5 Reasons Why Heavy Rain is One of The Best Games I Have Played This Year.

I have always been partial to storytelling in video games. In fact, my favourite game of all time is Telltale’s: The Walking Dead and I can still remember the gut-wrenching ending to the first season to this day. No game since then has affected me in the way that it did, and from that day onward I started to truly believe in the legitimacy of video games as an art form.

Fast forward to ten years later and I have decided to check out the choose your own adventure game that popularised the genre: Quantic Dream’s, Heavy Rain. Although it’s been a long time since its original release—17 years in fact—the game still felt incredibly fresh and exciting to me, as if it could have been released sometime this year. Overall, there were many aspects of the game that I enjoyed, and here are just five reasons why it is one of the best games I have played this year.

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1. It Is Atmospheric as Hell

There are only a handful of games that I have played that even come close to conjuring the atmosphere of Heavy Rain – namely, Resident Evil 4, Limbo, and the demo of the upcoming indie horror game: Stray Souls. The opening sequence of the game is a great example of this, as it is a montage sequence that shows a series of close-ups of dejected looking faces, with rain sweeping the urban streets behind them.

The rainfall is a constant motif throughout the game and adds greatly to its atmosphere. It falls constantly, during the desperate action sequences of the characters, and only really abates when the characters are inside and during the ending sequence of the story when the sunlight is finally seen again. The rainfall really gave a feeling of forward momentum to the story and made me acutely aware of the passage of time. Similar to background music, the rain had a mesmerizing effect on me and pulled me into the world that it helped to build.

2. The Performances

Heavy Rain came out at a time when the standards for voice acting in video games were much lower. Times have changed since then, and nowadays there are the likes of J. K. Simmons, Keanu Reeves and even Willem Dafoe working on projects within the games industry. Despite this, Heavy Rain definitely felt like an anomaly in terms of the quality of its voice actors as the cast did a great job of lending believability to the characters.

Personally, I was entranced by Pascal Langdale’s character of Ethan Mars, and strongly felt his dejection and loss of hope as the chances of finding his son became an increasingly distant reality. But Norman Jayden, played by Leon Ockenden too, was brilliant, and despite both of them being British in real life I fully believed the North American accent that they were both sporting. The facial recognition technology was also very believable and did a great job of capturing their performances, which is probably why it’s been used in so many games since.

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3. The Locations

Heavy Rain is set within a multitude of contrasting and surreal locations – a playground, a nightclub, and even a hallucinated train station filled with the unmoving apparitions of people. Despite their differences, they are all rendered with a unique charm, and the variety of the environments did a great job of keeping me engaged throughout my long playthrough.

For example, it was helpful that after witnessing a tense talk between Ethan and his wife about their son’s disappearance that the game would cut to Detective Scott Shelby as he strolls casually through a grocery store. This added levity and variety to the oftentimes nail-bitingly tense nature of the story.

The mix of surreal and real environments did a great job of helping me imagine the real and internal struggles of Norman Jayden and Ethan Mars too, as they struggled with their own demons on their journey to finding the origami killer. Additionally, even though the game has aged quite a bit, I was still very pleased with the visual presentation overall and felt like it held up to modern titles that are released within this genre.

4. Multiple endings

Multiple endings are not an anomaly in video games today, but seventeen years ago when Heavy Rain came out, they were. This makes it especially impressive to me that the game features over a dozen unique endings, all of which portray different outcomes for the characters that are based on the decisions made by the player throughout their playthrough.

Personally, on my first playthrough, I ended up with the ending of Madison Paige gaining a book deal of her experience with the origami killer and Norman Jayden being almost entirely sucked into the virtual world of ARI. Overall, I was happy with the endings for the characters that I got, although I did slightly cringe at the appearance of Norman Jayden on a talk show as I felt that it clashed tonally with the rest of the game. Nevertheless, the fact that the developers of this 17-year-old game were able to write enough endings to represent the diverse choices made by the players was very impressive.

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5. The Soundtrack

Although often underappreciated, a good video game soundtrack can do a great job of pulling in the player during tense and critical moments. In my opinion, Heavy Rain has one of the most iconic and unique soundtracks that I have ever heard, which is due to the brilliance of composer Normand Corbeil.

My personal favourites are ‘Ethan Mars’ theme’, which plays during the opening cinematic and ‘Painful Memories’, which plays after Ethan’s son, Jason, dies after getting hit by a passing car. Like any good soundtrack, these songs have melodies that help establish the atmosphere of the game and even just hearing them pulls me back into the game and my memories of playing it.

From the voice performances to the soundtrack and the remarkable atmosphere, Heavy Rain manages to be both a gripping mystery detective story and a moving family drama without ever being too sad or overwrought in the process. Even as a lover of these types of games, it still has totally taken me by surprise by how incredible it was.

There are five reasons why Heavy Rain is one of my favourite games that I played this year. Have you played Heavy Rain, and if so, what did you think about it? Let me know in the comments, and until next time.

Thanks for reading,

Oliver