As I’ve mentioned a few times my PS3 is a relatively recent acquisition, and so I missed on some otherwise must-have exclusives during their launch windows. In honor of the release of Beyond: Two Souls this week, I decided to skip it for now and instead fire up its spiritual predecessor, Heavy Rain.
I thought I might not have much to say about Heavy Rain, but it had me at “Press Start,” and not actually in a good way. I should point out that Mat C loved the game, and since I’ve personally just begun with it I can’t claim anything he says is wrong. I usually like games that are designed to be played more than once, and it isn’t to say I’ll hate the game or its narrative by the end. But boy, did the game design make me want to snark. Entirely on accident, I started live-tweeting my impressions as I had them. Now it’s got momentum and I don’t have much reason to stop. So, if you’re interested, follow the hashtag #ajplaysheavyrain on Twitter for the next couple of days. If you’re definitely not interested, or don’t want to be spoiled for this game, best avoid that hashtag then!
What is it that jumped out at me so much? I’m going to talk in a bit more detail about two design flaws in the game that made a bad first impression. These aren’t cosmetic things like voice acting or screen tearing. These are design choices that are clearly deliberate, but would have been just as easy, or even easier, to do differently and better.
Bad Choice One: The Game Has Multiple Difficulty Levels
In a skill-based game, something like Bayonetta or Jamestown, it’s a good idea to have a variety of skill levels. This allows beginners access to the game and a method to learn, while giving experts something to strive for. Mastering fair mechanics at a high level of difficulty is a rush. On the other hand, in a game that’s mostly narrative-driven, difficultly levels are a distraction. Deadly Premonition: the Director’s Cut did away with the multiple difficulty levels from the original title and dropped the game’s actual difficulty to close to its basement. This is the correct choice, allowing the game’s story to shine through without its clunky combat mechanics getting in the way. There are some story-based games that have done multiple difficulty levels well, but this involves increased granularity of what I might and might not find difficult and clear communication of what those difficulty levels will mean for my experience.
One of the first things Heavy Rain asks is related to game difficulty. It is not clear why. I stared at this screen for something like twenty minutes. Am I “familiar with the wireless controller”? Or am I “quite familiar with the wireless controller”? Is there some kind of ego tied up in this decision?
For the record, I lied, and told the game I was not familiar with the wireless controller. In other words, “Just give me Easy Mode, Heavy Rain.” It seems that if from telling it that, I have a smaller variety of buttons to memorize during Quick Time Events. I’m not really seeing where that is a huge detriment to my experience. Imagine the hypothetical: “Oh, Heavy Rain was good, but if only it asked me to hit the triangle button a little more often, it would have been great.”
It’s possible the game always wants me to be at the ragged edge of failing QTEs so that it can show off how it continues anyway, even if I fail. But I’m savvy enough to choose to fail if I think that will lead to an interesting outcome. An actual beginner will fail naturally no doubt.
What would have been better? A gently adapting difficulty curve that occasionally throws new button presses at me if it sees I’m doing well, and takes them away if I keep failing and doing poorly. The game has to track what QTEs I passed anyway, and already has these button press combinations pre-programmed, so I don’t see this as a terribly hard change to make. But if that’s impossible: just set it to the easiest setting and get on with the show.
Bad Choice Two: The Game Requires Both Hands On Controller
Heavy Rain breaks from 3D navigation tradition by putting camera controls on the left thumbstick rather than the right thumbstick. This doubles as the player-control, since the left thumbstick controlling my “look direction” is also how I change my “heading,” and I have to hold down the R2 button to actually move. It’s sort of like giving the typical tank or car controls to a human body. It would have been equally easy for the developers to put the “locomote” (the gas pedal) instruction on the left trigger, or leave the camera controls on the right. But Heavy Rain makes the very deliberate choice of requiring both hands to navigate the environment. When I want to access my character’s thoughts, I hold down the left trigger, and then push a button with my right thumb to actually read the thought. Again, this is a “crossover” gesture that requires both hands.
