Heavy Rain is a pretty good apology for Indigo Prophecy

GAMEPLAY NITPICKS

In the scene in the park, Ethan can play with Shaun in several ways at the playground - on the see-saw, the swings and the merry-go-round. After playing with everything in view, the game gave us the prompt to LEAVE, but we still wanted to take Shaun on the carousel. When we took Ethan over to the carousel, there was no prompt to interact with it. Why would there be a carousel if we couldn't do anything with it? We walked all around it, we went to the man at the booth, but still the game would not let us take Shaun on the carousel. So finally we gave up and pressed X to leave.

Sure enough, what does Shaun say when we're about to leave? "I wanna go on the carousel!"

Listen, David Cage. I get that you have a story to tell, but you can give me some damn leeway. I shouldn't have to wait for the game to tell me to do something if I already had the idea myself. This is especially confusing when there are several other points in the game where leaving an area means never returning to it again.


When Jayden is waiting in the police department to speak with the police chief, the game lets you control Jayden while he is waiting - you basically get to decide how he's going to pass the time. You can cross and uncross your legs, recline, and even play virtual wall ball with yourself - and if you do, a slack-jawed cop looks at you in befuddlement, one of the few attempts at humor in the game.

However, moments later, when Ethan is confronted by his wife about Shaun's disappearance, she spends the next minute blaming him and whining, and, as Ethan, you don't get to do ANYTHING - you can't calm her down or explain yourself or even say a word. This was incredibly frustrating to me. How is that you're allowed to cross and uncross your legs, but you can't converse with your wife over the crux of the game's conflict?! There are a lot of moments like this were Cage seemingly forgets to allow the player liberty at a point which would greatly benefit from exploration.


PRODUCTION NITPICKS

In Heavy Rain, we are treated to a flashback of a particular character as child. While the adult version of this character had no peculiar mode of speech, this child has an accent as thick as a croquembouche.

Promotional material for Heavy Rain boasted that it had a "Film Quality Narrative" and "Hollywood Production Values". Quantic Dream, seemingly ashamed of their own business, desires to brand itself, not as a video game, but a Very Serious Movie, or something like one.

If David Cage wants to make a movie, there is some advice I would like to give him:

Many Hollywood movies begin production with an attached creative staff, like a big actor who will play the lead. This actor and others will go where the movie goes and be available on location for all the days of shooting which they are needed. However, some movies require a great many amount of actors to portray various supporting characters, and producers are often busy with many other facets of the film to focus on this process. That is why, when filming in a particular location, they hire casting agents in the area.

The job of the casting agent is to cast actors who can:

• act well
• believably portray a character from the place in which the film is set

Even if a movie were NOT to shoot on location, the producers might contact a casting agency from the place in which the movie is set so that they might be able to cast actors from that area.

It is my belief that no one at Quantic Dream actually knew that casting agents where a type of people that existed. Had they known, they could have called an agency from Philadelphia to help them fill out their cast, so that Heavy Rain might actually seem like it takes place there as opposed to some alternate-dimension Brussels like I had at first assumed.

I will listen to defense of all of Heavy Rains' hiccups in presentation and interaction, but there is no excuse for the poor casting. I'm sure that many of these actors would prove to be quite talented in their native language, but they all could have been replaced by equally talented actors whose native language is English. There are a countless number of good American actors desperate for work, and for a project with such a sizable budget - a project built around a gripping drama driven by actions performed by believable characters - such a gross lack of effort in seeking these actors out is inexcusable.


As has been mentioned by many others, the actor who portrays Private Investigator Scott Shelby is by-and-far the best actor in the game. However, it is when those actors who are less stellar than he are speaking that the awkwardness of the writing is readily apparent. A great actor can find meaning in the dumbest lines, but a bad script cannot hide the silliness of its dialog forever. This is especially true in lines delivered by women or children.

Madison: "You go, girl!"

Jason: "Please dad, can I have one? I'd really love to have one!"

It's funny that children are such an integral part of Heavy Rain's story considering Cage has no idea how to distinct between the behavior of an actual child and a directionless, warbling idiot.


There are a few crowd scenes in Heavy Rain, times where you have to make your way through a large group of people. You may not notice, but very few - I would say approximately none - of these people are black.

At first I was relieved. The last black character David Cage had written into a game was Tyler from Indigo Prophecy, who was pretty much a basketball-playing, Motown-listening stereotype (however, much like Cole Train from Gears of War, his stereotypcial traits made him the one character in the game with the most personality). I thought that maybe Cage had come to terms with the fact that he obviously has never met a black person in his life and decided to give up on pretending he could write a black character.

But then Mad Jack was introduced, a huge, bald, tattooed, dim, big-lipped, sadistic ex-con who works in a junkyard. At first I was taken aback. But then I thought, "Okay, okay. So he's a violent brute, and he HAPPENS to be black. Maybe these things happen?"

Then, a couple of scenes later, while some characters are pondering the identity of person whom they only know as a name on a gravestone, out comes the groundskeeper of the graveyard - an elderly black gentleman, leaning on a shovel, who just happens to know the deceased because he's worked in this graveyard all his life. He then proceeds to tell the story of the deceased, which unfolds in a playable flashback. God bless you, Menial Labor Exposition Negro!

Also, Paco Mendes, the only Hispanic character I can recall, is a sleazy, womanizing, drug-dealing nightclub owner.

The funny thing about these these characters is that their voice actors are all quite competent, despite the fact that many of the supporting roles in the game are portrayed by actors who are much weaker or entirely miscast. This suggests several possibilities:

• Cage emphasized the importance of casting good actors to effectively portray his racist stereotypes over most of the other supporting roles in the game.
• Cage sees no difference between white people from Europe and white people from the United States and felt free to have them cast interchangeably.

Either way, it's difficult to assume that Cage is not racist.


Heavy Rain is not a bad game. But, pretty and engaging as it is, it's not the bastion of progressive video game storytelling. In fact, just last year, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories featured a variable narrative presented with a fraction of the budget and processing power available to Quantic Dream. I suppose the main difference between Shattered Memories and the "Hollywood-quality" Heavy Rain is that one has good actors and good writing.