Heavy Rain Thoughts.
Sep. 15th, 2011 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynHaving given up temporarily in despair on JRPGs, I've been playing Heavy Rain. Unfortunately it's short enough that I've already finished it, leaving me nothing to do but rant.
Heavy Rain is an Interactive Fiction game produced by Quantic Dream for the PS3, which means that it's almost entirely story-based. When played it feels like someone took the concept of the old item-based adventure games, the idea of a character or group of characters exploring their environment while trying to unravel a mystery, and updated it to new hardware. They replaced the usually frustrating item-based system with a simpler and more obvious action-command system, and turned what was once a linear plotline into a branching, twisting storyline with multiple endings.
The game involves four viewpoint characters, whose lives become tangled with a serial killer known as the Origami Killer, a killer who abducts pre-adolescent boys and drowns them, only to leave their bodies decorated with an orchid and an origami figure. The characters all have their own motivations and flaws (physical and mental), and intersect with each other's storylines as they each chase after the illusive and evasive figure who ties them together. The environment is well-built, interactive, and has a very gritty noir feel in the trailer-homes, rundown offices, and empty industrial buildings in which the game takes place. The game itself is extremely intense, and its immersive, interactive style effectively draws the player into the game.
I wish I could recommend the game. In fact, I would recommend the game, if it were not for several points that I think a gamer should be aware of before playing that I have listed below (while trying to avoid spoilers). They don't make the game a bad game, they just made me break out in random swearing, bash my head into books, hold a staring contest with my PS3, and in one case break out into an eruption of vitriolic victim-blaming so intense that I don't think that the fact that it was against a fictional character can redeem it.
The Control System Sucks: I was warned before playing that this game would have the worst control system of any game I'd recently played, and I have to admit that the warning was correct.
Part of the problem is that for beginners, the action button system is hard. The mechanical difficulty of the game comes from the fact that, to get the characters to perform actions, the player has to push buttons on the controller in response to symbols that appear on the screen. Some of the actions are simple - on the PS3 to open a drawer or a file cabinet sometimes you just have to press the right joystick either up or down. Many actions are simple to the point of tedium. However, the kind of actions you can fail at (such as chasing someone across moving traffic) require you to push several buttons at time, either in sequence, or holding them down at once, or repeatedly hammering one of them.
Experienced gamers may feel confident at their grasp of the controller, but even this may be premature. In other video games you are introduced to a control schema that has specific actions that cause specific reactions. When you come to a rooftop chase scene you may think to yourself "Okay, I have to press X to get over that gap, and then L1 to slide under that bar, and then hit the control stick right to make the turn". In Heavy Rain the control system is entirely random, you know you're going to have to push something, but you don't know what. Maybe you'll have to hold L1 and R2 to jump the gap. Maybe you'll have to hammer X as fast as you can. Maybe you'll have to rotate the right stick. You don't know, which means that anyone can slip up.
The opening prologue to the game, part 2 (skipping the male nudity)! Also featuring the many different control motions you will be making over and over again for the rest of the game.
But the game is good, it's really forgiving of most of these, as long as you don't fail too many of the "don't get hit in the face with an iron bar/knife/shotgun blast" problems.
And this is almost a trivial problem compared with the movement and camera system. The camera starts behind you and basically stays at the same angle as you walk around your environment. In the old days this somewhat limited camera view was because the developers did not render the entire environment and so had to limit your view (or you were moving on a matte painting a la Final Fantasy), but you can switch views by pressing a button here to something that's closer to behind your current position. All the environments appear to be fully rendered. So why not a free camera? The limited camera angles make it extremely difficult to see what's around you, and several puzzles become difficult due to your ability to do things like turn your fucking head and find the goddamn ringing telephone.
This is compounded by the ridiculous movement system. Unlike any game I've played in a long time, Heavy Rain has a walk button. You can turn yourself with the left joystick (sometimes), but your character doesn't move anywhere until you push and hold R2. This interferes with the extremely smooth joystick-based movement system we've come to expect from third-person cameras. It's even worse because it's clunky. Your character really only wants to move at right angles. When you're trying to turn around by holding your joystick in the opposite direction you're facing, your character tends to lurch in the original direction like a zombie before turning around. This is comical in most scenes to the point of ridiculousness, but can be a source of agonized frustration if you are, for example, surrounded by barbed wire or some other form of painful environment. And forget about curving around an obstacle, the clunky camera system and movement system will prevent it, and in fact penalize you for it. The game is beautifully rendered and looks very natural, until you start walking.
