Heavy Rain - Review
(for the Ps3)



Heavy Rain rocked my world back and forth and I knew exactly what kind of rating I was going to give it. What I wasn't entirely sure of was why I was so rocked in so many directions. In order to give the rocked-ness a bit more clarity, I'll start off with a short clip of writing that I jotted down while I was playing the game in one of my most heavy moments.

I just finished a segment of the game where I was faced with a challenge, seemingly impossible, and there was a door leading out that said "coward". I would obviously lose if I took the exit. After making it all the way here, there was no way I could duck out. But, sure enough, I failed the challenge, and my character got so beaten and devastated that he could barely stand, let alone keep trying. He himself went and took the coward door, and failed the test.

This game is divided by chapter, but you can't do your playthrough again. There's no reloading the last level and giving it another shot. If you fail, or fall, or get hurt too much, you don't just get to go back and try again. You continue through the story with the weight of that failure on your shoulders.

I have never been so devastated by a game as I was that first time I full-on saw defeat in Heavy Rain. I didn't even know what the actual consequences of not completing that challenge would be, but before even seeing any of them, I felt terrible. Terrible that I couldn't ever go back and fix my mistakes, that they were there for good, one way or another, and I'd just have to hope the situation wasn't beyond repair and that I'd be able to salvage my poor character's story.

The fact that the game manages to evoke feelings like this means, to me, that it's definitely doing its job right. That concept of "the weight of your mistakes" carries very strongly through the whole game. As it turns out, you can not only lose challenges or plot threads, but you can even get major characters killed at many points if you slip up at the wrong time. And if you do that, the entire story shifts because of it.