In various scenes we control: Ethan Mars, who is following the orders of the Origami Killer so that he can rescue his son Norman Jayden, an FBI supercop addicted to mind-altering pills Madison Paige, a journalist looking for a scoop on the killer and Scott Shelby, a local private investigator on the case. It also didn’t help the game’s reputation that the game’s length and multiple characters amplified its pacing issues. What that adds up to is a game that has all the pieces of a thriller but no way to put them together in the way that a thriller film would. By virtue of being a game, it also has a lot of interactive segments and scenes that have different potential end states.
Heavy Rain is a sprawling set of scenes across several playable characters that goes on for a dozen hours or so. The difference between those successful films and Heavy Rain, though, is that films are a couple hours of tight pacing that are heavily controlled by editing and direction. Delaying that capture generates the thrill. Just like the killers in those films, the Origami Killer is always one step ahead of the victims he is terrorizing and the detectives and journalists who seek him out. In Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs, the kinds of movies that Heavy Rain feels most in conversation with, the plot is always grinding its way toward smashing our protagonist detectives into the brutal killer who is behind everything.
The success is matched by an equal failure, though, because Heavy Rain is destined to follow in the footsteps of the always-escalating thriller genre. In his own words, “everybody who enjoys thrillers and owns a PlayStation 3 should be able to play the game.” In the wake of what Jesper Juul called “the casual revolution” in which mobile, Facebook games, and systems like the Wii showed that the world of people interested in games was much more vast than the “core” crowd catered to by most games, Cage clearly saw an opportunity to double-down on accessibility and adapting familiar media forms like the thriller into video games. There can be more than what people are currently getting, and beyond that, more people can enjoy playing it. “We think there is a market for experiences for people who are maybe tired with playing the same games over and over again,” he told SavyGamer, “and are eager for something different with more depth, more meaning, and more emotion.”įor Cage, one of the problems with games culture is simply that people don’t know all the things they can do with games. Spinning Heavy Rain as an evolution of his studio’s previous Fahrenheit ( Indigo Prophecy), he presented the game as an example of players simply not knowing what they want. Reading reviews from Cage at the time evokes strong feelings of revolutionary change. Here on the 10th anniversary of Heavy Rain, I want to consider those choices. It’s the ambiguity of not knowing if things matter. It’s not about getting an answer right or wrong. From Heavy Rain’s perspective in 2010, this is the heart of what meaningful choices mean in games.
The chances of knowing the color of the jacket with any certainty are slim, but this is a chance for characterization to take front and center. It’s just a place for the player to realize what a terrible father Ethan Mars is, and even more, to realize what a terrible performance they have given as that father. It’s not a critical fulcrum point of the game. It’s not a piece of information that matters. “It's just,” he told journalist Christian Nutt, “if you can't even remember the clothes of your son, it really means something about you as a father.” Director David Cage said in a post-release interview that this was about adding a kind of guilty texture to the world. When I played the game for the first time about a decade ago, I had no idea.
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