(Bonus points for the old crowd problem, where you collide with another person in a crowd and you end up in the sort of forehead-to-forehead shoving match that I remember before Assassin's Creed figured out how to push people out of the way)
The Game is Disturbing: And I'm saying that as someone who is not so easily disturbed. There are a lot of games with M ratings for disturbing imagery, but most of them are out-and-out gorefests where the continual eruption of fountains of blood and acres of guts are almost hilarious instead of disturbing. Heavy Rain is not anywhere near as bloody, but when they inflict pain to a character, they want you to feel it. They want you to cringe. They want you to take it personally.
Part of this is because Heavy Rain, for all my complaining, is a damn good game. The simple, constrained focus of the four lead characters allows you to really get inside their heads, to empathize with them. You begin to feel attached to them. So when they get hurt, humiliated, or frustrated, you feel it. It hurts. And this is only enhanced by the action button system. When characters perform actions that are stressful, or possibly painful, they don't want to do it. The button combinations become more complex, the actions become slower, more complicated, and more difficult to perform. Increasingly it feels like you're forcing your characters to do these things, which draws you right into the story. They become your surrogate, and their pain becomes your pain.
--MINOR SPOILERS--
Sometimes this is incredibly effective. There was one scene I liked where one of your characters, who has an unfortunate drug habit, suddenly begins suffering from withdrawal symptoms, including some quite vivid hallucinations. If left alone, the character will move across the room towards a vial of the drug to take a hit, ending the withdrawal at the cost of bringing them closer to death. You can stop them with an action command, but every time you do it the pause only lasts for a moment, while the hallucination swirls around them, before they lurch off again. This drew me in because, on the one hand it felt like you were physically forcing the character from doing something they were trying to do, while at the same time you were unable to tell whether or not there was actually an end to this, or whether the hallucinations would simply continue until your willpower finally faded. It was the uncertainty of outcome, and the certainty of consequences, that kept me going.
But this can also be disturbing, especially when you're about to do something that you know will lead to a bad end. In the second chapter, the prologue to the game, when your ten-year old son, who seems to always wander off into a crowded shopping mall without you, wants you to buy something for him, you just know that this one moment of distraction is going to end badly. You know it, but the game can't continue until you force your character to take their eyes off of their wandering son for the one vital, crucial moment. And that's one of the more benign moments of the game.
--END MINOR SPOILERS--
And note, I'm being nice here. I'm deliberately not including description of the most disturbing and intense scene in this game, possibly in any game I've every played, and that includes the pedophilia mind rape scene in Xenosaga I.
Madison Paige: And here was where I well and truly lost my shit. Out of the game's four viewpoint characters only one, Madison Paige, is female (this isn't a secret, it's basically in the manual). I wanted to like Madison, I really did. She's the kind of female character I like in my video games, smart, capable, and determined. But, despite the fact that I really did like her character, she drove me absolutely batshit, fucking insane. I guess the good news is that it's not entirely her fault.
1) As the sole female lead character, and the main female screen presence, the developers clearly thought that Madison needed to supply the game's T&A quotient. Her introductory scene takes place while she wanders through her apartment (or runs through it) in her underwear for no real apparent reason (interestingly, this is not the first partial nudity scene in the game, the first is when you make your male intro character take a shower). But this is only an appetizer to what I thought was one of the most demeaning scenes in the game, and maybe in any game I've ever played. I won't spoil it (I can't really, it's spoiled already), but if attracting the attention of a sleazeball by showing more leg, unbuttoning your shirt halfway, and shaking your ass in his general direction isn't your idea of a fun time you might want to put something controller-proof between yourself and the TV. Even I, and I think I'm supposed to be in the target demographic for these sorts of scenes, engaged in an hour-long staring match with my PS3 in which I refused to do it, and it refused to progress the story until I did. (There is an even more demeaning scene, but it's so stupid that I refuse to discuss it because even thinking about it makes me bash my head into things until I get a concussion and forget).
