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.
There’s an air of the improbable in every step of George A. Romero‘s career, something that began when his feature debut accidentally fell into the public domain and, along the way, became the most revered zombie movie of all time. There’s always been a scrappy energy to the way Romero worked, from Night of the Living Dead‘s more amateurish touches to the way he fought tooth and nail to cobble budgets together for much of his career. It makes him a filmmaker worth rooting for, and it’s easy to see why he’s grown so beloved.
The process of restoring Day of the Dead, Romero’s 1985 zombie classic, has that same air of the improbable. When the restorers working on Scream Factory’s beautiful new 4K glow-up of the film first set to work, they were delivered cans of film from the much-maligned 2008 remake of the same name, and had to keep searching to get all of the footage necessary to revive the original. A film initially shaped by budget constraints and Romero’s inventive spirit was once again fighting to stay alive. The restorers kept at it, found the footage they needed, and the result is a new horror essential, a 4K set that proves Romero was always worth rooting for, not just because he was a fighter, but because he had the talent to back it up.
Day of the Dead famously began as an epic, only to grow in intimacy as the budget shrank and Romero found he had to limit his locations and setpieces. Like Night of the Living Dead before it, Day then becomes a study in how to do a lot with a little, and my God does Romero do a lot. The film opens with its most expansive sequence, a helicopter flight over a desolate, zombie-ridden Florida, complete with alligators lurking on street corners and zombies piling out of buildings in states of advanced decay. Its heroes, including intrepid scientist Sarah (Lori Cardille), are looking for survivors, for hope. They find nothing and instead retreat back to their bunker, an underground labyrinth of salt mines and cinder blocks, wondering what to do until the end comes for them too.
If Night is a case study in how people behave in a crisis, Day is a case study in what happens when the crisis grows humdrum, when all that’s left to really squabble over is what the few remaining survivors will do with their time. Some, like the infamous Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato), shift into full-blown violent ideation towards others, while Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) throws himself into bloody work. In the middle of it all is Sarah, still clinging to the idea of a future even if she can’t see or feel it, and the film’s chief dramatic tension becomes not who will break first, but who will be left standing when the break eventually comes.
All of this serves to make Day especially bleak, even by Romero zombie film standards, not just because of the death surrounding the characters, but because of the grind of it all. It’s a gritty, dirty, shadowy movie, and I don’t know that I recognized quite how intensely focused a film it is stylistically until I saw this restoration. It’s not just sharpening the lines and correcting the colors after years of degradation; there’s a real texture to this movie that even Night and Dawn don’t really have, a sense of people scrounging around in the dirt for whatever they can find, and this restoration highlights that.
It might be Romero’s most visually developed film and compositionally ambitious movie, from the opening dream sequence to the final collapse of the bunker, and it’s all captured and enlivened by a careful, beautiful 4K upgrade.
If I had my druthers, this set would come with a few more brand-new bells and whistles, but the ones it does come with, including a set of lobby cards in the collector’s edition and new interviews with surviving cast and crew, are quite lovely. The cherry on top, though, is a new commentary track by critic and film historian Drew McWeeny and author Daniel Kraus, who has now completed two unfinished novels of Romero’s, including the epic The Living Dead. Few people working in the horror space right now know more about Romero than Kraus, but more importantly, few people understand Romero as Kraus does. He’s been inside the man’s imagination for so long that he’s imbued with a certain emotional intelligence about the films, and listening to him and McWeeny trade insights for the length of the film is a delight.
But what comes through most from this new restoration of Day of the Dead is just how much we still want to root for George A. Romero. To this day, he remains one of the great titans of independent cinema, a filmmaker who fought for every dollar on the budget, every creative decision, and every story for as long and as hard as he could. Day of the Dead‘s existence is proof of that, but seeing it with this fresh spotlight is a reminder of the artistry behind that independent spirit, and a celebration of one of horror’s greatest storytellers.
Day of the Dead is out now in a new Collector’s Edition 4K from Scream! Factory.
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