doing them, about both small irrelevant things that genuinely don’t matter, and with huge, plot-pivotal events. Characters suddenly start talking about people they’ve never met. The big reveal scene has a “Bullshit!” level retcon in it. As for the pacing, it’s utterly broken. The whole premise of the game is that the characters are in a race against time – a young boy is slowly drowning in rainwater, and the only way to rescue him is to find him before the level rises. The characters have no way of even knowing how long they’ve got, but still they amble around like they’ve got all the time in the world. The most jaw-dropping bit is a sex scene near the end. The actual scene itself is fine, from the Quick Time Event based bra-unclasping to the resolution, even if one of the participants is blood-soaked, unshaven, marinaded in his own fluids and has two broken ribs, but really – timing! With his son literally grasping for his final breaths in a rapidly filling pit of water, our hero gets to take time out of his day to bang the pretty lady? What?

“I knew David Cage would have me getting naked or making out with a corpse. At least I’m still ahead of poor Carla…”

Speaking of the pretty lady, Cage’s female characters usually annoy me, but Madison is something else. As with all things, it’s not a question of content as it is context. I don’t have a problem with characters getting naked in games, or with fanservice in general. It’s usually the smaller details that make the difference. For instance, Madison ending up doing a striptease for a seedy club-owner… okay, fine. It’s a problematic scene, but it makes sense and fits the style.

Madison’s only thought about how to approach the club-owner in the first place being to slut-up, tear her skirt and go dance sexy until he notices her… that’s another story.

Not only does this tactic not fit her character, what little of it we see, it’s phenomenally naive of her to think it’ll go well, with the striptease merely turning into the end of the act that she initiated. If uncomfortable was what they were going for, she should have been thrust into it – been caught sneaking around and then forced at gunpoint – rather than actively sexually objectifying herself and then being shocked that the sleazy guy turns out to be sleazy. Gasp.

Randomly, if a character’s nudity is going to be a meaningful plot point, it’s better not to kick off their character arc with a long, sexy shower. Both Ethan and Madison take one in their introduction, although the style is notably different. With Ethan, you hit a button to undress him and then there’s a butt-shot while he washes up and a quick QTE of him towelling off. For Madison, you slowly strip off her T-Shirt and underpants and are promptly treated to a lovingly rendered, uncensored, multi-camera scene of her washing. There is a bit of turnabout later on, where she can peek on Ethan, but it’s far, far from equal. Much like her lack of real background, instant infatuation with the blood-soaked probably-serial killer living in the next motel room, and general scenes of uselessness (although in fairness, not in her big action scene) her scenes really left a bad taste in my mouth. She’s not as bad as the appalling Carla Valenti in Fahrenheit, but it’s close.

SPOILERS BEGIN NOW

Madison is the killer.

THAT IS A LIE

Correct. I wanted to make sure nobody accidentally read on and missed out.

Scott Shelby. Amazing how the fat, asthmatic Jack Bauer is the biggest badass on PS3 right now. And not just because of his gut.

Heavy Rain’s big problem has nothing to do with any of this stuff though. It’s the main villain. The sweep of the main plot is actually pretty good. The killer’s motivation is fine, his gimmick is memorable, the basic ideas behind it are very clever. The tag-line “What would you do to save someone you love?” is immediately emotive in all the right ways, and you can really sympathise with Ethan’s plight. What I especially like is that nothing is easy for him. He doesn’t chop off a finger lightly, and it hurts. He gets scared. Killing someone isn’t something he’s ready for. The use of shaking icons to represent the characters’ emotional state is a fantastic bit of feedback, and one of Heavy Rain’s best ideas. When it works, it works. Definitely worth remembering.

When it doesn’t though, oh dear. Since I’ve put the spoiler warning up there, no more messing around. I had Shelby pegged from pretty much the start of the game, mostly because there was no way he could know that Shaun had been taken by the Origami Killer that quickly unless he had extra information. Even so, I really like him as a character. I love the concept that the most compassionate, most likeable member of the main characters turns out to be the villain. I love the twist that the victims went with him because he’s a cop, even if there’s issues there.

Once again though, the devil is in the details. It makes absolutely no sense that his previous victims still have all his little trinkets lying around, in one case under the counter of a shop, or that he wouldn’t know to ask for them directly. It’s implausible that a guy that fat could have crawled through the power-plant to lay the broken glass. There is no physical way he could possibly have done the murder in the antiques shop, nor any reason that he’d call the police and risk detection. There is no reason for him to be hunting down subscribers to origami magazines. His gravestone doesn’t match his age. He’s 48. His brother died when they were both ten. That would have to have been in 1963, but they were both born in 1967. How did they miss that?

