Somewhere between a casting call and a Raymond Carver paperback, Heavy Rain’s sunken eyes wander over the alley’s dark contours. It’s trying to tell you this story about a father and his family, some drunk and the girl he just met, a cop who can’t catch a break, a drifter with a headache. It’s one story, the one about a fraying urban class, told a couple of times the same way. And then it’s one story, the one about profound and enduring loss, told one time a couple of ways.
Tableaux and character sketch follow one another in slender depictions of what it feels like to feel sad, what looks like to look lost. And every once in a while you’re asked if you would just walk away from this situation, if you would rather leave this person to die, or if you would exhibit compassion over restraint. These decisions feel menacing because their effects are subtle, nearly imperceptible at first glance. Sometimes you’re just altering the tone without changing the context. But things start to compound, as they might in life, whether the alterations announce themselves at once or not. And maybe the game’s greatest trick is never letting you know just what you can change and what you can’t. It leads to moments of intense empathy. It drags you to moments of intense reflection.
But it’s not always this way. About the half way point, when the light from the brave and heartbreaking prologue has slipped away, the game feels less like a choose your own adventure than it does an adventure with optional options. It starts to revolve around your ability to take pop quizzes on Dual Shock button configuration or to recognize when you’re being asked a question. It’s an interactive movie in that you get to wander around the set awkwardly for a few minutes before the story starts back up. Sometimes the pantomime and quick time connect you with the action and emotion in the scene. Sometimes you’re left with whether you’d rather sit or stand while you’re being talked at.
It will be hard for people who play a lot of games to get their head around how little you’re actually doing from minute to minute. In this adventure game, you don’t solve mysteries, you don’t do much exploring and you’re not asked to remember details, though sometimes it helps. All that’s required of you is that you find the 4-to-6 things in the room that you can interact with and then interact with them. But if you’re hovering over these limitations, you’re playing when you’re supposed to be absorbing. This is a stream of consciousness for those who can cast off the yoke of expectation. And even if you aren’t of that mind, it’s unfair to criticize Heavy Rain for failing at being something it has no interest in. It just so happens that it doesn’t have much interest in being a game.
This passive midsection of the game is letting you study these tortured souls and their motivations, what is in the text and what you layer on top from your own experience. So when the big choices start to come hard in fast in the final 2 hours, you feel ready to make the big decisions about who lives and dies, who is redeemed and who is forgotten. The movie starts wrapping itself around your instinct and perception until the completely irrational things people tend to do in movies start to become intensely internalized. I am this shattered father’s neurotic sense of abandonment, and I have decided that only this action can account for everything that’s gone wrong.
It should be noted that all of this would probably be a bit wasted if it weren’t for the miraculous presentation. It boasts the density of textures and clean draw distances that mark the major ground-up PS3 titles. On top of that, the game goes out of its way to dress its apartments and crime scenes with tons of unique curios. And there is an almost perverse dedication to matching natural tones of lighting and sound design.
Heavy Rain sits inside your head for days after the closing scene as you try to close the dissociative gaps and make connections in the murky mystery. Subsequent plays will show you the gravity of your initial play, but they will always be curious conjecture or distant dreams. Your first play was your reality, and it will color all permutations thereafter. It’s one story, the one you deserved, told one way.
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