One of the great strengths of Heavy Rain is the way that it reacts to your actions — choices you make fundamentally change the game, leading to many exclamations of “were we playing the same game?” when exchanging stories with other players.
Designer David Cage is on the record saying that he’d rather players just run through the game once and let it stand, however it played out. My experience says that this would be a terrible mistake. Heavy Rain is at its best in small chunks, its individual chapters frequently standing as great sequences, only running into trouble when you try to string them all together into a satisfying story. Thankfully, the game includes a mode that lets you revisit any chapter you’ve played and experiment inside it, without saving your progress and making any choice permanent. This gives you a great opportunity to come back to key junctures in the game and see what might have happened. Where would things have gone if I hadn’t pulled the trigger at this moment? What if I had spent just a little more time hunting around this crime scene? Poking around in this relatively safe environment lets you more fully appreciate the branching story Quantic Dream created.
The only let down is that I am frequently coming across paths that are much more dramatically satisfying than the ones I ended up with in my first ‘cannon’ playthrough. In the full length game, tying all these individually strong pieces together, the weight of your decisions quickly builds up to a point where you have to just let yourself be swept along by whatever happens — which sometimes means suffering through “what the hell?” moments. When the investment of time is only 15 or so minutes, a dramatically weak outcome doesn’t feel quite so grating.
So, for anyone who played through Heavy Rain once, the ‘Chapters’ option on the menu is well worth a look, and makes the package much stronger.
So, I finished Heavy Rain. It was one of the most interesting experiences I’ve ever had with a game, and points the way for a whole new arena of ‘interactive drama.’ I’ll be excited to see where this goes, especially considering the promising sales of the game so far. That said, Heavy Rain is a game with a lot of problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Heavy Rain, Revisited
19 03 2010One of the great strengths of Heavy Rain is the way that it reacts to your actions — choices you make fundamentally change the game, leading to many exclamations of “were we playing the same game?” when exchanging stories with other players.
Designer David Cage is on the record saying that he’d rather players just run through the game once and let it stand, however it played out. My experience says that this would be a terrible mistake. Heavy Rain is at its best in small chunks, its individual chapters frequently standing as great sequences, only running into trouble when you try to string them all together into a satisfying story. Thankfully, the game includes a mode that lets you revisit any chapter you’ve played and experiment inside it, without saving your progress and making any choice permanent. This gives you a great opportunity to come back to key junctures in the game and see what might have happened. Where would things have gone if I hadn’t pulled the trigger at this moment? What if I had spent just a little more time hunting around this crime scene? Poking around in this relatively safe environment lets you more fully appreciate the branching story Quantic Dream created.
The only let down is that I am frequently coming across paths that are much more dramatically satisfying than the ones I ended up with in my first ‘cannon’ playthrough. In the full length game, tying all these individually strong pieces together, the weight of your decisions quickly builds up to a point where you have to just let yourself be swept along by whatever happens — which sometimes means suffering through “what the hell?” moments. When the investment of time is only 15 or so minutes, a dramatically weak outcome doesn’t feel quite so grating.
So, for anyone who played through Heavy Rain once, the ‘Chapters’ option on the menu is well worth a look, and makes the package much stronger.
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Heavy Rain
Categories : commentary