Heavy Rain Breaks Down Unusual Boundaries

I woke up after four or five hours of sleep on Tuesday morning and went to Gamestop to get my copy of Heavy Rain. I had heard from many different places that this game was boundary-breaking, innovative, and pioneering. I sat down, installed the game, started playing, and 12 hours later when I was watching the credits roll, I sat on my couch, breathing heavily through my mouth like a sad, fat asthmatic kid.

The game is phenomenal and does a lot of what it intended to do. I could not pull myself away except to relieve my bladder and appease the rumbling needs of my stomach. The character animations are uncanny (the good uncanny) and there were times when I thought I was watching real people on the screen. The mood of the game is dark and mesmerizing, brought beautifully to life with the haunting story and music.

Quantic Dream has become one of four studios that have successfully drawn me into a game with a genuine emotional attachment to the characters (the others being Kojima Productions, Team Ico, and Naughty Dog for the original Uncharted). When at one point in the story one of the main characters had an antagonist by the throat, I sat on my couch yelling, “Die bitch!” while furiously shaking the Dual Shock 3 in my sweaty hands. I wanted to rip out the guy’s fucking throat to avenge the wrongs he did to my character. I have never done that before with a game. It was both empowering and touching.

But Heavy Rain does not stop there. No, there are two major (and unusual) things the game did, which changed me as a gamer forever. These both pertain to the mechanic of holding multiple buttons down at the same time. When such an occasion arises, the player has to start holding down a button, as prompted on the screen, and then another button prompt arrives, and you have to hold both of them. And then another prompt pops up, followed by another and sometimes another until you are holding down four or five buttons at once. And these are not easily held combinations.

The first unusual thing that I had never before experienced occurred when I found myself at one point having to press all four shoulder buttons and two opposite face buttons (x and Triangle). X was first, then the shoulder buttons. I thought I was in the clear until that Triangle prompt appeared. Bear in mind, that if I hit Square or Circle at this point I would have failed the prompt so I couldn’t maneuver my thumb very well. So when I ran out of fingers, I brought the controller to my face in a state of panic and used my tongue to press the Triangle button. My tongue! I used my tongue as an appendage! I couldn’t believe it! The game got me so invested that I pressed my fucking tongue against the sweaty, slimy controller and held it there for nearly ten seconds!

Well, if that doesn’t invoke pure incredulity in you as it did me, this next first-time game experience will at least entertain you. At one point in the story, Madison Paige is questioning some dude and you have shake the controller to smack him around a little bit. I had no trouble with the sequence until she bent down and grasped his balls. In her quest for answers she began to squeeze the guy’s nuts, at which point I had to hold down some buttons. And the tighter she squeezed, the harder the controller vibrated. And it vibrated in a pulsating way that felt all too realistic. I felt a shockwave of disgust spreading through my palms and up my arms and afterward felt the need to wash my hands as if I had actually been squeezing a scrotum. It was awful.

So as you can see, there are brave new worlds into which Quantic Dream has ventured with Heavy Rain. It has given me as a gamer a whole platter of new experiences, some of which were quite bizarre and left me wondering things about myself after I finished the game. How far would you go to save someone you love? I guess I’d lick a nasty, germ-ridden controller for them.

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