2) She also has to provide most of the game's Damsel in Distress quotient. This is actually far more tolerable, because the Knight in Distress quotient is also ridiculously high. In fact, a great many characters find themselves attacked in closed rooms by thugs, trapped in cars in various states of about-to-be-destroyed, or pawns to insane serial killers and their twisted games. But still, Madison's "captured" quotient is about thirty percent too high. But even this wouldn't be so bad if it were not for the fact that:
3) Madison is too fucking stupid to live. I mean, she's smart, she's capable, and she does a much better job of moving through the convoluted plot then the police, but goddamn can she be a total idiot. And this is what pushed me over the edge of my "No Victim Blaming" stance into full-on vitriol. Maybe she doesn't deserve the blame, and maybe I shouldn't blame fictional people for an onset of stupidity, but sometimes it just seems too much. Here's some advice for all of you (men and women alike). Don't go into isolated, secluded rooms with a man if you have concrete, physical evidence that the man may be a highly dangerous and effective serial killer. The kind of man who spends his free time kidnapping pre-adolescent boys and locking them away where he can watch them drown may not be the kind of guy who respects your personal space. Look, it's not like you're doing anything wrong, but, and here I'm just saying, maybe you should give this a second thought.
And if you do manage to get in trouble by doing this, don't expect me to be able to save you. I'm just the player. Don't give me that, "Uh-oh, we're in trouble, how will we get out of this?" look, because I'll just flip out and scream at you in my empty apartment "What do you mean we? You got yourself into this mess. You better get yourself out. Don't ask me to fix this for you!" Then I'll go back in my room and swear at myself for a while.
If this were a real person this would probably be pretty far into victim-blaming territory. Even with a fictional character, blaming Madison feels sort of morally wrong. But God, for some reason I hate it when I'm expected to rescue you from your own stupidity. Why do I have to do it?
Madison's saving grace is that usually, having lied, blustered, or inquired her way into this mess by herself, she usually manages to get out of it by herself, and generally gets to help beat the shit out of whoever caused her this headache. But it's a really annoying problem to me, because I hate it when smart characters adopt the whole "Let's go wing something dangerous" plan.
Despite All This, It's a Really Good Game: After venting my spleen, and reviewing it on paper far more thoroughly then I expressed on screen, I still have to conclude that Heavy Rain is a really good game. Even with all the flaws, all the cringing moments, and if you have a sensitivity to blood, the disturbing moments, Heavy Rain retains a laundry list of good points. The story is good. It's fast paced. The action is exciting. It unwraps in layers. You like some of the characters, you hate other characters who you're supposed to hate.
Moreover, it clearly is an evolved version of the old item-based adventure game. Unlike the days of yore, when you had to pick up everything from candy wrappers to can openers until you got to the point where you could actually figure out how to use them to distract the guards or blow up the world, most of the game's action is interacting with things in your immediate environment. That means that the puzzles and challenges are a lot less surreal, and a lot more sensible. It also allows for a lot more variety. In item-based adventures, if you didn't pick up everything you needed, you were screwed. Often the game didn't even let you go on. In Heavy Rain there are very few essential items, replaced instead with sometimes optional tasks using what's at hand. You can even let some of your viewpoint characters die and still reach the ending (it changes the ending level and scenes, but you can do it). It ends up being much less cumbersome, and much more natural then the item-based single-answer approach.
Surprisingly, that flexibility does not take away from the poignancy or the focus of the main storyline. It simply opens up new lines of possible continuation as tightly bound as the originals. And that's good, because it makes you feel like you're interacting with the real world more then just sitting on your ass, trying to figure out how to ride the railroad to the next plot point.
The animation and scenery design are gorgeous. Someone clearly spent a long time thinking about the setting, and putting in a lot of attention to detail. The voice acting is actually rather good, in my opinion. Aesthetically the game is pleasing, as long as you don't wonder why your character walks like he's stuck on an invisible rail. Your characters are fully developed, and in all candor, I have to admit they're not that stupid. I may rail at Madison, but she only got herself trapped by criminals deliberately two or three times.
It does have some other problems. There are some minor storyline bugs, including a few inconsistencies in the storyline that are not resolved. The game is well enough crafted though that you overlook them, especially since while many of the inconsistencies appear to be random, some of them actually do point directly to the killer. It's possible to guess who the killer is (although I made a bad guess that put me off the right track early on), and the story is really well built up to that climax.
