Review: Heavy Rain

I would like to begin with a warning, that Heavy Rain is a game that cannot be looked at critically without spoiling certain elements of it, so to consider this a review would be misguided and for this reason I will not be assigning Heavy Rain a score. To anyone who has not yet purchased Heavy Rain or at least rented it I recommend you do, since it is a game that tries new and creative things and anyone who is interested in the video game medium should experience.

{SPOILER WARNING}

"With Heavy Rain I was looking for an emotional experience, that's what I wanted
to create. Something that would not be based on adrenaline,
frustration and completion but based on more complex, subtle emotions..."

(- David Cage, Writer/Director Heavy Rain)

To begin with, I would like to say that, yes, this is a video game. No matter how much David Cage wants you to think otherwise Heavy Rain is a video game, which in my perspective is a totally arbitrary term meant to describe any sort of virtual interactive experience. Yet Heavy Rain is not a video game like any other video game you have ever experienced, there is no fail state, no high score or leveling, there is just you and your characters' motivations.

Heavy Rain's goal was to make the player experience emotions they had never felt in video games before and to this extent Heavy Rain was a success. With no re-tries, fail states or continues everything that happens in Heavy Rain (without exploitation) is final. This allows the player to feel emotions that one would only ever otherwise feel in real-life. Where in other games the player can go back and try again Heavy Rain forces the player to live with the consequences of their actions giving the player a connection to the character that very few video games can. While the game did manage to make me feel frustration, success, joy and anger in a way that I have never felt in any other video game, it failed to make me empathize with any of the characters for several reasons.

The story of Heavy Rain is not good

I want to make this clear, Heavy Rain as a film would be average at most, equating to an above average episode of CSI, but as an interactive experience it is far more valuable to the viewer. The narrative is full of plot holes, lacks any sort of character development and is not unique in any sort of fashion. The main characters are above average for video game characters as in they are not completely flat, but lack the depth of the best movie characters. They don't change throughout the game either Ethan Mars is either really depressed or really happy and completely binary. Madison Page is despite, what David Cage may say, over-sexualized and her motivations are never quite clear. The relationship between Ethan and Madison is never justified, the sex scene is completely out of place and meaningless and immature. There is no reason for Ethan or Madison to care for one another because you never really see any sort of relationship develop, it all seems so rushed and out of context.

Perhaps given a better writer and a far less broad goal perhaps Heavy Rain could have been a far better experience, yet Heavy Rain still manages to do things no other game has. It is the first effort at a game of this style, and it is incredibly good for a first effort. Heavy Rain can draw people in, in a way other games cannot, and the potential of a game of this style in the future with a strong story and interesting characters could be incredible and leaves me as a gamer very excited.