From the Gaming Desk

I'm as surprised as anybody to find myself posting about video games so soon after the completion of Death Stranding.  But after a mere 16 hours, I've already completed my next game, the mystery Heavy Rain. I saw online that the game can be completed in as few as 10 hours, with an average completion time of 11½ hours. The last four hours of my game time were probably spent replaying certain scenes to effect different endings, so I probably reached my first conclusion after some 12 hours.

Heavy Rain is a David Cage game, the director of one of my favorites, Detroit: Become Human (2018).  Like Hideo Kojima of Death Stranding, David Cage is a video game auteur who obviously wants to direct films - his games look and feel different from anyone else's, and have a highly cinematic quality to them.  They're not at all unlike watching a movie which you have to occasionally nudge along from time to time and in which you can choose certain actions of the characters. 

Heavy Rain came out in 2010, an eternity ago in video-game time, so it was a chance to play an early Cage game, and see how technology and artistry have evolved over the eight years between Rain and Detroit. Long story short, I liked the plot and characters in Heavy Rain, and hated the mechanics and game play.

The Heavy Rain plot is basically a detective mystery involving a serial child murderer.  You alternate play among four different characters - the father of a recently vanished child, a journalist investigating the story, a private eye looking for the killer, and an FBI agent assigned to the case. Each character has their own story and those stories interweave and intermingle in the course of the game.  Part of the game is like a modern-day film noir and other parts of the game are like those Eli Roth Saw movies, as the father is forced to participate in a series of gruesome tasks to find clues on the whereabouts of his son. 

Although the story is highly scripted and controlled by the game itself, small decisions in the game have major implications later.  What the player decides ultimately determines which characters live or die (although you're not always aware of the life-or-death implications of your decisions at the time), and which characters live or die determines the various endings.  In all, there are 17 possible endings to the game.

So all of that's the good part.  What detracted from the game for me were the clunky mechanics.  The game was originally designed for the PlayStation, and the console version of the game might have played better. But in the PC version, the characters' movements were controlled by the usual WASD keyboard commands, but it was often difficult to predict what direction any key would make the player go. "W" certainly didn't automatically make the character move in the direction he or she was facing.  Sometimes, it made the character walk directly toward whatever the object of that scene was, but just as often, they would walk away from the object.  Sometimes, "W" would make the player walk only halfway down a hallway or staircase, and then at some point, they'd abruptly turn around and walk back in the opposite direction unless you started pressing the "S" key.  I spent far too much time with my character walking around in circles or walking into walls.  

Worse still, there were certain sequences that required you to use the WASD keys, or the Q, the E, the Left Shift, or the number 3 key, as directed by on-screen prompts.  These were often fight or flight sequences, and quick reflexes were necessary to hit the key when prompted in order for the character to survive or to escape capture.  But the problem was that the character was sometimes in front of the on-screen prompts, so you couldn't see it in time, or the prompt was onscreen for such a ridiculously short fraction of a second that it was almost impossible to respond in time (it didn't help that the letters "W," "A," and "S" on my year-old keyboard have worn off the keys). My characters kept getting captured or even killed simply because of these key-prompt issues, forcing me to decide to either continue the game without a major character, or to play the entire chapter over again and try to beat the key prompts on the next attempt (the game doesn't have a "Save" feature, but is at least divided into 50 chapters). I had to replay a lot of dialog sequences several times over in order to get to chapter-ending chase scenes for  my third, fourth, or more attempts to escape.

The good news is that most of these issues were resolved in 2018's Detroit: Become Human.  In addition to a longer and more complex plot (and more emotionally involving characters), the chapters in Detroit allowed you to jump back in at multiple points using clever plotline trees that traced your progress through the various storylines.  The controls in Detroit took a little getting used to, but after the initial, tutorial chapter, this player at least found the controls useable and predictable.  And the quick-time events with rapid screen prompts were easily visible and not quite as reliant on adolescent reflex speeds.

Detroit is clearly and by far the better game, but I'd recommend Heavy Rain if you still have the lightning-quick reflexes of a teenager, or find noirish thrillers interesting enough to put up with some level of frustration, or if you're interested in seeing for yourself the evolution of David Cage video games.