Heavy Rain

This isn't a review exactly. I just wanted to write a little bit about what I thought of the game and my quest to acquire its Platinum.

I started out by borrowing this game from Dan. He's the man. Dan likes to buy all the hot games brand new so he is a good person to trade with. All I have to do is wait until he plays thru it and is done and then he'll usually let me borrow it. That's a good friend. I do the same for him too. Don't have that many old skool gaming friends anymore which makes me sad. I thought more people than ever were supposed to be gaming. Why can't I borrow their games?

This game was on my radar not because it was a new awesome game that was supposed to be the next big hit but because of the uniqueness of it. This was game that had never really been attempted before. The developer, Quantic Dream, developed this game building on what they had done previously with their amazing motion capture technology in a game called Indigo Prophecy. (I don't have any experience with that game) These are not crazy spiky haired anime cartoon characters running around. These are hyper realistic humans walking around. It is freaky how real they look. They look real, their mouths move realistically when they talk, they walk and interact with the environment just how you'd expect a real person to. They did a really excellent job with that aspect of the game. It's far above what you see in 99% of other games out there and I would expect that if they make another game using this technology it would look and respond even better.

Heavy Rain is a murder mystery type of game (actually I think they refer to it as an 'Interactive Drama') that focuses on a group of people finding out the identity of the Origami Killer and stopping his crimes. Rather than be a 3rd person action packed adventure game like so many others they slowed it down and made it more for the mind. You can control the movement of the main character and as you walk around each scene if there is something you can interact with a button press icon will appear. Most of the action portions of the game are quick time events (QTE). There were two old games I kept thinking of as I played it. The control system reminded me a lot of how you played Dragon's Lair back in the day with the 'waiting to see what happens and then hurry up and press the control the correct way' and the mystery part of it reminded me of the old Sherlock Holmes game that came with the Sega CD (minus the INSANE load times that game had).

There are 4 main characters you play as throughout the game: Ethan Mars - a father and architect, Scott Shelby - a private detective, Madison Paige - a journalist and Norman Jayden - an FBI profiler. I think most would agree that the story mainly revolves around Ethan however. All the bad things are happening to him, his son dies, the other one is kidnapped, the cops start to believe that he's the killer and the whole time to save his son he's forced to endure these horrific trials. Madison is just looking for the story about the Origami Killer but she starts to see what Ethan is going through and it becomes more about helping him than the story towards the end. Scott is hired by the families of prior victims to search for clues to see if he can discern the identity of the killer. Finally Norman is trying to help the local police find the killer by searching for clues but a lot of internal politics are against him.

So knowing all of that (and of course having in the back of my mind the potential for acquiring this game platinum) I popped in the disc to see what was in store for me.

For the most part I enjoyed this game. As I noted earlier the graphics were amazing and the story was very intriguing. I had some guesses about the killer as I played but unfortunately didn't guess correctly until about 5 minutes before it was revealed anyway. I enjoyed playing over again once I knew who the killer was. A lot more made sense as far as motivations etc once I knew. Some things didn't make much sense then though (blackouts?). I would call out some of the better parts of the game as getting to drive the wrong way as fast as you can on a highway and having to cut off your own finger as two of the trials you were forced to endure to get more clues to find your son. Those trials reminded me a lot of the movie franchise 'Saw' with the horrible things you were forced to do to yourself and others to either live or save someone you care about. I know this has become on of the holy grails of the gaming industry too: the 'emotional attachment' to the characters your playing as. Well I can honestly tell you I felt it. When I thought about what I would do had I been in this characters place to save my son it greatly affected me. I love my son Isaac very much and to have him taken from me would kill me. I could really sympathize with what Ethan was going through. They did a very good job on that aspect of the game I thought.

Of course there were some parts that were pretty lame. I don't consider changing and feeding a baby or cooking some scrambled eggs a very fun video game activity to do. I guess it kind of fit in there as far as the story, etc but still.

I decided to start my trophy run. I was able to keep everyone alive for the end of the game the first time so that got me some endings trophies I needed. There is another way to play through to make sure that the bad guy wins. I needed to get that one next. It was kind of a bear to play through this over and over after a while but it wasn't difficult just time consuming. The last major trophy I needed was to get all 18 variations of the ending. Luckily there were FAQs online that told you exactly what to do and soon I had that one as well. It wasn't that hard since most of the decisions you made that affected the ending weren't that many chapters back. Once I scored that trophy there were just a few easy bronzes left to get and I could pick and choose the chapters to go through to get them. Boom! Platinum! Took me about a week I'd say.

Good game, good story, got the platinum, Thank you very much!!