It's just not the kind of game that you should play if you get easily frustrated at bad controls, are easily disturbed, or have difficulty resisting your urge to throw your controller through the screen.
Heavy Rain is an Interactive Fiction game produced by Quantic Dream for the PS3, which means that it's almost entirely story-based. When played it feels like someone took the concept of the old item-based adventure games, the idea of a character or group of characters exploring their environment while trying to unravel a mystery, and updated it to new hardware. They replaced the usually frustrating item-based system with a simpler and more obvious action-command system, and turned what was once a linear plotline into a branching, twisting storyline with multiple endings.
The game involves four viewpoint characters, whose lives become tangled with a serial killer known as the Origami Killer, a killer who abducts pre-adolescent boys and drowns them, only to leave their bodies decorated with an orchid and an origami figure. The characters all have their own motivations and flaws (physical and mental), and intersect with each other's storylines as they each chase after the illusive and evasive figure who ties them together. The environment is well-built, interactive, and has a very gritty noir feel in the trailer-homes, rundown offices, and empty industrial buildings in which the game takes place. The game itself is extremely intense, and its immersive, interactive style effectively draws the player into the game.
I wish I could recommend the game. In fact, I would recommend the game, if it were not for several points that I think a gamer should be aware of before playing that I have listed below (while trying to avoid spoilers). They don't make the game a bad game, they just made me break out in random swearing, bash my head into books, hold a staring contest with my PS3, and in one case break out into an eruption of vitriolic victim-blaming so intense that I don't think that the fact that it was against a fictional character can redeem it.
The Control System Sucks: I was warned before playing that this game would have the worst control system of any game I'd recently played, and I have to admit that the warning was correct.
Part of the problem is that for beginners, the action button system is hard. The mechanical difficulty of the game comes from the fact that, to get the characters to perform actions, the player has to push buttons on the controller in response to symbols that appear on the screen. Some of the actions are simple - on the PS3 to open a drawer or a file cabinet sometimes you just have to press the right joystick either up or down. Many actions are simple to the point of tedium. However, the kind of actions you can fail at (such as chasing someone across moving traffic) require you to push several buttons at time, either in sequence, or holding them down at once, or repeatedly hammering one of them.
Experienced gamers may feel confident at their grasp of the controller, but even this may be premature. In other video games you are introduced to a control schema that has specific actions that cause specific reactions. When you come to a rooftop chase scene you may think to yourself "Okay, I have to press X to get over that gap, and then L1 to slide under that bar, and then hit the control stick right to make the turn". In Heavy Rain the control system is entirely random, you know you're going to have to push something, but you don't know what. Maybe you'll have to hold L1 and R2 to jump the gap. Maybe you'll have to hammer X as fast as you can. Maybe you'll have to rotate the right stick. You don't know, which means that anyone can slip up.
But the game is good, it's really forgiving of most of these, as long as you don't fail too many of the "don't get hit in the face with an iron bar/knife/shotgun blast" problems.
And this is almost a trivial problem compared with the movement and camera system. The camera starts behind you and basically stays at the same angle as you walk around your environment. In the old days this somewhat limited camera view was because the developers did not render the entire environment and so had to limit your view (or you were moving on a matte painting a la Final Fantasy), but you can switch views by pressing a button here to something that's closer to behind your current position. All the environments appear to be fully rendered. So why not a free camera? The limited camera angles make it extremely difficult to see what's around you, and several puzzles become difficult due to your ability to do things like turn your fucking head and find the goddamn ringing telephone.
This is compounded by the ridiculous movement system. Unlike any game I've played in a long time, Heavy Rain has a walk button. You can turn yourself with the left joystick (sometimes), but your character doesn't move anywhere until you push and hold R2. This interferes with the extremely smooth joystick-based movement system we've come to expect from third-person cameras. It's even worse because it's clunky. Your character really only wants to move at right angles. When you're trying to turn around by holding your joystick in the opposite direction you're facing, your character tends to lurch in the original direction like a zombie before turning around. This is comical in most scenes to the point of ridiculousness, but can be a source of agonized frustration if you are, for example, surrounded by barbed wire or some other form of painful environment. And forget about curving around an obstacle, the clunky camera system and movement system will prevent it, and in fact penalize you for it. The game is beautifully rendered and looks very natural, until you start walking.
