Heavy Rain (PC) review "Experimental Interactive Fiction isn’t without its drawbacks – but nothing ventured, nothing rained."

The problem with playing a Quantic Dream game is that it’s a lot like eating a cake with a lightbulb baked inside it; everything’s pleasant at first, but there’s no escaping the ominous knowledge that something is going to go very wrong at some point. There’s this weird rebellious creativity running roughshod though all their games that make it clear they’re actually pretty bitter about having to be games in the first place. What they want to be instead is Interactive Fiction; a weird Frankenstein’s Monster of a creation. A story perhaps better told through cinema forced through a begrudging patchwork of interactivity that’s so unwanted by the narrative its inclusion seems spiteful. It’s always clumsy, but it’s often endearing in a weird way; most of the time, it’s implemented in a series of quick time events, and everyone loves them, but some of the choices are so left field and bizarre that they feel new and refreshing almost by chance.

This is Heavy Rain’s curse, but it’s also its strength. There’s some really peculiar inputs asked of you, like having to hit forward-semicircle-back to open a kitchen cabinet while, traditionally, that would launch Ken Masters into a hurricane kick instead. It’s a weird affront to your gaming muscle memory so, when you’re casually looking for plates to set out for a children’s birthday party, it feels like nonsensical busy work. But when you’re rifling through closets trying to find something that might save your life and time is of the essence, that single fiddly interaction is a rage-inducing anxiety factory.

That’s the game part of Heavy Rain; resentful, purposefully clumsy and, occasionally, accidently brilliant. But that’s never supposed to be the focus of the experiment. Heavy Rain is a fragmented story about a rainy day serial killer who abducts children and drowns them in slowly filling puddles. The latest child to go missing is the son of Ethan Mars, a parent who’s already had to deal with the tragic loss of one kid. The plot is centred around Ethan’s desperate search for his son and the increasingly dangerous and bizarre things he has to do to try and find answers. Except, sometimes, it’s not. Sometimes it’s about FBI agent Norman Jayden, a man working himself into near insanity trying to catch the killer. He’s openly resented by much of the local police force, and suffering from the mental strain caused by his high tech investigation methods. Only, sometimes, it’s not him either. Investigating from the other end of the spectrum, Scott Selby is a private investigator picking at the leads abandoned by the police. Investigative journalist, Maddison Paige is also included. Though no one seems entirely sure why.



Having the same subject dissected through vastly different perspectives is often the greatest hook Heavy Rain has. Ethan is an emotional wreck, running purely on primal emotion, following a trail of breadcrumbs left by the killer to very much place him in harm’s way. He’s offered tantalising scraps of information as to where his son is held, but the price of each clue steadily climbs. Norman can afford to be more clinical, sweeping crime scenes for forensic evidence and then trying to manoeuvre all the pieces into place in order to make some sense out of it all. Scott has a slightly more harrowing investigation ahead, talking to the families of previous victims, dredging up the darkest of their memories in the hope that there may be some little spark hidden within that will cause everything else to make sudden, dreadful sense. Maddison Paige is also there.

Thing is, maybe in your mind, Ethan’s son isn’t worth the hassle of slogging through a bunch of ridiculously inadvisable trials, and you can choose to not bother. Or you could bother; you could bother super hard, but fail miserably. Mess up a series of quick time events, or elect not to take part at all, and you would normally fall foul of a game over screen before being deposited back at the nearest checkpoint to try it all again. How very passé; none of that played out nonsense for Heavy Rain. Screwed up one of Ethan’s trials? No do overs! Do the rest of the game without the clue that success would have provided. Screw up a number of quick time prompts while Norman fights for his life, and he’s dead. The game moves on without him. No more meticulous clue gathering for you. Oh shoot, Scottie’s got a gun. Better pay close attention to those weird button prompts if you want to get back to making grieving mothers relive their greatest suffering. Maddison’s alone in her apartment; press down to pee.

So, where’s that lightbulb?

Like Fahrenheit before it, it saves that for the very last bite. Heavy Rain advances multiple endings to cater for the fact that any combination of the main cast might be killed off by your choices before you get to the end. How the game fits all these together, and the consequences involved with how each individual affects the others is actually pretty nuanced and delicately executed. The problem is the catalyst; Heavy Rain is a mystery game, with the identity and the motive of the killer carrying the vast bulk of the mystique. Throughout the tale, it’s coy and secretive, dropping little clues and red herrings about numerous suspects. Some of these are investigated and dismissed as you go, but others are left to dangle, tauntingly ambiguous. Then the killer is revealed. And there’s your mouthful of glass.



I’ll condense this rant so I can skirt around spoilers, but the big reveal is the game’s greatest failure. There’s more than a few reasons as to why it’s such a deflating missed opportunity but the biggest one is the most obvious. Heavy Rain openly cheats so that when the curtain is pulled aside, you’re hit with maximum shock factor. Except this is never earnt; there’s no emotional investment in it because, rather than see all the clues scattered through the game come together, you’re left wondering how the bloody hell this is the twist. The awful truth is revealed, and Rain gets busy trying to explain it all away, only it doesn’t do so by pointing out all the clever little things that hinted at this conclusion. It can’t; they don’t exist. Everything the concealed killer did happens exclusively off-screen. Even when members of the cast are right there in the same room as them all these things that would suggest the guilty party’s culpability are uniformly missing. In contrast, evidence that might have suggested the guilt of a different person is instantly dismissed, never to be bought up or mentioned again. They’re no longer needed, so simply cease to exist.

Then things play out depending on who’s managed to limp themselves to the finishing line. Depending on you and your choices, there’s a chance that some of the cast might pull their shit together and stand a fighting chance at returning to normality. Or they might be left wallowing in their own guilt and regrets. Or they might be dead. It’s hard not to be impressed by how the game itself comes together at the finale, but the game was never supposed to be the star of the show. It was supposed to be the brave storytelling of Heavy Rain lapping up your admiration and applause. Instead, it leaves you to pick glass shards out of the roof of your mouth.

Community review by EmP (October 31, 2023) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.