Heavy Rain (PS3) Review

Heavy Rain is a new title exclusively available for the Playstation 3. It accounts the story of the ‘Origami Killer’ – a serial killer who follows the unsettling modus operandi of drowning ten year old boys in rain water once the levels are sufficiently high, and then abandoning them for the police to find later with orchids on their chests and origami dogs in their hands. The title tells this story from the perspectives of four separate protagonists – a father; an FBI profiler; a private investigator; and an investigative journalist. All interactions in the game are handled via what are known as ‘quick-time-events’ – context sensitive on-screen commands – often with multiple options available. How the story progresses depends on how the player reacts to these commands throughout the game.

First things first: Heavy Rain is not a game. Neither is it a film. I’ll come to the reasons why this is so in due course, however it’s worth bearing this in mind from the offset – if you hate videogames; or if you’re just naturally lacking in coordination; or wits; or curiosity, and so imagine that you’re no good at them and never will be – don’t assume that Heavy Rain is necessarily a write-off for you. Being a bad gamer doesn’t count you out of this unique experience.

So what is Heavy Rain if the two categories above don’t apply? Well – it’s a hybrid. Not a mere combination of film elements and game elements, as has been done several times before, but an actual melding; an amalgamation; of the two mediums. Where a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 could rightly be described as half-game and half-film, with the player/viewer spending half their time watching a movie and the other half playing a videogame[1], one can only describe the player[2] as doing both simultaneously in Heavy Rain. It’s a little viewing, but not enough for the experience to become passive; and a little gaming, but not enough to warrant the notion that the player is actually in control of the characters in the piece. At no point are you fooled into thinking that you are Ethan Mars; Norman Jayden; Madison Paige; or Scott Shelby[3], while playing Heavy Rain – an important factor given their conflicting interests and motivations. The game[4] doesn’t desire the player to invest his soul into any one character at any one time – they are not your virtual avatars, as is often (perhaps even always) the case in videogames – rather, they are freely existing (fictional) people in their own right, there for the player to judge; to like; to hate; to pity; to be aroused by[5], and to whom the player is never expected to do more than empathise with – which is the defining element of Heavy Rain.

So why isn’t Heavy Rain a film? After all – films similarly intend their viewers to sympathise with their characters, without being absorbed by them. What then distinguishes Heavy Rain from a movie like Primal Fear say, or The Fugitive? Well, it’s the aforementioned empathy – and the manner and sheer degree to which Heavy Rain manages to achieve it. There are morose parts of Heavy Rain; exciting parts; anxious parts; morally challenging parts; yes, a vast (if not the whole) gamut of human emotions are covered throughout Heavy Rain’s myriad starts to finishes. The game forces empathy to these elements in a manner that is simply beyond the scope of cinema. By placing god-like control over how these events play out for the protagonists; in the hands of players, any degree of passive non-accountability is forfeit. Particularly given that one is never ‘punished’ for the form their control takes – the story simply takes whatever the player does in its stride and continues on. Again this serves to highlight the defining quality of Heavy Rain: that the protagonists are not representatives of the real world player but independent people in and of themselves. The ramifications of the beating; the crime; the death; the bad decision, that the player causes the protagonist to suffer, are not met by the player (as would happen in most games: either via a gameover screen, or some hindrance to their gameplay ability), but by the character – and the fictional universe of Heavy Rain itself. Moreover, the control the game offers the player over these decisions is not always purely intellectual (though it is sometimes). Though there are of course points at which the player may calmly consider their options and then opt to move the story along as they see fit; there are other moments at which barely any thinking time whatsoever is given, and the story’s progression is down entirely to the players attentiveness; reflexes; or ability to tolerate pressure. Naturally, the points at which the game depends on these differing faculties mirror the situations the protagonists find themselves in – for example, the parrying of a punch depends on a split second reaction to the on-screen display by the player, as opposed to a thought out decision – while control over how best the protagonist may negotiate someone into opening up emotionally is handled slowly and methodically, with time to consider which of a number of persuasive tactics is likely to be most effective. If you’re an uncoordinated mess under pressure; but a sweet and compassionate human being, the events of the story will reflect this; and likewise if you’re able to reconstruct an assault rifle in under five seconds, but are socially inept.

