I played and completed Heavy Rain last night. What a turbulent ride that was!
I was looking forward to this game for a very long time, since I heard about it after playing Fahrenheit last year, in fact.
It's a thriller interactive movie, about hunting for a serial killer who drowns children in rainwater. Pretty bleak subject material! Also, I guess it's pretty strange as something to ask for as a birthday present but that's what I requested and received from my boyfriend. Collector's Edition, yay! :)
I started it up, played through bit by bit until I came to two scenes which were really intense... at that point I decided to stop and play something more relaxing, and continued with the "more relaxing" games for about a fortnight before getting back to the game and finishing the rest in one run last night.
Gameplay is similar to Fahrenheit - most are in third person and you can walk and explore scenes and interact with in-game characters, switching between controllable characters as fits the story, with action sequences played out using on-screen instructions.
The main differences in gameplay are that you can press L2 to look into the mind of the person you're controlling and select different thoughts, and that the game uses motion controls (sixaxis) for some actions. In most games I've played on PS3 that use sixaxis, they have felt more of a hinderance than anything else, but they do work quite well in Heavy Rain.
The game promised many branches throughout the story, as it was said that your main protagonists can die depending on the choices you make. I have only played through the game once, but I did happen to see some very different outcomes of scenes depending on what I did (then I reloaded the game), and some people have told me they got really different endings, so that's quite cool.
The graphics in this game are really amazing, and that's not normally something I would praise a game for right from the start, but this is so good that I have to mention it. The faces of characters are especially detailed and expressive, I thought. The face of one shopkeeper in particular stands out in my mind. He had incredibly dark eyes and his performance was genuinely moving. There's also a "Making of" casting video included as an unlockable extra to the game, and it's obvious that many of the characters really do look a lot like the actors that played them (but altered accordingly).
Aside from the characters, the art direction in this game was really good, I thought. It's not often that you think of art direction in a game, but there it was; settings for each scenario that push you into one emotion or another, and another unlockable bonus is concept artwork which is really good artwork in its own right, realistic... perhaps even hyper realistic mundane scenes. Seems strange, but that's the only way I can think of describing them.
The atmosphere was really well set up in each scene, I know it must have been difficult to get this just right because it is a game and the game uses techniques normally employed in film. That is, the player can decide what to do in most scenes that are not cut-scenes, which means they can dawdle, they can move artificially slowly or goofily, so it must have been difficult to capture atmosphere, and yet it succeeded. I was completely drawn in.
Even moments where the game had me (the player) flustered and I couldn't decide what to do, so I made my character pace around the room. Even those moments looked right for the scene. It was just really well made.
The story.... I found compelling, but at the end I had a lot of things I wanted to discuss with other people who had played the game! Are they plot holes or would they be revealed if I played different branches through the game? I cannot say yet. But it's been fun just talking to people about their experiences, their choices, and what they made of various bits and pieces in the game, and characters.
So, overall I was very satisfied with Heavy Rain.
It managed to surpass not only my expectations from playing the studio's previous game, but my general expectations of acting and expression from CGI characters and of the use of film techniques to create emotion and atmosphere in video games.
Although I have access to the DLC chapter of this game, I have not downloaded it yet. I was busy this evening! :)
Very Very Minor Gripe: There was a pre-launch fun little augmented reality game (ARG) to play via the web using Twitter and Facebook and special little websites they'd set up, it was called the "4 Days Challenge". That's all good and well, and it was a nice marketing gesture to give us that ARG game, but the initial "prize" for getting it right was a trailer which managed to spoil me in knowing the start of a scene (one of the scenes which made me put down the game for a fortnight, in fact). That was pretty bad, I thought. Also, I managed to stupidly sign up for the 4 Days Challenge website with my language set as Spanish and couldn't log in again to change it, so they kept sending me emails I had to run through a translator! Lastly, I only got the prize for the event this morning via email, which I thought was quite late. It's an XMB theme for the PS3 dashboard. It's all free so I shouldn't really complain, haha!
