Heavy Rain Retrospective

So I just recently finished my first playthrough of Heavy Rain (review to be featured on The Daily Gamer sometime this week) and with the recent PS3 wordwide crash I thought I might take this downtime to reflect upon my experiences. Obviously there are spoilers ahead for anyone yet to finish the game, but I’m sure some will still read out of temptation and complain that I spoiled the game for them. Nothin I can do about those peoples aside from tell them to GTFO plz, kthxbai.

note: this isn't a proper review of the gameplay/presentation, just my own reflections of my story.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

In short, I’m disappointed with my experiences in Heavy Rain. This doesn’t mean that I’m displeased with the quality of the story or characterisation, but more that I am not happy with the outcome that my actions lead to. I may have succeed in saving Shaun Mars from the Origami Killer, but the final outcomes for the main cast left me with little emotional attachment.

Firstly, Ethan Mars SHOULD HAVE DIED! In my story, my choices lead him to be a father in search of redemption; a man willing to do anything to repair his relationship with Shaun. While the earlier challenges posed little more than ‘risk vs reward’ scenarios, I really had to reflect on if it was worth sentencing Ethan to a certain death for the sake of his son. Giving in and taking the poison was one of the more powerful moments in the game and the developers should be rewarded for creating such a set-up. And to only fail and select the wrong address in the end (a fault of my not noticing how obvious the real location was) felt like the ultimate punishment for a man who was destined to fail. Which is why I was ready to start writing death letters to the development team when the epilogue showed Ethan still alive and developing a stable relationship with his son. A can appreciate the final test being more psycological than fatal, but the way in which it was presented felt as if it should have ending with an actual death.

And speaking of actual deaths, Madison’s death at the hands of the Origami Killer was a fault on my part (and I am willing to accept it) but I can’t help but feel her involvement in my story felt tacked on. I wonder if I were to go back and have her not help Ethan when she first saw him at the hotel, would the story have just gone on withoutany of her scenes? I didn’t hate her investigations into the killer, on the contrary I actually found the chapter with the doctor to be the most thrilling of all, but since the parts of the mystery she revealed were never relayed to Norman/Ethan, her story continued to feel separate rather than connected. Prehaps if she had survived her encounter with Scott, she would have felt more important to the outcome of the story.

Instead that role fell to Norman, the FBI agent with a drug habit and Batman-like detective vision. Looking back, the complaints I have about Madison could just as easily be applied to Norman if he had died instead of her. But with her dead and Ethan MIA, he became the centre focus for the final chapter and the overall hero. The changes in character perspective in the overall game feel as if they are little more than to flesh out one main hero’s journey, but until the last chapter that hero for me was Ethan. The sudden change of having Norman come in and be the saviour was abrupt and would be somewhat confusing in a storytelling perspective in my opinion, but as I stated at the beginning, issues like these were the end result of the choices I made so I cannot hold the game responsible for its storytelling methods.

END SPOILERS!!!

I think my overall complaint with this method is that the game holds onto all its secrets right until the end. On the first playthrough, the player is doing little more than blindly fumbling through the story with no direction of what outcomes will be had from his actions (assuming hint guides and walkthroughs are not used). When every PS3 in the world stops dying and I go back to play through the game with different choices, I feel like this will be the story that should have been told the first time around, a directors cut, if you will. With the overall story arc now revealed to me, I can succeed in making the right choices that will lead to a conclusion that I will not lose sleep over. But maybe I’m complaining over nothing, maybe this is how Quantic Dream wanted me to experience the story; constantly making mistakes that will lead to an outcome that I do not fully expect, and to rectify my errors only when I have a full understanding of the story at hand.