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.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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