This is just… horrible storytelling. One or two problems can be ignored and handwaved. When revealed, Heavy Rain’s plot is nothing but problems, tied together with the fervent hope that nobody’s paying attention. Why does Ethan keep blacking out and appearing in Carnaby Cross holding a little origami figure? It’s never explained. Why does he dream of drowning bodies when his own son was hit by a car? When core mysteries like the reason why he spends most of the game thinking he’s the killer are just ignored and dismissed, there’s simply no hope for the rest of the story. It’s nothing short of contempt for the player invested in the action. It’s narrative suicide.

Much like Fahrenheit, my suspicion is that this is one of those games that was made up as they went along. For a game that seems to absolutely drip care and attention to detail, it’s bizarrely sloppy, and sometimes just plain weird. Even some of the sets are ridiculous, and I don’t mean Jaden’s trip to Mars. Why would a crappy motel room have pills and medical supplies in its cupboard? Why does Madison’s apartment have the kind of shower you’d expect in a leisure centre changing room, including multiple shower heads? It’s really off-putting. Irrelevant, but off-putting.

“Wait, you actually called me a cracker? That’s in the script? I quit.”

The absolute nadir thought is the Trials concept. The basic idea of ‘would you kill/suffer/sacrifice/not bang the hot chick oh wait ignore that one to save your son’ is fine. A bit stock serial killer, but fine, whatever. What’s not acceptable is the villain’s idiotic game of Hangman. Every trial you solve gets you a few more letters or numbers, with the idea that getting them all will give you your son’s location. Almost immediately, you get most of the number, and a word that’s obviously Roosevelt. How many Roosevelt streets are there in this city? Go get a map, you finger-chopping fool. After that, there’s the obvious problem that Shelby can’t possibly be monitoring this stuff all day, especially when he’s out with Lauren, and I doubt there’ll be any webcam applications specifically designed to monitor someone chopping their fingers off any time soon. He has no way of tracking Ethan, no idea of which trial he’s going to do first, and most infuriatingly of all, he cheats. Why pretend to poison someone if you’re going to shoot him in the back anyway? Did Shelby actually forget his own motivation?

In case it’s not obvious, Heavy Rain made me very cross.

There is plenty of stuff I liked too though, and the best of it is… oddly… Shelby. I really dig this guy, both as a character and a plot point. Even after making him almost at the start and extra little things like the ‘victims’ having hired him despite none of the parents knowing him, I was hoping I was wrong. Partly, I like the fact that he’s such an unusual body-type for a game hero – easily dismissed, but phenomenally capable in a fight. His compassion, which I do think is genuine even with what we find out later, really endeared him to me. He’s a big cuddly Jack Bauer, and the scene where we cut to him burning the evidence is a genuinely brilliant reveal. The attempt at flipping the perspective to show us what ‘really’ happened is a bit of a failure, mostly because he’s far, far too smart to just let stuff play out in the way that we’re shown, but it’s a necessary one.

There are still questions to be asked, notably why he spends so much time picking a fight with the Kramers when you’d think he has more important things to do, but overall he’s a great example of the unreliable narrator done well. In a game that often frustrates with characters just showing up at places and talking to people you’ve never even heard of but are meant to be really scary, he makes it work. I felt particularly bad for Lauren, who even in the best possible ending, ends up alone, frustrated and still in the dark, reduced to spitting at the grave of the killer she fell for.

In short, Shelby is great. I would happily have played the whole game as him.

Anyway, after all this, you may be wondering what I thought of Heavy Rain. Shockingly, I did not like it very much. A few genuinely awesome scenes, some amazing production values, and an absolutely wretched story that could have been good, but drowns much faster than its villain’s victims. It’s the game a C-grade thriller writer would put together if they had no real understanding of what makes games special – an interactive movie in the same sense that hitting pause every few minutes while watching Seven is interactive. Where it works, it’s mostly by lifting cliches straight from its source medium, rather than telling a great original story. Still, it has a few genuinely great ideas of its own, especially in terms of how the story can alter depending on the characters, and the subtle variations of scenes that leave you never sure how things were ’supposed’ to go. And it’s more interesting than Shenmue 2, which was very similar in many ways, without even attempting to tell an interesting story. Even after all this ranting, I’m glad I played it.

But I’m especially glad I only rented it.

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