Of course, Heavy Rain is not flawless. However the story progresses, there are a number of plot holes (including one major incident which I won’t detail in order to keep this commentary spoiler free) which can be mildly jarring – though certainly not enough to spoil the experience. In addition, though I have not read this elsewhere and therefore suspect that this issue may be unique to me, the discovery of the Origami Killer’s identity is somewhat unsatisfying. It’s not cheap, and on paper it’s a reasonably fair; or even good choice, but it doesn’t strike you (or rather me) in that satisfying way that great plot twists can when executed well. It just doesn’t ring true, for some very important reasons that I’ll refrain from entering into here for the sake of avoiding ruining your experience. Hopefully you’ll think otherwise. The controls are also not perfect. Due to the manner in which on-screen commands are portrayed, the player can occasionally influence things in a way that was not only unintended; but also unfairly beyond their control. Though I found these instances rare, they did exist – and they were certainly frustrating in a game which places such importance on the control and decisions of the player.

Ultimately, Heavy Rain is an important artistic occurrence, and one that any genuine cultural or artistic commentator would be wrong to ignore. It is not perfect in its storytelling; nor its cinematography; nor in its gameplay – but it does bring something new to the table – something significantly heavy, and groundbreaking enough to qualify as a shift in expectations for the artistic medium of videogaming. I certainly highly recommend it to gamers and non-gamers alike.

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[1] … that both happen to be involved in the same fictional universe, following the same plot)

[2] I’m using this verb simply because there’s no other to accurately describe the experience I’m trying to portray.

[3] The four protagonists of Heavy Rain.

[4] Again, simply because there exists no other appropriate word.

[5] Certainly an element that exists, though not immaturely or gratuitously.

Flower (PSN Game): Review

I’ve heard it said that Flower, the latest PSN exclusive brought to us by thatgamecompany, is a game in which you play the wind. Indeed that is the case. However, in practice, it’s so much more.

The first thing I want to say is this: ignore the trailer. Though I understand how difficult it must have been to create a trailer for a game like Flower, I must say that whoever made the one they went with did a particularly bad job. The music is poorly chosen, the aesthetics displayed make the game seem depthless, and the entire artistry of the piece (and I mean artistry) is completely lacking. It is NOT a good reflection of the product you will be purchasing. So, having left you utterly in the dark, allow me to explain what Flower is.

Flower is not a game per se, but neither is it merely an interactive video like Linger in Shadows. As far as I could tell, there was no way to lose in Flower – no deaths; no time limits; in reality, no obstacles to overcome at all. Your competitive drive and lust for glory will go completely unmet in Flower; however that’s sort of the point.

The game begins in a dull grey urban room, the only break from this sombre pallet being a solitary potted flower on the desk in front of the window. The entire game is handled via the sixaxis controls and as such, to begin you are required to manoeuvre the camera over this flower and loosen one of its petals with any of the controller’s buttons. Doing so brings you into a valley, with the potted flower from the room now growing in front of you with petals closed, waiting to bloom. A press of any button and a single petal floats aloft on the breeze, thus beginning your journey. With the petal caught on the wind, you flow towards other flowers, bringing them into bloom and catching their petals as you go. That’s it.

Now let me say at this point, with absolute honesty, Flower moved me. As you flow through the air, sometimes rushing through the grass, sometimes gusting (again, via pressing any button), sweeping upwards high above the valley, twisting to reveal the long tail of multicoloured petals in your wake, the sense of harmony and beauty within nature is immense. This is strengthened a hundred fold by the minimalist and tranquil music which accompanies the game, with new notes striking in whenever a petal is released into your tail. I felt myself compelled to move gracefully, to bring flowers into bloom in an order which would best create beautiful music (although in practice, every note, whichever flower you bloom, fits perfectly), I felt the surge of power as I swept the petals upwards, and the overwhelming wonder as my descent revealed the stunning valley below. All of this movement I might add is controlled via Sixaxis, and I say with some confidence that this is by far the best implementation of the feature. Even turning the controller 180 degrees seems to be recognised by the game, with the petals making a total (though fluent) about face.

There’s little more I can mention that won’t ruin your own experience of Flower. Like all art, it can’t truly be appreciated until experienced first hand. It brings me great pleasure to see developers put the time and money into making creations like this. It goes to show not only that the videogame medium has progressed to a serious and mature level, but that developers and game companies respect us, the gamers, enough to expect us to appreciate this kind of thing. For £6.29, Flower is an absolutely essential purchase for anyone with even the slightest appreciation of art and/or nature. And it’s just for us PS3 gamers!

