Cats and dogs

My niece recently told me, quite matter-of-factly, that dogs are boys and cats are girls. Heavy Rain, the new hotness in “interactive drama,” uses that kind of childish logic to create its “drama.”

I didn’t really like Heavy Rain. It’s a compelling, hard-to-put down “thrilling ride” of a video game. (Like you’ve heard.) Just don’t spend any time thinking about what’s happening.

Heavy Rain is brilliant during the action. Whenever you’re forced to survive a string of electrified wires or the chopping off of part of your hand, the intensity is palpable. Everything else, however, plays like a bad Law & Order: SVU, or (as you probably have heard) a weak cross between Seven and Saw. 

How far would you go to save someone you love?

It’s a powerful question. And it’s too bad that Heavy Rain really doesn’t have much to say about it.

Because—unless you’re a totally anti-social deviant (at least when you play videogames)—you’re probably going to answer it the right way. You’ll do whatever it takes. Because, in a videogame, it’s easy to take on whatever the bad guy can throw. Cut off a finger. No problem. (I just have to do a few extra button presses.) Drink poison? Why not? (I’m not going to die. It’s a game.) Even the “bad guy” is inexplicably one of the main characters.

All work together to make you constantly aware of the distance between you and the game. Which is, essentially, the problem with all videogames.

I get distracted by the industry conversations about how the level of story in videogames and how they are now capable of being meaningful, emotive art. I absolutely believe that games can be art, but it has only happened a few times so far.

Heavy Rain is not art. Heavy Rain is a very, very good videogame. But nothing more. It asks some very deep questions and does some really interesting things to try to connect the player to the drama. But it never quite works.

In the end, I probably won’t really remember Heavy Rain. The technology is there and, with the right structure of a story, the art could have been too. But I can’t recommend Heavy Rain to almost anyone. Even though I admire that David Cage tried so hard to create something he loved.

(P.S. I had talked to Logan, in detail, about how we should present our thoughts on the game. Turns out, even though there is also much ado about the supposedly branching structure of the game, the actual details of the game don’t matter. [That’s one of Heavy Rain’s failings. It doesn’t really matter what you do. As long as no ones dies, the last scene is the only one that is important.])