We finished playing Heavy Rain last night. When I say ‘we’, I mean my girlfriend and I, and we played it in a way I hadn’t played any game in years: together, sitting on the sofa, swapping the controller between scenes while the spectator offered advice and/or irksome criticism to the player regarding the onscreen action. Playing this way was a lot of fun, and for the first time (ever?) I found myself being the tough guy in our relationship. Often she would squeal and press the controller into my hands as the game forced us into another tense (but slightly ridiculous) fight scene; at one point she got so startled she screamed and threw the wireless controller across the room, forcing me to dive after it in order to save a character from their untimely demise.
Heavy Rain is in the odd position of being scoffed at by hardcore gamers and largely overlooked by casual players. It’s become something of a joke for its use of QuickTime Events (frequently referred to as QTEs, even though QuickTime isn’t always used) where the player is challenged to hit, hold or manipulate the controls in time with icons which flash up on the screen. Traditionally, if you fail to complete one of these events, the game simply ends and you have to repeat the sequence until you get it right, but in Heavy Rain (as in its predecessor, Fahrenheit) the game rolls on regardless. Except that characters may still suffer, and even die in the process. Oh, and there’s no manual save function. Your decisions are pretty much final.
What this means is that it’s basically impossible not to finish the game. Most of the critical challenges aren’t very difficult, and apart from the occasional moral conundrum you’re never really unsure of what to do next. You can blunder your way through most of the QTEs, and even if one or more of the central characters dies, the game will continue. You might not get a very happy ending, but you will have ‘finished’ the game. This, along with a self-consciously cinematic aesthetic, is what makes Heavy Rain more similar to an interactive movie than a traditional gaming experience.
That’s not to say it isn’t fun. Perhaps its most fascinating aspect is that even as you have to scour crime scenes for clues or save store clerks from armed robbers, you also spend a lot of time doing menial stuff; one sequence requires you to work out what to do with your son after he comes home from school. Do you let him watch TV all night and leave him asleep on the couch, or do you give him his dinner, make him do his homework and send him to bed early? The clock is ticking. Do nothing and time rolls on without you. Partly these sequences serve to slow the game down to a more reflective pace that breaks up the action sequences and demonstrates the remarkable level of technical detail invested into this world and its people. But really these moments are about getting to know the person you’re playing in a way that’s still quite unusual for most games.
The question of motivation never usually comes up. As Charlie Brooker pointed out in one of his recent columns, most videogame characters are dicks. Normally it’s what the player desires in the moment, not the feelings of their character, that matters. And what the player desires in the moment is – given that their main method of interacting with the world is usually the barrel of a gun – normally something stupid and awful. There’s little that could really be said to ‘matter’ in most games beyond the life or death of the protagonist; when you die, the game is over, so anything that might keep you alive is therefore the good and right thing to do. Heavy Rain does rather better than most games at presenting you with the illusion of meaningful choice, but in doing so it does seem to sacrifice a lot of what makes most games gamelike.
Perhaps what I liked most about Heavy Rain was playing it with my girlfriend. For a short while, it became a real thing for us. At a time when the most popular video games have foregone hot seat or split-screen multiplayer in favour of creating an environment where strangers from across the globe have an equal opportunity to be abused by raging pre-teens, it was a pleasant change to share a game with somebody else who was equally invested in the experience.
