Why I Stopped Playing Heavy Rain

Last week I mentioned how I eventually finish some games and that I want to see the whole game before giving it a fair chance. For some of the titles in my library I think I spent too much time playing them to write a First Impressions piece, but I have not finished it yet. For a few of these games, I deliberately put them down, thinking I would finish them later but never got back to them. For these video games, or “interactive drama” in this specific instance, I’m going to explain why I did that. Here are the reasons why I stopped playing Heavy Rain.

Developed by Quantic Dream, Heavy Rain is so different a narrative from other video game titles that I find myself focusing on the story, but that’s not a good thing. The game opens with one of the protagonists Ethan Mars waking up in his home and preparing for his son’s birthday. In the last Quantic Dream game, Indigo Prophecy, you had an exciting supernatural mystery to explore as soon as the opening cutscene ended. In contrast, before even learning about the serial killer, the Origami Killer, in this game, you get cleaned up, do some work around the house, play with the kids, and take them to the mall. The first scene with actual tension happens when Ethan loses track of his son Jason in the mall after Jason walks off. Pushing through a crowd to find Ethan’s child is exciting, but after the scene ends you might wonder why Ethan was too busy paying for a balloon to watch his son, why his son would wander out of the mall and across the street, why Jason would run back across the street when Ethan arrived outside and spotted him, and, most importantly, why a car that did not look like it was moving too fast killed Jason and put Ethan into a coma for a while. You have no choice to make in this tragedy, for it is the prologue, and nothing you did earlier matters for the rest of the game. The first actual dilemma is taking care of Ethan’s other son Shaun for a night after Ethan and his wife have separated. The way Ethan treats his surviving son only matters for earning a trophy on the PlayStation Network; at least the game preserves the mood by waiting until a loading screen to tell you which trophies you earned.

The main reason why I stopped playing the game was narrative dissonance, but the awkward control scheme drove the point home. Instead of using the control stick to move a character, the control stick changes the direction the character looks; you need to hold R2 to actually walk or run anywhere. For most of the time, controlling Ethan and three other characters was not too bad. I enjoyed investigating to find the Origami Killer as FBI agent Norman Jayden and private investigator Scott Shelby. I even tolerated the quick time sequences of not investigating the serial killer as reporter Madison Paige. The specific breaking point was in the Butterfly scene with Ethan. To clarify, during the game Ethan’s surviving son is kidnapped, so Ethan finds that someone is giving him trials to give him clues to find Shaun before he drowns. In the second trial, Ethan breaks into an old building to find himself trapped in a small branching corridor with a floor covered in broken glass. To get through the sequence, Ethan needs to crawl through the area and periodically light a match to find the exit. However, because I could not simply crawl using the control stick, I found that Ethan would not turn down the path that I wanted or that I would lose track of where I was in the maze. Eventually I let Ethan collapse expecting that, as the game advertised, the story would continue even if one of the characters dies. After the screen blacked out, the next thing I saw was Ethan stumbling outside the building. How he did that I had no idea, but from what I understand two of the four characters cannot die during the game. I ended up spoiling the rest of the game by watching a playthrough online, and I just never returned to the game.

Heavy Rain is a narrative-focused experience in which the story is distinct but too incoherent for me to be engaged in. Scenes independent of each other could be exciting or emotional, but flaws in the writing and the control scheme disengaged me from finding out what happens to the characters and identifying the Origami Killer on my own. I pledge to eventually finish the game so that I can explain from my own perspective what I thought of the controls, writing, and other aspects of the video game. The artistic vision of Heavy Rain may be unique, but it’s not appealing enough to sit down and wait for a mandatory large game update to try to install before the installation fails and forces me to start the update over. I figured out I needed to turn off the PS3 media server function before the update could work, so I guess that’s progress.