Heavy Rain

I should start with this: there will be slight spoilers for Heavy Rain in this post. It is kind of hard to discuss this game without them, honestly, so beware. I won't reveal who the killer is, though.

The story in Heavy Rain is fantastic! The gameplay is terrible!

That's really all you need to know about Heavy Rain. I get what the developers were going for: an involving experience, utilizing the unique aspects of video games to present basically a murder mystery book that is interactive. And for the most part, they succeed; the game changes pretty much every time you play it, with different outcomes depending on the choices you made throughout the narrative. Which I applaud! These are great things.

But oh, how I wish the gameplay weren't so bad. You see, in Heavy Rain, the entire game controls as such: movement is similar to the first few Resident Evil games - you hold R2 to walk, and use the left stick to turn. That would be awful enough, but the rest of the controls are all played out with Quick Time Events. If you're unfamiliar with these, they are events that the player attempts to beat by pressing the button on the screen. For example, to open the fridge, you go up to the fridge and rotate the right stick clockwise from the right. To pick up an item off the desk, you push the right stick up. And so on.

What sucks about this is that all the activities that would usually be fun in a game (fighting a boss! Driving a car and avoiding traffic! Shooting guns!) are boring at best, and plain frustrating at worst. Sure, the events are kind of intense because you are so scared you'll screw up whatever weird button combo the developers came up with, but that kind of nullifies the point of them - you should be scared because you are playing the character and they are in a tough situation, not because you are scared of the controls.

My only other complaint is a stupid save system. The game is autosave only - you cannot create a save at any point. If you want to restart because you screwed up some retarded QTE - which will happen! - you have to try to reload your previous save before the game saves over it. Awesome!

The story itself, though... So good. You play as multiple characters, each twisting and winding around the same plot points. The Origami Killer is kidnapping little boys and drowning them, and you have to find out who. It is made somewhat clear off the bat that the killer is either one of the characters you play as or someone very close to them, so the game is always throwing you curveballs as far as character development goes. For example, for my playthrough, I was incredibly surprised as to the killer's identity, although it made sense when I went back and thought about what I had been doing with them throughout the game.

Anyway, many characters can die throughout the game, changing the outcome in several ways. I'll probably play through the game again someday, and see what changes as I go through.

I'll just have to suffer through those annoying damn QTEs.