Score: 9.8

Fallout 3 Review

Who remembers Oblivion? I’m guessing the answer is: quite a few of you. Oblivion was the game that brought us sixteen square miles of luscious greenery; rolling hills; and medieval towns and castles, hundreds of interactive NPCs, dozens of playable quests, and (for all intents and purposes) an infinity of conversations – all spoken allowed no-less. It was hailed by many, by the vast majority in fact, as a groundbreaking; utterly absorbing and life-consuming paradigm of gaming art. So what did I miss?

Something about Oblivion just didn’t talk to me. Yes, there were huge expansive areas – but they were undeniably a little samey. Each dungeon / floral field / Oblivion gate castle resembled the last. The dialogue was uninspiring and was voiced without flair. The quests (at least the non-central ones) were flat and a little dull, and overall the game seemed, in many areas, that little bit short of perfection. Ultimately, Oblivion failed to draw me in – an essential aspect for a free-form game of this type. I watched my character wander the valleys of Tamriel, but I was never really there with him.

So what about Fallout 3, the equally lauded game brought to us by the same developer as Oblivion: Bethesda software? If Oblivion didn’t enrapture your heart and mind, is there any point in picking up Fallout 3? Short answer: Abso-frickin’-lutely!

On the surface Fallout 3 may sound like little more than Oblivion with guns. Where once you wandered the green passes of Tamriel, now you drudge through the nuclear wasteland of Washington DC; where before you interacted with knights; elves and wizards, now you’re met by raiders and ghouls (people with radioactively disfigured bodies); and while you may recall swinging a sword or firing a bow, now you’ll do the same with a baseball bat or a 10mm pistol. This, however, is far from the full story. Though all the above comparisons are accurate, Fallout 3 has that extra ingredient which, in my view, Oblivion lacked – it really manages to draw the player in to its selected atmosphere.

Fallout 3 takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where Washington DC once stood. In the game the year is 2277, some two-hundred years since a nuclear war between China and the USA more or less left the world in utter ruin. As far as one imagines, the entire planet is left decimated by the aforementioned war and Washington DC is no different – buildings are ripped to shreds; no greenery is left visible; and civilisation as we know it is a thing of the past. However, as the voiceover during the game’s introductory video states: ‘war never changes’: humanity is not done for, and the decimation of society has provided a breeding ground for opportunistic raiders; sadist murderers; and (optimistically) the odd good Samaritan trying to get things back on track. All this, however, is of no concern to you (or rather your character) who has spent your entire life underground in one of a number of secure vaults, built and populated before the nuclear holocaust devastated the outside world. Unlike the residents of other vaults, who emerged years earlier into the wastelands above, you are a resident of vault 101 – the vault which, after initially closing its doors, never opened them again.

Unsurprisingly (it’d be one hell of a dull game otherwise), this isolation only lasts some twenty minutes into the game as your character finds themselves abruptly forced to escape the vault after it transpires that your idealistic doctor father has secretly left for some unknown reason. Thus begins your search for your father, and your exodus from the sterile vault into the irradiated and lawless wastes.

Fallout 3 does a superb job of conveying the hopelessness, and the contrary raw drive to survival, that exists in the post-apocalyptic wastes. The colour pallet is full of dull greys and browns, contrasted only by the odd glow of luminescent green present in radioactive objects as a reminder of the harsh and terrible calamity that had taken place centuries before. Strewn throughout the landscape are shattered billboards advertising new products; dilapidated houses with sofas and TVs still in place; discarded teddy bears and toy cars; and, occasionally the odd charred skeletal remains of one of the old citizens. For the most part the player is alone while wandering through the rubble, with neither friend nor foe visible on the horizon, and as such the game achieves a fine sense of loneliness and despair. When one does finally come across a populated area however, it is pleasing to find that variety abounds in ways undreamt of in Tamriel. Towns, cities and manned buildings all vary relative to their inhabitants. The first town the player is likely to reach, Megaton, is a ramshackle junkyard, constructed of old rusted parts of aeroplanes and iron fences. Its inhabitants live in shacks built from bullet-ridden sheet metal and spare parts. Megaton’s population consists of a ragtag bunch of wanderers, ex-raiders, opportunists and cultheads – it is a town built of necessity, lacking in law and order, and without pretensions of anything grander – in short it’s a town of the old Wild West, and thus fittingly it has its own saloon and sheriff. Compare that to Tenpenny tower – a well-furnished and fully mod-con fitted apartment complex built out of an old luxury building for the rich folk of post-apocalyptic Washington. This variety really helps to add to the sense of scale in Fallout 3, which is an essential component in a game wishing to represent an entire city as its backdrop.

