I’m playing Heavy Rain now… but I use the term “playing” loosely…
Heavy Rain is alot of things, but a game it is not… Of course, that depends on the definition of game that we use, but at this juncture I’m just using the definition that stays that a game is something that you play… and you don’t play Heavy Rain, you watch it… I’d estimate that the play/watch ratio is about 1 hour of play per 5 hours of cutscenes.
Every action you perform in the game, you are treated with some seconds of cutscene, and this goes through the whole game… the term “game” doesn’t suit it, since we watch more than play. A more apt term would be “interactive movie”. It’s not even a decent exploratory system, since moving in the game is atrocious!
We can argue that the decisions we make on the game are meaningful, and affect the outcome of the game, but even the first proposition (that the actions are meaningful) is subject to discussion: a series of times in the game, I just press the button to see what will happen, since the effect of my button-pressing isn’t apparent until I actually press the button (Ctrl-Alt-Del did an awesome cartoon about this here).
So we have a “game” that makes us watch it, and difficults the decision-making process… hardly a game, to be honest…
David Cage several times has said that Heavy Rain would redefine games and the way we feel about them, but to be honest, I think we had plenty of that previously: Steve Jackson’s Fighting Games series of books… And even if it was another medium, we have the brilliance of Don Bluth back in 1983, when he released Dragon’s Lair on Laserdisc!!!
So, in my opinion, Heavy Rain is just the natural evolution of “interactive movie” games… of course, is is an amazing leap in technology, writing and emotional involvement, equivelent from going from Amoeba (Steve Jackson) to mamals (Don Bluth’s games) to Heavy Rain (Cro Magnon)… but still a way off to a true interactive movie experience (where you can really do everything, not just what the game designer thought of).
It has lots of positive points, though… the fact that you don’t have a “save game” facility makes you be more carefull with your decisions, since you have to live with them until the end of the game. For example, I shot some guy in the game, and I’ll have to carry that around for the rest of the game… downside of this is that I didn’t actually wanted to kill him, thought the button did something else, and I wish I could rewind and do that scene as I intended to. But given the tradeoff, it’s better like this, since it makes the player/watcher be more empathic with the decisions they take, which is kind of lacking in other games (point in question, the Holy/Unholy thing in Dante’s Inferno, which is kind of pointless and doesn’t reflect on the personality of the player, but on the concept of beating the game-system). Choices have to be meaningful to achieve some measure of empathy between the player and the game character, and this is Heavy Rain’s strenght: make the actions count, make the player question his judgement, make the player part of the story.
Heavy Rain is a very well executed piece of software, with amazing graphics, a compelling story (after the first 1.5 hours though), but still it isn’t a game… it’s well executed interactive fiction.
Because I like numbers, here’s a final breakdown on my rant:
Heavy Rain
- Gameplay: 3/10
- Story: 9/10
- Graphics: 9/10
- Sound: 8/10
- Emo-ness: 10/10
- Overall: 5/10
Try it if you like studying games, otherwise grab a good book or see a good movie…