Sure, this isn’t the first time you’ve heard about Heavy Rain. But I’ve found that a lot of what’s been discussed in the gaming media has been from the perspective of those familiar with developer Quantic Dream. But how does the game come off to someone who only dabbles in adventure games and has never personally tried out a release from the influential — albeit avant-garde — French developer? That’s why I wanted to cast all preconceptions aside at Tokyo Game Show and give the alleged “film-noir thriller” a shot for myself.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":647021,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"A"}']Before I get into that directly, though, let me dispel a few myths. Forget all you’ve heard about the Japanese actively detesting Western games. Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and Gears of War have all made reasonably successful sales splashes in Japan over the past few years, and God of War III and Heavy Rain were two of the more popular games at Sony’s Tokyo Game Show booth, with waits of over an hour for both. As longtime Tokyo resident (and Geekbox fan, might I add) Kyle McLain told me, the Japanese definitely “respect” Western gaming now, at least based on his firsthand observations — something that definitely couldn’t be said when I first started following the Japanese gaming scene back in the ’90s, when Western games were regularly lampooned in the pages of Famitsu.
And that gets me to Heavy Rain specifically. I’ll be honest: Despite following the industry heavily over the past couple of decades, I admit that I’d never heard of the company until the massive hype for Heavy Rain. Which, in retrospect, is baffling after reading about their pedigree. I mean, their debut effort, 1999 PC/Dreamcast release Omikron: The Nomad Soul, featured music and design input from David Freakin’ Bowie! How could I have missed this?! And film-noir is one of my favorite film genres, so the thought of playing a video game version is something I don’t think I can pass up.
The opening scene of the TGS Heavy Rain demo revolved around my favorite film-noir archetype: the private detective. Scott Shelby is investigating a series of murders and questions a local shop owner, when suddenly, a robber bursts into the store. But while the cinematics impressed me, even in Japanese, I was shocked at how dated some of the controls were. I felt like I was clunking around in the original Resident Evil by using the R1 button to move around the shop. But this ultimately worked to my advantage, as I accidentally lurched forward far enough for the robber to notice me — unintentionally saving the shop owner in the process!
The second part of the demo, a junkyard confrontation with a miscreant named Mad Jack, impressed me slightly less. Instead of simple dialogue choices moving the story forward, I had to perform some CSI-style investigating, which got old as I backtracked across the junkyard. And when the inevitable throwdown with Mad Jack got underway, I found most of the onscreen timed-button-press prompts didn’t offer enough clues as to what to do next.
I’m not wild about some of the controls, but I did leave the demo intrigued, and I’ll definitely give the game a shot when it release next year — and that’s because I know that, regardless of whether it’s completely successful, it’ll definitely offer something different.