Heavy Rain

It's the raining season, so it's only appropriate to talk about the heavy rain.

No, I mean =this= Heavy Rain. The interactive fiction work on the PS3 that has won many acclaimed reviews and finally, I had the chance to understand why other players are so excited about this title. Actually I've completed this a few weeks back, I just didn't have the chance to really sit down and blog about this, and I didn't want to let that experience just fade away with time, so here's my little review to imprint it into my memory...

This story-intensive piece begs players to answer the question: How far are you willing to go to save someone you love? The story revolves around the Origami Killer, who is a serial that strikes during the heavy rain season in fall by kidnapping a child, leaving the child to drown due to the heavy rain, near a railway a few days later with an orchid and an origami figure. Players first start out with the father of the latest victim, Ethan Mars, who has received origami figures containing instructions about the trials the killer has set out for Ethan to save his son. Along the way, a private investigator Scott Shelby visits the families of the previous victims to learn more about the killer. FBI agent Norman Jayden works together with the Police to help bring the Origami Killer to justice, while journalist Madison Paige suffers from chronic insomnia, and conducts her own investigation on the Origami Killer after her fateful meeting with Ethan at a motel.

Summary aside, let's just jump straight into what I think about this work. This is not really a game technically speaking, it's more like a mixture of film and interactive fiction. But I'm really awed by the writing and design of this piece, as the player actions influence the outcome. Characters can die if the player is not careful (or did it on purpose), and this kind of writing is very lacking in most games currently in the market. In addition, I am also awed by the themes and trials set up for the players to undertake. I can still remember the trial where I have to decide whether I am willing to sacrifice a part of me physically to save my son. Ok, technically that's not my son but Ethan's, but you get the idea. The immersion of this title is... awesome. And I remember and feel the pain and stress vividly when I had to achieve this task within 5 minutes.

The graphics and animation helps add realism and immersion during my playthrough, though there were awkward animation moments. I liked how the character models are shown close up with some slight animations during loading times, it's a wonderful showcase of how detailed the character textures are, and how well the lighting is done, even for the eyes. I used to think that a model's eyes were the most telling of whether the model is real or just CG, but I guess I live in the past generation.

My favourite character is Madison (as seen above), maybe because I'm biased since I'm a female. At first I did not think she's pretty but after going through the entire ordeal with her, I think otherwise. All characters are flawed in terms of personality -- they all have some psychological problems they had to go through, which is a little cheesy to me, but I think this characterizations are necessary to bring out the control interface, which emphasizes on the psychological state the character is going through at the moment. It is totally cool, with some movement control with the PS3 controller, but this interface have its flaws too.

Another feature which I really liked was.... *surprise surprise!* the pause screen. When the player pauses the game, random rain droplets would appear to fall on the screen, and the screen will appear as though as it's a normal water surface with all the ripples from the raindrops. Any effects programmer would say "Hey that's just a simple trick!", but I was awed, because the normal gamer who doesn't know game programming would think this effect looks good, and it is really simple to achieve this effect. It's a nice and neat solution to creating a cool looking pause screen without getting additional assets for it.

Let's talk about the interface, which I had touched on slightly earlier. The tilting of camera view is controlled by the left analog stick, while walking requires both the left analog stick and R2 on the PS3 controller. All other actions to be carried out are done either with the right analog stick, the 4 buttons, by thrusting the entire controller up, down, sideways, or rotating the controller. The visual cues on screen to allow players choose the action they wish to carry out could be blurred, depending on the psychological impact of the action on the character. I think this aspect allows players to better immerse themselves in the story and to empathize with the character. A really good example would be Scott feeding the baby in the screenshot above, I really feel I'm mothering... oh I mean, fathering, the baby. On the other hand, I felt the controls for movement and tilting of camera was not that intuitive and obvious, perhaps they should be swapped, since most of the time players would be moving their characters around, instead of changing camera view. The current control scheme for moving characters just feels too cumbersome in my opinion.

Speaking of camera views, most of the time the camera view is fine. However there are some camera glitches, albeit minor ones at specific locations, which will cause the game to be unable to proceed. I once got my character stuck after he jumped over a fence to his neighbour's house in his garden. I couldn't go back or move forward and I couldn't even see my character at all. In the end I had to get out of the current game and play again from my previous auto save point.

Norman has really cool glasses and gloves, and I absolutely love playing with his ARI glasses. Opps I side tracked! I wanted to talk more about the actions available to players, and I felt sometimes that certain action options are not made known to the players good enough. Sometimes, perhaps due to the camera angle, the visual cue to input and execute an action could not be seen clearly, despite the character being relatively near to trigger the action. On other cases, I could see the option to carry out an action, but I have no idea what kind of action I could do. Sometimes that action which I would do in mistake was not what I wanted. Perhaps for the less obvious actions, some verbal cue could be given before allowing the users to decide whether to proceed with the actual action. An example would be in the Madison's dream sequence, where she could choose to take the sleeping pills in her bathroom to help her with her insomnia. I actually did not want to take those pills but I did it unknowingly in the end, which caused me to miss a few sequences subsequently.

In conclusion, Heavy Rain is a really immersive title which I would suggest for potential gamers to try and stay away from any walkthroughs during their first playthrough. I made the mistake of spoiling myself and reading through all the options to make sure I get the best ending (since I only intended to play the entire title once) and that really reduced my Heavy Rain experience. I was left with a lingering thirst at the end of the story, and I would like to see more of such similar experience, be it in games or in interactive fiction.