To explain why this is stupid, let’s look at a really good game, EarthBound, recently re-released on WiiU. A cool thing about EarthBound, at least in its original format, is that you can play most of the game with your left hand. A few quick controller shortcuts using the “Select” and “Left Trigger” buttons make this a very ergonomic choice. While you’ll probably want both hands for an intense battle, it’s nice to just play the game with one hand while you’re wandering around towns having chats. It has baffled me for years why no other RPG stole this control scheme, until the Wii came out and just gave us a one-handed controller altogether.
Before you make the joke about how I must want to play Heavy Rain one-handed for prurient reasons, let me assure you that I’m way more into bad boys than depressy single-dad types. The fact is, I wanted to play Heavy Rain one-handed because I was eating a microwave pizza. I didn’t want to play it one-handed during some kind of intense fight scene. I just wanted to play it one-handed while I was banging around the shiny starter house talking to my children and doing mundane tasks. I think this is reasonable.
My guess is that Heavy Rain always requires two hands because David Cage wants us to have a “lean-in” experience that requires our concentration. This is a fake, phony way of generating interest. A movie doesn’t require that I have both hands on a controller, and is happy to let me munch on popcorn while I watch it. A movie has other ways of keeping me engaged, and if Heavy Rain wants to be a movie so badly anyway, maybe it could use some of those ways. If it’s okay with being a game, rest assured that I have been engaged by EarthBound for literally decades.
Oh, and these events where I have to vigorously shake the controller can go right to Hell.
I did not pick up Heavy Rain expecting to dislike it, and my default mode of examination isn’t necessarily a negative one. But I will say Heavy Rain is going to be a hard sell for me compared to some other critics. First of all I’m coming to it late, and when a game idea is less new it’s easier to notice the flaws in execution. Last year The Walking Dead did this sort of thing in a way I enjoyed and is still fresh in my head, and that is creating a frankly unfair bar for Heavy Rain to hit. I already know all the plot twists in Heavy Rain from years of reading about it, so they won’t have shock impact. And most importantly I personally have no interest what-so-ever in merely being a dad.
Like I said above, if you’d like to see more live impressions please read my Twitter feed. On the other hand, if you want to mock all the dad content in modern videogames with me, use hashtag #dadfeels on Twitter which I think is starting to catch on. Although some people are using it to post sincere videos or pictures of their children, I find this just adds to the heady dadfeels mix.
Email the author of this post at aj@tap-repeatedly.com.
Pretty certain I picked easy mode because I’m, you know, not a masochist. Seemed like a no-brainer choice to me too.
I still found not-easy mode to be pretty easy, but it does utilize most of the buttons on the controller at various times during those action sequences, so it keeps you on your toes a bit. I suppose the choice of difficulty, if you’re not the sort that has to look down at the controller to find where X is, ends up being about whether you want to be completely in control of how the story progresses. I personally prefer to have a mix of choices and “challenges” to overcome, with my ability to achieve the latter having an effect on the game’s progress. When that kind of stuff comes up I don’t usually want to fail intentionally for any reason, at least not the first time through.
Oh, and ironically, I think that the “shake the controller” activities are amongst the interactions that work best with one hand. The Sixaxis will totally give it to you if you just let go with one hand and waggle your wrist. Much easier than trying to mimic the motion they imply.
Definitely looking forward to your impressions. I, too, bought a PS3 late in the game – just about two years ago. In those two years, I have played a grand total of TWO games on it: “Heavy Rain” and “The Last of Us.” That’s it. (I do use it as a Blu-Ray DVD player!)
I enjoyed “Heavy Rain” even though I knew pretty much everything going in. I don’t really remember the “difficulty level” choice at the beginning, though I am sure I chose the middle-of-the-road decision. Also, I can’t think of any console game that I’ve ever been able to play “one-handed.”
Good one, AJ. I look forward to your Twitter adventures.
I was conflicted about Heavy Rain – I loved it.
That was the conflict.
There’s no reason why I should have loved it. I hate QTEs, I hate stupid production decisions like having French actors playing Americans, I hate moronic story breakdowns. By all accounts Heavy Rain should be my arch-foe. But it wasn’t! This confuses me.
