Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer Review

8.0

Format PlayStation 3

Developer Quantic Dream

Publisher

Genre Action, Adventure

27 Comments

It takes a particular type of player to appreciate a game that asks you to baby-sit a small child, cook scrambled egg, brush your teeth or change a baby's nappy.

It'll take a Shenmue-type gamer. The ones who avidly fetched milk for the cat in the park, made sure Ryo got sufficient sleep, took their forklift job seriously and spent ages browsing the interactive shelves of Dobuita's convenience store. You either adored Shenmue with all your heart or you couldn't see the point and hated it.

Heavy Rain will divide people in similar ways. As huge fans of the 'real life' concept of Shenmue, we hugely appreciate producer David Cage's vision and Heavy Rain's accomplishments as a narrative piece of work. Of course if you want to dive through the air filling faces with bullets, drive cars or blow shit up, go play GTAIV. It's not happening here.

Heavy Rain is a story-lead interactive film, essentially - a series of separate scenes (or levels) that unfold a truly moving plot with powerful and compelling questions of morality and real tests of your decision-making abilities. The story is brilliant.

It's all centred around the murders of a serial killer known as the Origami Killer, who kidnaps small boys before drowning them five days later and dumping the bodies with an origami model in their hand and an Orchid flower on their chest.

You've got four main playable characters whose stories start separately but become intertwined as you progress through the game. Ethan Mars is an architect and father of two, whose younger son is tragically killed in a car accident at the start of the game. Things gets worse when his other son goes missing, leading him to frantically search the streets to get him back.

Madison Paige - the first revealed character in early demos - is a photo journalist who gets caught up in the Origami case. Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler with a drug problem, and Scott Shelby, an old-school Colombo-style private detective, are both charged with investigating the Origami case as the latest victim goes missing and has only days to live.

It's a tense and unpredictable plot with some truly moving scenes - more so than any other game - and some surprising twists.

The best thing about Heavy Rain is its decision-making element. The game constantly throws decisions at you - and usually you have to make them quickly. Some are tense (do you shoot someone who appears to be a threat or wait and see what happens?), some are reaction-based (do you run left or run right), some question your morals (do you kill someone for personal gain or not?) while others test your tact (use aggressive questioning techniques or go easy on your subject?)

You never know which decision is the right one. More importantly, you have no idea how profoundly your decisions will affect the ambitious branching plot. Many of them don't make a great deal of difference at all, while some actions can have epic consequences, the most impactful being death.

And that's the real clincher - fear of death. In no game have we ever properly feared death. But you know that dying in Heavy Rain puts a permanent end to that character and you have that in mind the whole game. It does a fantastic job of building your connection with these characters (such as in the slower-paced introductory chapters we detailed in this preview), so you REALLY don't want them to die.

And so every time someone swings a crowbar at your face, a truck drives at you, or you pay a visit to a potential murderer's house you feel tense in the knowledge that these could be that character's last steps. You feel genuine concern and that's what makes Heavy Rain so special.

But is it a videogame? To break it down for you, gameplay comes in three main flavours. The first is free movement; instances when you're directly controlling the movement of your character, walking by holding R2 and directing them with the left analogue stick. In these instances you're often locked into a very small area; a house, police station or courtyard for example, with a very set objective (fetch this object or speak to this person).

The best of these sections are Jayden's investigative missions, where you use a pair of sci-fi VR glasses to sniff out evidence at a crime scene, following trails and analysing evidence to help track down the Origami Killer. Good stuff.

But around 70 percent of the game, we'd say, is made up of two types of QTE-like mechanics and choice-based dialogue scenes. Fast-paced QTE action scenes flash up button icons for you to hit quickly, often with multiple buttons appearing at the same time offering a choice of actions. Missing a button doesn't mean instant failure, which is cool, but failure is possible and, as you know, there's no Game Over (even in death) - the game continues with the consequences of the scene.

Then there are the slower QTE scenes where a range of on-screen gestures appear with no real time restriction, asking you to push the right analogue and move the Sixaxis controller in different ways that cleverly mimic the on-screen action, or press/hold buttons to help your character perform a given task. This can be anything from taking a shower to climbing over a wall or making a coffee.

But to call these slower scenes 'interactive' is debatable. For example, to end one scene you have to get into your car and drive away. There are separate gestures to complete for opening the door, putting on your seatbelt, starting the car, putting it into gear and applying the accelerator.

Yes, you're pushing the buttons to make all this happen but you don't have a choice. You HAVE to do it and there's no failure, no timing and no skill involved. It's just a cutscene that keeps pausing for you to hit another button. It's like having to keep pressing the play button on a faulty DVD movie. That's not interactive in our eyes. You find yourself asking why the game couldn't have just played out the 'getting into car and driving away' cutscene automatically.

Many of the free movement sections are like this too. In one scene you're told to retrieve a mobile phone from a drawer in the living room - the perfect opportunity for some videogame-style interactivity: the chance to search some drawers, check out some random stuff and maybe even stumble upon something of significance of your own accord. A chance to achieve something yourself.

But, disappointingly, you can only look in one drawer, which is clearly marked with a huge gesture icon to open it, taking away all sense of achievement. This is just another example of the game's minimal interaction.

Choice-based dialogue scenes can also have different outcomes, but as a gamer you rarely feel like you've achieved something at the end of them. It's not like Shenmue where you're given the freedom to conduct your own investigations by speaking to any number of people, the completion of such tasks being immensely gratifying. In Heavy Rain you're forced into a scene with one character to interact with and a couple of possible outcomes. That's it.

And thus the reason why Heavy Rain feels more like a film than a game. A film that lets you get involved, press a few buttons here and there and make a few choices on behalf of the characters, but not a videogame that, like almost every other, rewards skill or good judgement with gratifying accomplishment.

The concept of death being final and a plot that branches in different directions as you take action is what makes Heavy Rain special, although without having the time to play through the game multiple times we can't tell you exactly how branching the story actually is.

You have to appreciate Heavy Rain for what it is; a fantastic and absorbing narrative, and a bold new venture in interactive storytelling. Not Shenmue.

Mike Jackson