But I'm getting ahead of myself. What exactly is Heavy Rain? Well, it's an adventure game of sorts, with a heavy focus on Shenmue-style QTEs. That means a lot of button-tapping and stick-waggling, whether it's one character shaking a carton of orange juice before taking a swig or another swinging a fist in a punch-up. Occasionally you can wander around freely, and the environments are beautifully detailed.
But most of the time you're watching a procession of cutscenes, deciding how they play out with varying levels of interactivity via a series of timed, reaction-based button prompts. But here's what makes Heavy Rain worth playing despite its amateurish, hole-ridden plot, inhuman dialogue, and inconsistent tone. It's actually one of the most twisting, structurally complex, and reactive interactive stories on PC.
While a Telltale game will let you carve your own path to a single ending, with only slight variations, it's actually possible for every main character to die in Heavy Rain. And the final outcome will be wildly different depending on the many choices you make across its ten or so hours of play.
The plot is Baby's First Thriller and the characters are humourless and hard to love, but there's no denying that this is an interactive story in the truest sense. Some of the QTEs are comically easy, allowing you to fail multiple times before you're really punished. But when a major mistake can, in extreme cases, lead to a character dying, the stakes always feel high. Inside the apartment, Ethan is instructed to cut off the last section of one of his fingers to get more letters for the hangman.
He does this successfully and while recovering from the pain, Madison finds Ethan, alerts him, and assists in his escape from Blake and Norman. Upon returning to the motel, Ethan forces Madison to leave and opens the shark origami to discover the next trial.
After Ethan eludes capture, Jayden rests in his hotel room. Refusing to take the Triptocaine, he begins hallucinating and manages to calm himself with a cold shower. Meanwhile, Scott and Lauren head up to Manfred 's antique shop. Manfred is able to specify the model of typewriter used to type the address on the envelope sent to Lauren's husband.
While searching through his office for a list of people who either purchased or had their machines repaired at his shop, Manfred is killed. Scott, believing that police interrogation would interfere with their investigation and lead to Shaun's death, wipes his and Lauren's fingerprints from every surface they touched in the shop. Then they leave. Ethan arrives at drug dealer Brad Silver 's home and must murder him to complete the Shark Trial.
Though Ethan sympathizes with the drug dealer, who is also a father, he doesn't hesitate to pull the trigger. Ethan then takes a picture of the corpse and receives the next hangman letters before leaving the apartment. At this time, Madison heads to Adrian Baker's house.
As Baker owns the apartment on Marble Street, she believes that he may be or know something about the Origami Killer. Madison is knocked out, either by consuming the drugged drink offered to her or by blunt force.
She wakes up tied to a makeshift surgery table and finds Baker caressing her and surrounded by bloody instruments. He attempts to harm her using a cordless drill but is interrupted by the doorbell. Madison is able to free herself from the ropes used to restrain her and a fight ensues. Madison kills Baker in self-defense and gets a business card from the Blue Lagoon to meet up with " Paco ," whose name was written on the back of the card. Norman goes to Mad Jack 's junkyard and confronts him, believing a car owned by the killer was stolen and sold to him by Jack.
Mad Jack refuses to cooperate and insists that Norman leave. While snooping, Norman discovers a corpse in an acid bath. Mad Jack returns and they begin to fight. Norman defeats and arrests Jack. Meanwhile, at Scott's apartment, Lauren reveals that she has stolen Manfred's list. They cross-reference the list from Manfred's shop with a list of local people who subscribed to origami magazines in the last 30 years. They find only one name on both lists: John Sheppard , a boy who died over 30 years ago at the age of ten.
Lauren and Scott find John Sheppard's grave and are told that John drowned as his brother watched helplessly. Lauren suggests that the brother is the killer.
Madison goes to the Blue Lagoon and finds that Paco is the owner of the club. She manages to impress him by dancing seductively. They go to his office, where Paco forces her to perform a striptease for him. Madison is able to knock him out and holds him at gunpoint. At first, he refuses to admit any connections to the apartment on Marble Street, but Madison is able to discover that a man by the name of John Sheppard rents it. Madison leaves just as Jayden arrives.
Upon entering Paco's office, Jayden finds him dead and fights his killer, who is able to escape. Madison and Ethan return to the motel and eventually make love. While dressing, Ethan finds Madison's cell phone and notepad and discovers that she's a journalist. He becomes furious with her. Madison begs for his forgiveness and Ethan, believing that she is sincere, forgives her.
The police arrive at the motel while Madison goes out for food. She is able to call Ethan's room, allowing him to escape and continue on to the last trial. Upon returning to his apartment, Scott finds Lauren taken hostage by Charles Kramer and is knocked out.
He wakes up and finds they are trapped in his car , which is now at the bottom of a lake. Scott is able to free himself, and depending on the player's actions, either frees Lauren or leaves her to drown.
If he frees her, both are able to safely exit the car. Scott, desperate for revenge, returns to Kramer's mansion , killing his bodyguards. Scott finds Charles, who admits that his son Gordi killed Joseph Brown as a copycat crime to get some sort of sick thrill, but was genuinely remorseful. Charles insists that this murder was a one-time event and that Gordi is not the Origami Killer.
Kramer has a heart attack and Scott has the choice to save him. After that, he leaves. Madison then pays a visit to Ann Sheppard , John's mother, in the geriatrics ward of a hospital where she is suffering from Alzheimer's.
She eventually reveals her other son's name to Madison, who leaves quickly. Meanwhile, Ethan follows the instructions to the address within the Rat Trial. There, he is given the option to drink a vial filled with poison that will kill him in 60 minutes. This will give him enough time to find and save his son and say goodbye. Ethan drinks the poison and is given the last letters to the address: Theodore Roosevelt Road.
Back in his office, Norman is busy attempting to piece together the final clues to the Origami Killer's identity. He reviews the video his ARI glasses recorded during his altercation with Paco's killer and finds that the killer has a gold watch much like the one given to lieutenants in the police department.
He pieces together the geolocation information and discovers the identity of the killer. He rushes quickly out the door and Blake takes notice, following him with the police. A cutscene returns to the fateful day of John Sheppard's death to reveal that his brother attempted to get their father to assist him and save John, but he refused to come.
In his last breaths, Johnny calls out to his brother and reveals that his name is Scottie. Returning to the present, Scott Shelby is in his apartment burning all of the evidence he has gathered connecting him to the crimes, revealing himself as the Origami Killer.
Both games carried over features from Heavy Rain : its slow-going gameplay, interactive control schemes and branching narrative arcs. But they carried over its flaws, too: its gratuitous shower scenes and emotional tone-deafness. Opprobrium rained down on Detroit for its wretched stabs at racial-political allegory, with one infamous segment giving a light-skinned android the chance to make a public speech emulating Martin Luther King. Even now, with just a decade having passed, Heavy Rain often feels like a curio from another age.
Subsequent games have imitated and improved its gameplay formula, like the great B-movie-inspired horror Until Dawn. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later?
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