Heavy Rain

Help find his son

I completed Heavy Rain in just about 10 hours. The game took me on an emotional rollercoaster ride, and i have been spending some time collecting my thoughts about it. I can honestly say that even though the game has it flaws, i will describe it as one of the best experiences i have ever had with a game. This post will be spoiler free, so if you haven’t played the game, don’t worry i won’t reveal anything.

First, lets get all the praise out of the way. Heavy Rain is the first game that has made me feel. I felt with the protagonists, and i wanted to do my best to help them out. As you can read from any review, the main plot of the game is to save a child who has been kidnapped by an evil killer. Through its amazing visuals and storytelling techniques, the game manages to really want to save the poor kid. He isn’t just a bunch of pixels on the screen, he’s a real kid that you want to do your best to help. But the question then becomes, how far are you willing to go to save him?

The game involves a bunch of moral choices. Some of them are aimed at making you feel the pain of the protagonists, but most of them are aimed at making YOU, the player, think and feel. And it works. It works so very well. At one point during the game i actually had to put the controller down, and think. Should i do this? Am i a bad person if i do this? I mean, i just want to help the kid. Eventually i made the choice, picked up the controller and clicked the right couple of buttons. But that moment of thought stuck with me. Had i done the right thing?

And it is in this that Heavy Rain succeeds so very well. As you can read in other places, the game is pretty much just an interactive film. Everything is based around quicktime events, and it quickly gets old – but the story is so great, the moral implications so awesome, and the setting and mood so thick that you MUST complete the game to see the end of the story.

I can’t write anymore without writing spoilers – so i will post more on this in the following days, but i just wanted to make this one spoiler free post to let you know that if you only play one game this year, and you like storytelling – play Heavy Rain. Its absolutely awesome.