(Bonus points for the old crowd problem, where you collide with another person in a crowd and you end up in the sort of forehead-to-forehead shoving match that I remember before Assassin's Creed figured out how to push people out of the way)
The Game is Disturbing: And I'm saying that as someone who is not so easily disturbed. There are a lot of games with M ratings for disturbing imagery, but most of them are out-and-out gorefests where the continual eruption of fountains of blood and acres of guts are almost hilarious instead of disturbing. Heavy Rain is not anywhere near as bloody, but when they inflict pain to a character, they want you to feel it. They want you to cringe. They want you to take it personally.
Part of this is because Heavy Rain, for all my complaining, is a damn good game. The simple, constrained focus of the four lead characters allows you to really get inside their heads, to empathize with them. You begin to feel attached to them. So when they get hurt, humiliated, or frustrated, you feel it. It hurts. And this is only enhanced by the action button system. When characters perform actions that are stressful, or possibly painful, they don't want to do it. The button combinations become more complex, the actions become slower, more complicated, and more difficult to perform. Increasingly it feels like you're forcing your characters to do these things, which draws you right into the story. They become your surrogate, and their pain becomes your pain.
--MINOR SPOILERS--
Sometimes this is incredibly effective. There was one scene I liked where one of your characters, who has an unfortunate drug habit, suddenly begins suffering from withdrawal symptoms, including some quite vivid hallucinations. If left alone, the character will move across the room towards a vial of the drug to take a hit, ending the withdrawal at the cost of bringing them closer to death. You can stop them with an action command, but every time you do it the pause only lasts for a moment, while the hallucination swirls around them, before they lurch off again. This drew me in because, on the one hand it felt like you were physically forcing the character from doing something they were trying to do, while at the same time you were unable to tell whether or not there was actually an end to this, or whether the hallucinations would simply continue until your willpower finally faded. It was the uncertainty of outcome, and the certainty of consequences, that kept me going.
But this can also be disturbing, especially when you're about to do something that you know will lead to a bad end. In the second chapter, the prologue to the game, when your ten-year old son, who seems to always wander off into a crowded shopping mall without you, wants you to buy something for him, you just know that this one moment of distraction is going to end badly. You know it, but the game can't continue until you force your character to take their eyes off of their wandering son for the one vital, crucial moment. And that's one of the more benign moments of the game.
--END MINOR SPOILERS--
And note, I'm being nice here. I'm deliberately not including description of the most disturbing and intense scene in this game, possibly in any game I've every played, and that includes the pedophilia mind rape scene in Xenosaga I.
Madison Paige: And here was where I well and truly lost my shit. Out of the game's four viewpoint characters only one, Madison Paige, is female (this isn't a secret, it's basically in the manual). I wanted to like Madison, I really did. She's the kind of female character I like in my video games, smart, capable, and determined. But, despite the fact that I really did like her character, she drove me absolutely batshit, fucking insane. I guess the good news is that it's not entirely her fault.
1) As the sole female lead character, and the main female screen presence, the developers clearly thought that Madison needed to supply the game's T&A quotient. Her introductory scene takes place while she wanders through her apartment (or runs through it) in her underwear for no real apparent reason (interestingly, this is not the first partial nudity scene in the game, the first is when you make your male intro character take a shower). But this is only an appetizer to what I thought was one of the most demeaning scenes in the game, and maybe in any game I've ever played. I won't spoil it (I can't really, it's spoiled already), but if attracting the attention of a sleazeball by showing more leg, unbuttoning your shirt halfway, and shaking your ass in his general direction isn't your idea of a fun time you might want to put something controller-proof between yourself and the TV. Even I, and I think I'm supposed to be in the target demographic for these sorts of scenes, engaged in an hour-long staring match with my PS3 in which I refused to do it, and it refused to progress the story until I did. (There is an even more demeaning scene, but it's so stupid that I refuse to discuss it because even thinking about it makes me bash my head into things until I get a concussion and forget).
