#Heavy rain black character manual#

For all of Heavy Rain’s much vaunted pretensions of being the first great mature video game narrative, it fails. It’s not as mature as it thinksĭisappointment time. Thanks to some sharp cinematography, canny direction and the illusion of spontaneity afforded by the branching action scenes (even a successful fight can take two or three different directions before you win), Heavy Rain’s combinations of button taps and stick tweaks can feel as gratifying as lining up a headshot in real time. Need to find a route out of a locked room? Just fulfil the QTE requirements of each possible exit until you trigger the one that actually works.Īs for the numerous hands-off sections, in which your character’s actions play out automatically and your QTE inputs simply dictate the success or failure of a certain action, they feel much more immediate than you might expect. It’s no more taxing than eliminating the villagers with the filler dialogue in order to find the quest-giver in a JRPG. Rather than finding the right object to pass an obstacle, you’ll usually just investigate your surroundings until you find the element that moves the plot along. You see while Heavy Rain steadfastly follows the old genre trope of identifying and interacting with usable items and characters in the immediate environment, you’ll rarely ever have to think about what to do with them. Those of you hoping for a grand renaissance of the good old point-and-click are going to be disappointed.

'Augmented cinema' would probably be the best term to use to describe Heavy Rain, and as a sensory experience there’s nothing else like it around today. The QTE commands frequently even approximate the physical actions your character has to make in the game world, further adding to the immersion, even if a few become so unnecessarily convoluted that you can occasionally run the risk of running out of fingers part way through.

So that’s how it works, but what's it like to play? Is it an adventure game? Is it an interactive movie? Is it the joyful union of cinema and game so long coveted by Kojima’s four-day-long Metal Gear cut-scenes? Heavy Rain is a tricky one to pin down in truth, and it’s probably better explained by detailing what it isn’t.Ībove: The perilous results of Heavy Rain's more demanding QTE inputs

There are multiple versions of many scenes to accommodate this branching, and more than a few that you’ll only see if you take a certain route. Regardless of personal success or failure, Shelby still got the result he needed to further the plot in the predestined direction, but in other scenes your actions might lead to a different outcome, resulting in a different story branch for your character, the existence or non-existence of a character relationship, or even the death of a protagonist or important NPC.

#Heavy rain black character manual#

We could also have kept our hands in the air (dropping them was a manual action, performed by letting go of L1 and R1) and talked the robber into leaving. One approach led to a quick and easy victory, while the other led to a botched confrontation.