Heavy Rain: Hands-on with the Opening Chapters

by Chris Roper - IGN.com | 14 December 2009 12:00
 
We've played through the first few hours. Has Quantic Dream pulled it off?
 
There's perhaps no more curious a game headed to the PlayStation 3 than Heavy Rain. Its story-heavy gameplay is based on contextual actions rather than a never-changing control scheme, your choices directly reflect how the game is played out, and it's even possible to have main, playable characters die off and still have the story come to some sort of conclusion. In short, it's an experiment in interactive storytelling and we can't wait to play through it.
 
While we'll have to wait a couple more months to play from beginning to end, Sony recently sent us a preview build featuring the first 11 chapters of the game (out of 60+ from what we understand). All four main playable characters make an appearance here and there's a fairly wide variety of gameplay to be seen in the build.
 
Do note that this preview will contain a number of slight spoilers from the opening segments, so if you wish to remain completely fresh when the game hits, you're probably best moving on.
 

Click the image to see the game in action.

For better or worse, Heavy Rain opens up slowly with a drawn-out sequence where Ethan Mars (an architect) wakes up, takes a shower, maybe has some orange juice and generally just tinkers around in his home for a bit. His wife and two sons are out shopping for his youngest son's birthday, giving you some time to wander around, figure out the mechanics and generally come to grips with how the game plays. After the rest of the family comes home, there's a bit of family interaction that takes place before they all wind up at the mall some time later.
 
This opening chapter does two things really well; it gives you a chance to figure out how to interact with stuff on your own time, and it sets up the family dynamic nicely with some good character development. It's written like a movie opening, which I think is why the pacing is a little slow. In a film, you'd never show much of a guy walking down the stairs, exploring the kitchen and that sort of thing. It would be trimmed to be tight and concise. Here, you have to go through all of that walking and looking around which slows the pacing down quite a bit.
 
Still, it sets up the next event, and what happens to Ethan because of it, very well. When the family heads to the mall, his son Jason runs off and Ethan loses him. After a rather claustrophobic run through the mall's crowd (which is packed like a concert rather than a sedate shopping center), Ethan and Jason are both hit by a car, with the accident killing Jason and sending Ethan into a coma for six months.

The characters in Heavy Rain are flawed, in a good way.

From here, things start picking up. Cutting to two years later, Ethan is a mess, has a disconnected relationship with his other son, Sean, and, most importantly, blacks out randomly, waking up with an origami creation in his hand.
 
After Ethan's opening chapters (all of what I'm explaining is intermingled, cutting between characters for most sections), you wind up playing a couple segments as private detective Scott Shelby. In the first, he goes to question a prostitute about her son's murder, and in the second chapter, he visits a shop owner for the same reason (though a different kid). It seems that the Origami Killer has been hunting down young boys, abducting them in broad daylight, killing them and then "allowing" the police to find the body five days later. Gruesome stuff indeed, but this is a story (and game) for an older audience, filled with enough cussing, violence and nudity to please a sailor. In both of Detective Shelby's sequences, the person he goes to interview is attacked. With the prostitute, someone goes to her door and starts roughing her up right after you leave. You can break in and help or leave her to deal with her own problem. With the shop owner, a thief comes in and tries to rob him at gun point. Wrong place at the wrong time for Shelby once again, it seems.
 
While the first 11 chapters aren't enough to show us the full breadth of these choices, choosing to help these characters looks like it'll result in them helping you more (or even at all) later in the story. Ignore them and you probably won't fill in all of the pieces, and perhaps the Origami Killer will walk away clean.
 
We've written about the third character, Norman Jayden, and his ARI (Added Reality Interface) back around E3, but in short, he's an FBI agent with an experimental investigative device that allows him to see things that the human eye might miss (like blood, scents, fingerprints, etc.). It also processes information about these things and files them away in a database that he can access and reference later.
 
He has two sequences in this first bit of the game. First, he shows up at a crime scene to investigate what's happened. You don't learn too much here, just some clues that will likely help you piece things together later on, but one thing I noticed that was really cool was that the dialog would change to reflect the order of what you checked out. So, for example, if you find some footprints somewhere, he might mention that he doesn't know whose they are. Then if you find more of them at the body, he'll mention the other set that you'd already found. Or, if you find the set at the body first, when you find the second set he'll say that they're the killer's, rather than not knowing whose they are. It's a small touch but a really nice one.
 

The investigative ARI device is a cool touch.

Jayden's second section has him go to the local police department to claim an office to work from. You can opt to sit in and watch a press conference that's taking place there, which gives you a little more insight into the murders (though it doesn't seem necessary in terms of gameplay completion), or you can head straight to your office to begin work. Rather than carrying a briefcase, Jayden simply uses the ARI to access and compile all of the evidence and even change the environment that he's working in to appear to be something other than a dusty office. It's pretty cool stuff.
 
The fourth and last character that I got to see, who didn't show up until the build's 11th and final chapter, is Madison Paige. She wakes up in her apartment very late at night (or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it) and after walking around and exploring the place for a bit, she notices that the refrigerator door is wide open. Soon thereafter, you see a shadowy figure scurrying around the apartment and try to make a break for the front door. I won't spoil what happens here, but it can be a somewhat lengthy sequence that ends the build in both an adrenaline-filled and "what was that all about?" sort of fashion.
 
In terms of gameplay, the basics are the same stuff that we've written about numerous times before, though the movement controls feel a lot more natural since the last time I had played it back in May. You still need to hold L2 in order to walk, but the left stick no longer "aims" your forward movement but instead moves you like you'd expect to in any other third-person action or adventure game.
 

Ethan is messed in the head.

Something else that's also new since then is that you can now pick up and play any chapter that you've reached. It's tied to your save, so if go back and play chapter 40, for instance, and a character had died at chapter 30, that person will still be dead. You'd have to go back before they were dead to continue their story, which means you can't just watch all of the endings easily. Go watch Back to the Future if that's too confusing for you. What's nice is that you can pick a new save spot to play from and work through the rest of the game again.
 
Heavy Rain is looking really good at this point with great presentation all around. I don't know if the pacing will suit everyone who tries it, but those who want an engrossing story, one that's determined by how you play it, will probably find a lot to like here. I for one am excited to get my hands on the final release.
 
Supplied by IGN.com