Before I get into my
opinions, I want to start off by boasting about my QTE prowess in Heavy Rain.
In a game that I’ve heard a lot of people talk about screwing up on their first
play-through, I naturally assumed that I’d meet with similar disasters; so I
was super proud to get all four playable characters alive to the end game, and
then even have the three heroes defeat the villain in the final showdown.
Another boast - I was so lightning-quick during the Mad Jack fight with Norman
that I didn’t even get to the final two-thirds of the fight, because I slapped
the cuffs on the guy and subdued him so early on.
For balance, I did
not do nearly this well when I played Until Dawn last year. In that game
I managed to lose Jessica to a fumbled QTE, Matt to a bad choice, and Mike and
Ashley to poor timing. So hopefully this is evidence of my reflexes improving
(which is meant to be one of the pluses to regular video gaming, right?). The
only determinant character I lost in Heavy Rain was Lauren, who drowned
when she and Shelby were trapped in the car - which was really sad because I
did like her a lot and was trying to save her, but either didn’t understand
what to do or wasn’t quick enough to do it, or quite possibly both.
In addition to
impressing people with this, what I’m trying to confess is that despite Heavy
Rain’s many, glaring flaws, it boosted my ego somewhat, and I’m bound to be
biased by that. In truth, when I first finished it I wasn’t sure how I felt;
but it’s been a couple of weeks now, and the other day I saw a copy of it on a
shop shelf and said, without thinking, “Oh, I loved that game!” Which, once I
stopped to think about it, definitely felt true. It’s an interesting
combination of loving things about it that I genuinely thought were great, and
ironically loving things that I thought were so terrible they were funny, but
hey - love’s complicated.
Speaking of love,
have I mentioned enough that I ended up with a massive crush on Norman Jayden?
My mother let me watch Due South on TV at an impressionable age, and it
instilled in me a lifelong love of stories about by-the-book super-cops who are
just trying to do the right thing in a corrupt world. Poor Norman. I just
wanted to hug him, mainly because it’d be nice for him to get some human
contact that didn’t involve having his ass handed to him every chapter. From
what I’ve seen from the Detroit: Become Human demo, Connor seems to be
very much cut from the same cloth as Norman; leading me to comment that David
Cage might be terrible at writing realistic female characters, but he sure can
come up with the sort of clean-cut white boy I’m guaranteed to fall in love
with.
In fairness to David
Cage, not all of his female characters are as terrible as I may have made out.
In the past I’ve commented at length upon what I consider to be Madison’s many
flaws, both in-universe and on a meta level, but she isn’t quite the only woman
to feature in Heavy Rain. Lauren Winter is arguably the most significant
non-playable character in the game - less of a motivator than Shaun, maybe, but
far more of a featured presence, actually appearing in a lot more chapters.
Other than the fact that she’s introduced working as a prostitute - which is
not necessarily a problem, but does feel like a gratuitous attempt to
sexualise her - Lauren is a fairly proactive and competent character. Like
Madison, she puts herself in ridiculous amounts of danger pursuing the Origami
Killer; but unlike Madison, who stumbles into the case by chance,
Lauren is the mother of one of the victims, and therefore her reckless drive
felt much more believable and sympathetic. When Madison tried to flirt her way
into getting information, she came across as a skeevy journalist not much
better than the men she was taking advantage of; when Lauren did it, I felt her
desperation and her disgust, but also her raw determination. As I’ve already mentioned,
I was truly quite shaken up when I failed to save her, although I comforted
myself that it did mean I spared her from the awful revelation about what
Shelby did to her son.
I chose not to pursue
either of the optional romance paths in the game, which were between Ethan and
Madison and between Shelby and Lauren. In both cases, (and even putting aside
the spoiler that Shelby killed Lauren’s son), it just felt really gross to
attempt to seduce someone literally in the moment they were trying to get justice
for their kidnapped and/or murdered child. As a result, Ethan neither moved in
with Madison nor got back together with his ex-wife Grace at the end (which I
understand can happen if Madison dies); instead, he and Shaun seemed to be
taking some time together to heal and bond after everything they’ve gone
through, which I think is both healthier and more nuanced than a romantic
ending would have been. It was actually pretty heartwarming, even if my main
impression of the men in the Mars family throughout the game was frequently
summed up in the word “derrrp”.
So where did
everybody end up? Ethan and Shaun started to rebuild, as I’ve mentioned; and
Shelby died because he always does if one of the protagonists can successfully
fight him at the end (Norman, in my game - of course, because he’s clearly
the hero in a cast of fools). Poor Lauren was dead, but I can’t entirely
pretend it wasn’t something of a mercy in many ways. Madison wrote a book and
became a TV personality; her ending reminded me a lot of Lana in American
Horror Story: Asylum - maybe it’s just a trope that almost always sails
alongside the Intrepid Lady Journalist archetype. Though she levelled-up in
usefulness towards the end, she remained a fairly flimsy character for most of
the game, but at least one person clearly misidentified her as the real saviour
of the day: the mysterious “Vincent”, who turns up to one of her book signings
in order to drop sinister hints about his role in a sequel that’s probably
never going to happen now.
And what of Norman,
my best boy and bae-of-the-month? Well, it turns out that, in true fashion for
beautifully suffering characters, Norman gets screwed to some degree no
matter what ending you get. Consensus is that the best you can manage is to
deliberately guide him away from the warehouse, forcing him to miss the
end-game but prompting him to quit his job and, with it, his destructive addictions.
Not exactly a fair pay-off for the most competent character in the game.
The ending I got, in
which Norman is instrumental in defeating Shelby, started with a section on the
same talk show that Madison appears on (which I have quietly retconned out of
my personal headcanon as an unnecessary duplication of the scene, as well as
weirdly out-of-character for Norman). This is followed by Norman apparently
overcoming his Triptocaine addiction; only to begin hallucinating the toy tanks
from one of his ARI games in real life - a grim confirmation that it was the
technology, and not the drug, that was his real and ongoing destructive
addiction.
I’ve seen a couple of
attempts to write this off as either a joke ending by David Cage that landed a
little too hard, or evidence that Norman is actually recovering - since he’s
only hallucinating small assets, not whole ARI environments as he was earlier
in the game. Much as I’d like to believe the latter theory in particular, I’m
more inclined to believe that Norman is still in danger from ARI unless he
quits entirely. I don’t demand happy endings in fiction, even for my
favourites; more important to me is that this feels true to his character. Who
knows, it might have been cast in a better light if the Heavy Rain
Chronicles prequel had ever gotten further than a single, Madison-focused
episode; but I can live with this outcome, even if I am a bit sad about the
knowledge that my favourite character is the only protagonist who never gets a
happy ending on their own terms. It’s been said many times that I’m always
drawn to the underdog, and it seems like I’ve been true to form here.
Heavy Rain may be much sillier than a story about
child murder should ever be, but David Cage did pretty much single-handedly
elevate the interactive fiction genre from the weird cousin of the gaming world
to one of the hottest genres going. It's fair to say that The Walking Dead,
Life is Strange, Until Dawn, and perhaps even this year's BAFTA Best Game
winner What Remains of Edith Finch all benefited from the
groundwork laid by Heavy Rain, even if they weren't directly influenced
by it. It may not be the best example of its type, but it is still great fun to
play, especially if you know what you're in for and aren't expecting a cutting
edge gaming experience from a title that will be turning 10 before you know it.
Say it with me now:
JAAASON?!
...
SHAAAUN!!
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