Reviews
[Review] ‘Heavy Rain’ is the Embodiment of Everything Good and Bad About Quantic Dream’s Games
Quantic Dreams’ PlayStation adventures head to PC, starting with serial killer thriller Heavy Rain.
Heavy Rain, for me, was a standout title during the PS3’s resurgence. It had the atmosphere, it had a deliciously gloomy soundtrack, and it looked pretty damn good to boot. It was enough to forgive some of the title’s more elaborate eccentricities (also known as ruddy great flaws in its storytelling).
The thing is, 9 years have passed, and storytelling and presentation in big-budget gaming are arguably in a much better state overall, so heading back to Heavy Rain now surely can’t paint it in that positive a light?
The answer is largely no, it cannot, but there’s still a hokey charm to Heavy Rain that ensures its increasingly dated core matters about as much as the plot to a cult cheapo 80’s horror would. It’s almost got a Giallo quality to it, and with an entertaining branching story, where there are some meaningful consequences among the hilarious sex scenes and odd accents, Heavy Rain is still pretty good as a spectacle, eccentricities and all.
For those who didn’t get to sample the Euro cheese goodness first time around, a brief explanation. The game centers on four characters who are seemingly connected by their hunt for a notorious serial killer.
Firstly, there’s Dad of the Year Ethan Mars, who having tragically lost one son already, finds his other son kidnapped by the Origami Killer, and now must face a series of Saw-esque challenges to rescue him. The character has been the subject of many a meme (Press X to Jason) and plenty of ridicule (the aforementioned hilarious sex scene and the daffy logic behind it, but he has a compelling story, and some of the game’s best set pieces. The ‘dare’ to drive the wrong way in traffic is still intense, and every sacrifice he’s asked to make carries some weight. There’s some nicely done ambiguity about why his son was chosen. Is it all a manifestation of Ethan’s guilt? Are the blackouts Ethan has clues to what’s going on? Sadly the revelations are not as satisfying as they could have been, but the build is good.
Next up is FBI agent Norman Jayden. He’s on the hunt for the Origami Killer, and has an addiction problem of sorts in his augmented reality visor that he uses for connecting evidence (it’s basically a nonsense thing, but gives us some cool visuals). Using it too much drastically effects Norman’s story outcome, but don’t let that stop you as the detective bits are probably the most enjoyable part of being Norman Jayden, who is otherwise the least interesting character of the four.
Madison Paige is our third character and if any character feels like they’re in a particularly skeezy Giallo, it’s Madison. She’s treated as eye candy, made to endure the nastiest and ickiest situations of the four, and coming back to that sex scene, she loses any shred of agency or personality as a character the moment that it occurs (or doesn’t, you don’t actually have to go through with it mercifully unless you want to see every outcome). Despite the issues with her presentation, she starts out quite interesting, but as is the case with all four characters, the unraveling plot scuppers all good intentions by the end.
Never is that truer than when we go through the story of the fourth protagonist. Gumshoe Scott Shelby is the most endearing and well-written of the four. A caring, seemingly selfless man always out to try and help those less fortunate. His arc could have been something special if handled properly, but alas, the gaping holes in logic and the writing means we see a missed opportunity on a grand scale.
You’ve probably noticed a recurring theme here. The writing in Heavy Rain, and indeed the plot as a result of it, is a confused, unfocused mess of strands that are supposed to smartly connect, but instead, look more like a plate of spaghetti got tipped unceremoniously into the bin
Still, the game is looking lovely even after 9 years. This PC port is of the remastered Ps4 version, so it has aged a bit better than it might have, plus decent PC settings make it shine just that little bit brighter. Quantic Dream’s gloomy brown world is atmospheric and grimly beautiful in places. The soundtrack is, in my opinion, one of the finest from this decade. It is mournful, haunting, and completely in keeping with the aforementioned atmosphere.
As daft as Heavy Rain can be, and it really is quite daft, it’s still quite unlike anything else, even its spiritual successors Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human, and spiritual forefather Indigo Prophecy. It’s a more grounded game than those are, dabbling just a tiny bit with sci-fi in Norman Jayden’s AR ability, and as such has a rather distinct personality by comparison.
It will infuriate, it will make you laugh unintentionally, and cringe to the center of the Earth at times, but Heavy Rain is still very much worth investigating for its bold, and often striking, weirdness.
Heavy Rain review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Heavy Rain is out now on PC and PS4.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
You must be logged in to post a comment.