The hand contortions necessary to play the game were unwelcome to say the least. Whether or not I wanted to eat pizza while playing, some of the QTE challenges demanded digital twister beyond my capabilities, which led to more than a few moments of frustration.
I still haven’t picked up Beyond yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I may never know why (or how) Heavy Rain worked for me, but it did. What can I say? If I were a dad, I’d probably be that guy.
Maybe slightly less of a loser. Slightly.
I just got to a point where I got desperate and hit a button with my tongue and I think it was my favorite part so far. So I disagree on contortions. I just want to not have to contort when nothing interesting is going on!
“I personally prefer to have a mix of choices and “challenges” to overcome…”
I’m with you there, Dix, normally. With Heavy Rain I just wanted the story. Even so, some of the button gymnastics required were ridiculous.
It’s a shame you played the game knowing everything about it beforehand because I think half of the enjoyment is the revealing of everything. I know Steerpike didn’t like the twist but I was happy to be surprised by it! Reading your tweets, I’m not sure I picked up on any foreshadowing that I recall. The little boy wheezing in the flashback seemed suspiciously relevant but it wasn’t enough to make me connect the dots.
Hailey and I had a great time with Heavy Rain, sharing our single routes through the game once we’d finished it and apparently having very different endings. She went with easy mode because she’s not too familiar with the PS pads, while I chose the ‘not-easy’ mode. I agree with Dix in that the more complex QTEs and perhaps shorter periods of time to react kept you on your toes and made certain sequences very intense (such as the Mad Jack scene with Jayden). So while pressing more buttons quicker may seem silly as an increased difficulty setting, it pretty much made the experience for me because had it been easier then I might not have fucked up as much. Poor Jayden. That was a hair raising death, and all because I wasn’t quick enough pressing up, or X, or something.
There was one point where I had to jolt the controller down but because the pad was resting on my lap I failed the QTE and some bad shit happened, so I restarted that scene and suspended the pad in mid-air from that point onwards. It seemed a little unfair to me! I think the game very much wants you on edge most of the time though, and the music really keeps that feeling going, but I can understand you not wanting to have to be gripping the pad with both hands during the slower sections all the time!
For the record, I still haven’t played The Walking Dead yet!
If you are following my Tweets, I just finished it (or at least got one particular ending) so here are some more thoughts:
I fuckin’ love Norman Jayden and he is the best.
I hated Madison, not so much because of any particular Madison-like quality about her, but because she made the game super male-gazey. I don’t mind playing as sexy women (see… many of my other reviews) but it just seemed like the world of the game itself was putting Madison in pervy peril whenever possible and I always felt awful whenever I was going to have to play as her. I didn’t see her shower sequence, feel somewhat grateful for this.
The foreshadowing for the twist is really, really weak. A sign of a good twist is if you watch it all in retrospect, it should make sense and you should be like “ohhhh yeah of COURSE.” Heavy Rain does the opposite of this; it deliberately does stuff in Scott’s scenes that is totally intellectually dishonest and designed to throw you off, especially early on. Also Scott was far and away the most inconsistent character anyway. Is he some kind of superman, or a asthmatic? Is the asthma just to throw you off or something? This contradiction shows up in his first scene and never really goes away.
I did all the trials with Ethan, every single one, but it might not have been necessary because – in spite of my dislike of Madison sequences – I was apparently really good with her and did all of her stuff super-correctly. Maybe it was mostly that every time I was her, I was trying to not be her as fast as possible, whereas, with Norman, I was really thorough because being him was more fun.
Yeah I agree with Madison’s situations making the game very male-gazey.
I bottled on Ethan’s last trial. I sat in that chair in the corner for about 30 minutes wondering what to do and figured ‘Well, I’ve escaped death numerous times now and I’ll be damned if I’m drinking poison after all that’ and walked out. I enjoyed Norman’s bits until he got killed in Mad Jack’s crusher… man, that freaked me out. I remember watching Superman III as a kid and being scared shitless of the bit when Clark Kent gets thrown in the crusher by Evil Superman. Watching Norman go in the crusher really got to me!
[…] made a post about Heavy Rain on Tap-Repeatedly today. I’ve had it for a while but felt inspired to finally play it now […]