2) She also has to provide most of the game's Damsel in Distress quotient. This is actually far more tolerable, because the Knight in Distress quotient is also ridiculously high. In fact, a great many characters find themselves attacked in closed rooms by thugs, trapped in cars in various states of about-to-be-destroyed, or pawns to insane serial killers and their twisted games. But still, Madison's "captured" quotient is about thirty percent too high. But even this wouldn't be so bad if it were not for the fact that:
3) Madison is too fucking stupid to live. I mean, she's smart, she's capable, and she does a much better job of moving through the convoluted plot then the police, but goddamn can she be a total idiot. And this is what pushed me over the edge of my "No Victim Blaming" stance into full-on vitriol. Maybe she doesn't deserve the blame, and maybe I shouldn't blame fictional people for an onset of stupidity, but sometimes it just seems too much. Here's some advice for all of you (men and women alike). Don't go into isolated, secluded rooms with a man if you have concrete, physical evidence that the man may be a highly dangerous and effective serial killer. The kind of man who spends his free time kidnapping pre-adolescent boys and locking them away where he can watch them drown may not be the kind of guy who respects your personal space. Look, it's not like you're doing anything wrong, but, and here I'm just saying, maybe you should give this a second thought.
And if you do manage to get in trouble by doing this, don't expect me to be able to save you. I'm just the player. Don't give me that, "Uh-oh, we're in trouble, how will we get out of this?" look, because I'll just flip out and scream at you in my empty apartment "What do you mean we? You got yourself into this mess. You better get yourself out. Don't ask me to fix this for you!" Then I'll go back in my room and swear at myself for a while.
If this were a real person this would probably be pretty far into victim-blaming territory. Even with a fictional character, blaming Madison feels sort of morally wrong. But God, for some reason I hate it when I'm expected to rescue you from your own stupidity. Why do I have to do it?
Madison's saving grace is that usually, having lied, blustered, or inquired her way into this mess by herself, she usually manages to get out of it by herself, and generally gets to help beat the shit out of whoever caused her this headache. But it's a really annoying problem to me, because I hate it when smart characters adopt the whole "Let's go wing something dangerous" plan.
Despite All This, It's a Really Good Game: After venting my spleen, and reviewing it on paper far more thoroughly then I expressed on screen, I still have to conclude that Heavy Rain is a really good game. Even with all the flaws, all the cringing moments, and if you have a sensitivity to blood, the disturbing moments, Heavy Rain retains a laundry list of good points. The story is good. It's fast paced. The action is exciting. It unwraps in layers. You like some of the characters, you hate other characters who you're supposed to hate.
Moreover, it clearly is an evolved version of the old item-based adventure game. Unlike the days of yore, when you had to pick up everything from candy wrappers to can openers until you got to the point where you could actually figure out how to use them to distract the guards or blow up the world, most of the game's action is interacting with things in your immediate environment. That means that the puzzles and challenges are a lot less surreal, and a lot more sensible. It also allows for a lot more variety. In item-based adventures, if you didn't pick up everything you needed, you were screwed. Often the game didn't even let you go on. In Heavy Rain there are very few essential items, replaced instead with sometimes optional tasks using what's at hand. You can even let some of your viewpoint characters die and still reach the ending (it changes the ending level and scenes, but you can do it). It ends up being much less cumbersome, and much more natural then the item-based single-answer approach.
Surprisingly, that flexibility does not take away from the poignancy or the focus of the main storyline. It simply opens up new lines of possible continuation as tightly bound as the originals. And that's good, because it makes you feel like you're interacting with the real world more then just sitting on your ass, trying to figure out how to ride the railroad to the next plot point.
The animation and scenery design are gorgeous. Someone clearly spent a long time thinking about the setting, and putting in a lot of attention to detail. The voice acting is actually rather good, in my opinion. Aesthetically the game is pleasing, as long as you don't wonder why your character walks like he's stuck on an invisible rail. Your characters are fully developed, and in all candor, I have to admit they're not that stupid. I may rail at Madison, but she only got herself trapped by criminals deliberately two or three times.
It does have some other problems. There are some minor storyline bugs, including a few inconsistencies in the storyline that are not resolved. The game is well enough crafted though that you overlook them, especially since while many of the inconsistencies appear to be random, some of them actually do point directly to the killer. It's possible to guess who the killer is (although I made a bad guess that put me off the right track early on), and the story is really well built up to that climax.
It's just not the kind of game that you should play if you get easily frustrated at bad controls, are easily disturbed, or have difficulty resisting your urge to throw your controller through the screen.