Yeah, I’m starting out with a call out to Chocolate Rain. It makes about as much sense as this title does. Which makes sense because it was penned by the same guy who made Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Fahrenheit, two of the stranger action/adventure games to make it onto console systems. The quickest way to describe the game is to imagine Dragon’s Lair mixed with an episode of CSI, with a heavy lean on story, character building, exploration and the dreaded Quick Time Events (QTE).

I’ve been told some of you enjoy QTE. The novelty of it wore off after a few dozen of my precious quarters had been eaten up by Dirk the daring on his pointless adventure of guessing whatever button or direction the designers thought you should push with robotic precision and clairvoyant timing. While it is fun to slam on the X button to rip off a god’s head in God of War, or open a door here or there, the idea of a game told entirely from QTE didn’t appeal to me, but I soldiered on, the brave reviewer I am to find out that Heavy Rain changes a few things around and does the impossible, makes QTE tolerable.

Using a new and therefore confusing and stupid until you get the hang of it control scheme, you are present with various symbols that attempt to reproduce movements and natural thought processes, making the QTE more like a Real Time Event, given that your speed and timing impacts the animation, game play and events on the screen. You don’t just play Simon says with the flashing lights, you read the action and follow through with simple to relate to commands. It’s a real improvement for QTE and hopefully something other developers start using to fill out their boring games with.

Now, that leaves the game as mainly one thing, an interactive movie that you end up having to push buttons or perform commands to keep watching. You can select a very minimal difficulty that reduces the need to master your button locations (heck, I would have liked an option to skip it and just watch the movie) or make it harder if you enjoy failure and button pushing. The rest is controlled by the analog sticks and buttons, slightly pushing them not only changes the speed of the animation, but the reaction of the movement is reflected in the game. Slam a door and wake your sleeping child up, or gently close it and let him sleep.

The intro is however the creepiest most disturbing display of meat puppets performing the best a French soap opera could provide, and takes a good while for you to ignore the poor voice action of the women and children as you oddly interact with them as a loving father and class “A” weirdo. The first scene where you kiss your wife can only be described as creepy as your hollow eyes roll around aimlessly and your lips sort of touch, but never do because nobody knows how to animate things like that realistically. The tutorial sets up simple “butterfly effects” however and shows that even little action, like which child you play with first or how you set the plates can impact the game later on, which is what really sells this title.

The loading screens alone are the stuff of nightmares, with uncomfortably close zoom ins on the character you are about to play, huffing or looking slack jawed as he waits with you for the load screen to end. However, once you make it past the “Uncanny Valley” effect, you start to absorb the four playable characters and become wrapped up in the impressive amount of details, story, character and emotion in this title. I hate QTE and found this game worth playing after I stuck with it for a bit, it’s a fun and interesting story, marred by many, strange, creepy style choices. It’s a great effort and your enjoyment of it relies on your ability to let the world absorb you. Adventure fans, Shenmue fans, anyone that likes point and click or crime novels, mysteries and the like will enjoy this title and should check it out.

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