Fallout 3 is a western RPG, similar in its elements to the aforementioned Oblivion. However, levelling up in Fallout 3 is handled entirely via the player’s selection of components, so don’t expect to up your agility by jumping everywhere as in Oblivion. Combat takes place in real-time and can be viewed from either a first or third person perspective (as can the rest of the game). The most notable component in combat terms, however, is the addition of the new VATS system, which allows the player to freeze time in order to have their character target a strike at a specific body part, either for strategic reasons (to cripple their gun wielding arm, for example), or sadistic ones (to watch their head get ripped off by one beautifully placed shotgun shell), both of which the game handles beautifully with cinematic shots exhibiting the strike in slow motion. Likewise, enemies are able to target specific areas of the player’s body (although in real-time, not in VATS of course), and this too will have specific implications in the game: a crippled leg is obviously going to be an issue speed wise, while a crippled arm will bring down your strength. Healing is handled by the use of aid, which can be administered either directly to damaged areas of the body, or generally to the player’s overall HP. Another aspect to which one must pay attention is your level of radiation, which can rise by being in irradiated areas or by consuming irradiated products. As radiation rises, radiation poisoning can take hold, which will have negative implications to a weaker or stronger degree depending on the level of poisoning which has occurred. Oh, and did I mention that you can get addicted to the various drugs in the game if you use them too much? This level of detail again adds to the game’s degree of immersion, which can really take hold during those desperate situations – rushing back to a safe town; pursued by malevolent mercenaries; and dragging a dead leg behind you while all the time in need of a desperate fix for your ‘Buffout’ addiction really jars when it comes suddenly after the lonely isolation of the wastes.

I did mention ‘malevolent’ mercenaries there, but of course that’s not necessarily the case. What if those mercs are after a rampant murderer of innocents who urgently needs to be dealt with before they embark on their next killing spree? Indeed, this unsavoury character can be you in Fallout 3. The game is built with what it calls a ‘karma’ system in place, which constantly keeps check on how ethically the player is acting. Do something bad, anything from verbally abusing a friend to blowing their brains out, and your karma will decrease. Do something good (do you really need examples?) and your karma will increase. Every action goes into a tally which ranks you as very evil or very good, or as anything in between, and this can fluctuate throughout the game depending on future decisions and interactions. Moreover, your karma level will have far reaching implications for the way your character interacts with the world. If you’re a good guy then you’ll find nice people take a liking to you, maybe even donating valuable items or money, but don’t expect all those bad guys you’ve poked the noses of to give you an easy time, because your saintly image will have every low-life gunning for you (just ask Batman). On the contrary, play as Satan himself and you’ll find it a lot easier to procure (stolen) money and items, as well as to simply solve problems with your shotgun (or later on, your mouth-wateringly awesome, mini-nuke firing, fatman bazooka), however you’re gonna meet a lot of cold-shoulders from honest folk, not to mention having to face off against a fair share of security personnel. The developers have cleverly built their system so that no-one of the three possible karma levels (good, neutral or evil) is an outlandishly superior choice (in gameplay terms) with each offering distinct advantages and disadvantages to the player.

Sound is another element which deserves special mention in its ability to up the atmosphere of the game. Sound-effects are well created and accurately reflect their real-life equivalents, with explosions (particularly during the slow-mo VATS mode) sounding superbly satisfying.  However, it’s the music that deserves particular applause. The game includes a number of well chosen and scene setting pieces of 1950s music, which are cut into radio broadcasts (of which there are a few, all of which can be listened to at leisure so long as the player is in an area with signal), but it is the music composed for the game which best reflects the feeling the developers desired to pass on. Whether wandering the vast open wastes, walking through the abandoned, dark, dusty metro system, or facing off in combat, the game’s musical score works wonders in reflecting the relevant mood. It is also used extremely sparingly, a move which allows it to creep into the players consciousness rather than allowing one to focus on it, or permitting it to detract from the emptiness of the wastes.

Fallout 3 has that je-ne-sais-quois which, for me, Oblivion lacked. It packs in so many diffuse elements which increase the level of immersion that it’s astounding even that the development team had the extreme level of commitment necessary to follow through with it, particularly considering some of the incomplete and simplistic games which retail for the same price tag. Indeed, for this alone Bethesda should be admired. However to wrap it all up in an intriguing and engrossing story, with superb and innovative gameplay elements, and a fair bit of contemplative reflection on humankind, is beyond commendable. As with films; books and paintings, not all games need be impressive as art forms, but Fallout 3 is, and it’s so-much better for it. You owe it to your (not yet exploded) head to play it.

SCORE: 9.4