When Quantic dream and Atari released Fahrenheit or Indigo Prophecy in 2005, gamers were somehow troubled. It combined a revolutionary game control and an interesting story, but the gameplay had serious issues. Personally, I was more troubled as I found the story pretty exaggerating…
For the first time in an adventure game, the player had no inventory, no point-n-click, but immediate control of all of his hero’s moves…Getting dressed, walking, talking, yawning and even having sex!
And then two years passed…Suddenly, at E3 of 2006 a new game was announced…Its name: Heavy rain, but no more information was given. The only thing that was spread among people was a tech-demo, entitled: The Casting…
When I first took a look at The Casting I was astonished. I mean, I was so absorbed by the girl that it really looked as a real casting to me…Not only the amazing voice, not only the music and the monologue, but mainly the graphics. It was the first time that visual displays of many and various human emotions were displayed on my monitor by a 3D model.
From that moment on I started counting…the days until Heavy Rain’s releae…
Story
Ok. Let me start this review by saying that Heavy Rain is not an adventure game. Not by standards of course. As its predecessor, it is more like Phantasmagorias or Ripper or Dreamfall – Interactive movie games. That means that the main aspect of the game is the story and second in importance is the gameplay. Your actions and your dialogues have immediate affect on the story and only that. This also means that any gameplay’s flaws have negative influence on the unraveling of the story, which if it’s not solid enough sets the whole game on danger.
But Heavy Rain has perhaps the third most intriguing and interesting story made for an adventure game – or any game in general if you want. That’s my opinion of course. I still count as number one Longest Journey and Dreamfall and as number two Still Life and I suppose that I will be disliked by many of you having Gabriel Knight below Heavy Rain. But that’s the truth. It combines so great an authentic Film Noir thriller, with a hi-tech adventure, a drama and a love story. I’m really telling you – it is a solid scenario. If I had to say something bad for the story is that I found the revealing before the ending somehow sudden. It’s a bit like there are holes in the plot. The totally unfortunate thing is that I cannot say more without giving spoilers about the story…But I suppose it’s for you to find out.
Our story begins with Ethan Mars, a successful architect and happy father of two boys. In the first chapter – the intro if you like – we can take a look at his wonderful everyday life.
One day, the whole family decides to go to the mall. Everything is colorful, everything is shiny. The little boy, Shaun, goes with his mother to buy shoes. The eldest, Jason, stays with Ethan. Then something distracts Ethan and he loses Jason of his sight. He starts looking for him. After some agonizing minutes he sees that Jason is on the street. A car is coming towards him. Ethan jumps to save his son’s life. But he fails.
Two years have passed. Colors are gone. Heavy rain is falling for days in the city. Ethan is divorced and has no father-son connection with Shaun. And on the top of everything, one day Shaun disappears.
His disappearance is connected by the police with the Origami Killer case. For some time, young boys are found dead, drowned by rainwater, their bodies left with an origami figurine in their hands.
Four people are involved in the case – that’s four playable characters. All of them, for their own reasons, have one thing in mind. Save the boy and find the killer:
Ethan Mars – Shaun’s father.
Scott Shelby – a private detective, former policeman, who gets hired by the victims’ parents in order to collect information about the case.
Norman Jayden – an FBI profiler, who is sent to co-operate with local police for helping with finding information about the killer.
Madison Paige – a journalist who suffers from insomnia and goes to a certain motel seeking sleep. She gets involved into the case, trying to find clues for an article.
I will say it again. The story is absolutely magnificent. It is a 100% good murder case plot. It’s almost like watching Minority Report or reading Black Dahlia. And it was very significant for the game as a whole its story to be nice, because as mentioned above, in Interactive video games story is the first thing that matters.
What makes the story even better is that according to your own actions, failures or successions, bad or good decisions, you can have about six or seven different endings, with some of them being good and the others being bad. The even more intriguing thing is that you don’t have any way of controlling how your story is going to unravel, other than controlling your characters and taking decisions according to what you believe.
What Quantic Dream has accomplished is absolutely amazing. Ok, the decision-making thing is already done by Knights of the Old Republic or Fable you will say. Agreed. Others will say that Fahrenheit had also somehow this feature. Agreed again.
But Heavy Rain has really leaded this to perfection. Because in opposition to the above games, there is almost no clue to tell you if your decision is good or bad and to what ending it will lead you. It is just your decision and you will have to face the consequences.
So, if we have to make a conclusion here – the plot is almost perfect. And its best feature if you ask me – no supernatural mumbo jumbo as in Fahrenheit.
Graphics
If I said that the story was almost perfect, I really cannot say anything else for visuals other than: perfect. And that’s without almost.
The first clue you get about the above conclusion is the game’s intro to the menu and the menu itself. Quantic dream named its game Heavy Rain and, believe me, you haven’t seen so realistic digital rain in your life. The drops that fall on the ground, on windows, on cars on everything – are just astonishing. Just mouth-opening astonishing.
The second aspect the developers decided to create in a serious and innovative way is the faces. OMG what faces are those. It is for sure the first time in history of gaming that human emotions are displayed in so realistic way. You have to look at a close-up if you don’t believe me. These faces can smile, cry, shout, grump, wrinkle and still look like real. Some exceptions may occur here and there, but in general it’s really something else! If you look on Ethan or Jayden for example, you can even see that they are somehow badly shaved! I have to mention here that Heavy Rain enables animation of pupil dilation, tongue, eyes, fingers and dynamic hair!!
Both internal and external places are made in the finest way. No dull rooms, no buildings look-alike. On the contrary actually. David Cage wanted his game to be innovative in both controls and graphics, so you can imagine that we are talking about hi-quality visuals. I continue to believe that up to now it’s the best-looking game if not for all platforms, at least for PS3. From Ethan’s house to the mall, from the old factory to Shelby’s apartment and from the construction site to the finale’s location, are all some examples of the game’s quality.
There are some flaws of course. I know that I said graphics were perfect and that’s because I don’t think that their flaws cause any minus to the above-mentioned quality. The problem is that whereas face close-ups are perfect – and I mean perfect-, when you look at a character from a distance, things are not so fine. The level of visual perfection is still high, but not that high.
Models in general are done very very nicely. If you want to double check you have to see them naked…Yes, there are some scenes like that-warn your kids if you like…
Their movements are of the best you’ve seen so far. Ok, the grand prize in this category belongs to FPS games. But in Heavy rain running and falling is not the only thing you’ll have to do. Unzipping, hugging, showering (I like the arrangement of the movements up to here :D), dancing, putting on make-up and other show a huge variety of movements, all of which are executed very smoothly by your character…
The game uses full body and facial motion capture, advanced skin shaders, and advanced rendering features, such as depth of field, spherical harmonics, auto exposure and high dynamic range rendering.
The result is amazing. Especially Madison, who is a motion captured model of Jacqui Ainsley is so beautiful – perhaps the sexiest 3D woman in recent games – yes I know that Lara is sexy too, but she was lower-poly .
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Heavy Rain Review 
