Heavy Rain

[Wesley Thomas]

Playing it now. Aside from the voice acting, I digs.

[Thrik]

I've just finished it and really enjoyed the whole experience, even if the two Ethan plot holes and the Madison plot hole continue to dumbfound me. Those aside the writing was way above Fahrenheit and was thoroughly competant, and I very much enjoyed the way it built up to the reveal.

The voice acting for the childen was truly poor, though. Did they just get real kids who can't act or what? Everyone else seemed fine though IMO.

[toblix]

Did they get kids at all? I seem to remember all the children sounded like 30-year old voice actresses.

[Sully907]

I thought the problem was that the children sounded too much like children, like they weren't good enough actors because of their age or something. The children and the newscaster were really the only voice acting that was truly bad. The rest of the stuff, like Jayden's voice, just sounds kind of like an accent. I can get over that.

[Wesley Thomas]

Finished it today. Thought it was great, for the most part. I still can't dig on the voice acting.

[Erkki]

Just finished playing it. Man what a crappy story that drags on and on. There is no interesting gameplay really and yet the same story could be told in film in 1-2 hours.

Still, something gripped me enough that I kept playing (it could also be that I'm sitting home with pneumonia and not much else to do)

[Scrobbs]

Sorry for thread resurrection. Well, not that sorry. Anyway. I've not read any of this thread in case of spoilers. I deliberately didn't when it was going on jsut in case.

Bought this the other weekend, as I'd always been meaning to, and kept forgetting/never got round to it.

What a game.

Can I say that again?

What a game!

Really, really enjoying it. It's not too long (~70% the way through), but wow. If games can more along this line instead of another fucking FPS (although I am looking forward to Brink, but that's a special case), then there's hope for the industry yet.

Trbles thumbs up from me!

[Zeusthecat]

I beat Heavy Rain last week and quite enjoyed it. This game had some issues with both the story and the controls and through a good portion of the game, I thought I had it all figured out. But they were just smart enough with the story and the different characters that I still ended up being surprised by some of the twists. By the time the credits rolled, I was quite satisfied with the game I had played and was even tempted to start over and make some different choices. I did at least replay the last chapter to get a different ending which was just as satisfying as the ending I originally got.

 

Up until the big reveal, I was almost certain that the Origami killer was Ethan's psychiatrist. He seemed to be the only person that would have had enough intimate knowledge of Ethan's life and would have been capable of taking advantage of (or causing) Ethan's blackouts while the children were being abducted. Scott Shelby's character was easily the best character in the game and I think that voice actor did a phenomenal job, but I was just slightly let down when I found out he was the killer. It was a little deflating that Ethan's blackouts (a major element that occurred during more than one abduction) were just completely coincidental and were never explicitly mentioned as part of Scott's plan to divert attention from himself.

 

But it was still good. The story was interesting and for once, it was a piece of media that pretty much showed all of the cops as corrupt assholes. Almost everything I see on TV shows cops as these infallible heroes so it was refreshing to see this game show a world where these cops are acting shady and cutting corners just to nail someone for the crime. I'm not sure what any of the futuristic drug/augmented reality crap was with Norman but it made things a little more interesting and weird. It would have been nice if they could have explained what the fuck any of that was about but it was cool that the game basically ended with his mind being broken and showing that he will hallucinate little digital tanks for the rest of his life.

 

The accents sucked in this game though. That was the one thing that kept pulling me out. With the exception of Scott Shelby, everyone had this thinly veiled accent that made it super weird at times. The way they kept pronouncing 'Origami' drove me insane.

 

I think one thing that is key to this genre of 'interactive drama' is graphical fidelity. There were a number of places that the game fell a bit flat because animations were sometimes a bit stiff and the graphics just weren't as good as I would have hoped (although probably pretty astounding for when this game came out). I'd love to see more of this stuff but on modern hardware and with better voice acting. The whole concept is just super compelling and having such a well balanced story that is capable of branching in many different ways is something I would love to see more of.

[Ninety-Three]

It was a little deflating that Ethan's blackouts (a major element that occurred during more than one abduction) were just completely coincidental and were never explicitly mentioned as part of Scott's plan to divert attention from himself.

...

I'm not sure what any of the futuristic drug/augmented reality crap was with Norman but it made things a little more interesting and weird. It would have been nice if they could have explained what the fuck any of that was about but it was cool that the game basically ended with his mind being broken and showing that he will hallucinate little digital tanks for the rest of his life.

 

Spoilery explanations of things:

The blackouts are remnants of a scrapped plot thread: originally Ethan and the killer had some kind of psychic link that made Ethan black out whenever the killer struck. The supernatural elements were scrapped fairly late in development, I imagine they simply didn't have time to remove the blackout stuff.

 

As for Norman, it's theorized that his weird future drug is actually just used to control the side-effects of his weird future AR crap (it's never said what it's for, and note that he suffers side effects after using VR, and they go away when he takes tripto). Outside the realm of speculation, your ending depends on how much you used the ARI. Norman gets endings that range from insanity and suicide to quitting the ARI and basically being fine.

[Zeusthecat]

Well that explains why the blackouts felt so out of place. Take those out of the equation and this was a pretty damn fine murder mystery game. The augmented reality stuff was still a little weird but it at least added some interesting flair to the game.

 

I guess maybe if I were to level one additional complaint with the story, it would be that they manufactured way too many fights throughout the game. Almost every scene with Scott or Norman ended up devolving into some life or death fight. For a game that had QTE's for taking care of a baby, it's strange that they still felt the need to pack the game full of these violent encounters. It was completely unnecessary and bummed me out a bit. It's the same thing that bothers me so much about American police procedurals where they depict every scenario as life and death and CSIs go to investigate crime scenes with guns drawn and then get kidnapped by the killer and held for ransom and barf.