By Nick Masercola, Staff Writer
How far would you go to save someone you love? That’s the question posed by the genre-defying murder mystery video game, “Heavy Rain,” which tells the story of a fight to catch a child-murderer known as the Origami killer. The plot is told through the eyes of a private investigator, a brilliant FBI agent who is slowly losing his battle to drug addiction, a reporter willing to go to any lengths to get the story and the father of the most recently abducted child. The characters are all interesting, and playing the mystery out through four different perspectives works wonderfully for the game’s pacing.
Not only is the story great, but it’s made even better by the fact that it changes based on each decision you make. Picture this: You’re in the back of a convenience store when a man comes in trying to rob the clerk. You want to interview the clerk because the Origami killer killed his son and he may know something that can lead you to him. What do you do?
Do you try and sneak up and knock out the robber? Reason with him, and eventually talk him into leaving? Rush him and get into a struggle for the gun? Or do you stay in the back of the store, seeing what transpires? These are all valid choices, and any one you choose will spin the narrative into a different direction. As the game goes forward, the choices become far more difficult.
This leads to another major innovation; there is no “game-over” screen. You read that right—if a character dies they simply remain dead and the story just changes to accommodate it.
No do-overs, no retries. This makes every action sequence have tension almost no game comes close to. An early scene in the story where a character is forced to drive 60 mph on the highway in the wrong direction is so intense that you won’t even blink, horrified that one wrong move will lead to their fatal head-on collision.
All of these scenes are backed by an ingenious control scheme. The controls in “Heavy Rain” are context sensitive and change to mimic whatever your character must do. For example, if you’re giving someone CPR, you may have to grasp all the shoulder buttons and slam the controller downward, trying to mimic the actual hand motion. If you’re strangling a man, you might need to slowly push in on the analog sticks and shoulder buttons to tighten your grip on his throat. It sounds strange but it works wonderfully, putting you in complete control of every action you perform.
There are problems though. The first hour is really bad. It’s incredibly slow, mainly revolving around menial tasks such as playing with your child and getting ready for work in order to set-up the characters and story. Another issue is that the voice acting of the cast fluctuates from great (Norman Jayden) to downright bad (Ethan’s kids, who are obviously French). It never ruins the experience, but it definitely mars it.
But even with its flaws, “Heavy Rain” is still a great experience that contains several new inventions not yet seen in videogames. If you own a ps3, get this game.
New video game for PS3 (Photo source creative commons)