REVIEW – Quantic Dream developer studio owns the genre of interactive movies. With Detroit: Become Human out on the market it is worth to take their PS3 classic out for a spin again.

 

This review focuses on the PS4 version of Heavy Rain which comes with remastered graphics. It is hard to imagine that the game for the PS3 was first released in 2010. More massive environments could be sometimes less detailed, but the character models and the important sets where the narrative unfolds are simply pieces of a masterwork. The character design is still with today’s standards excellent and detailed. The whole game has this dark and sad aura (most if the time it is raining), but every time you jump into an adventure, it is worth to discover your surroundings and just to enjoy the view.

Top notch story

You could tell that the story making and the casting of the actors were done with much effort. From the first moment on all the main characters seem very familiar, and I positively mean this. It’s like as if we have already seen some of the archetypes from our favorite novels or today’s popular TV series. A good example is our protagonist, the ultimate family man who cares for his children and is always there when there is a need.

The game starts slowly, and then it quickly builds up its momentum, and later throughout the entire story, it will stay very intense. Sudden turns and changes will occur very often partly of course based on our decisions. The only critic to heavy rain might be that sometimes it is too obvious what would happen if you were not able to complete a series of quick time events and let yourself run into a dead end branch of the whole game. Therefore I encourage you to take the full journey, try to complete all occurring events, challenges and to uncover the entire line of mysteries.

Of course, you can always go back to one of your favorite chapter and the game will offer to load that part of the story without generating a new save game file and this will let you experiment with those alternative decisions too.

Simple, yet full of twists

The main story seems plain simple, yet that way of carrying out is as mentioned before full of twists and turns. The key mystery to solve is finding a serial killer who leaves origami figures near their victims. With the parallel interaction of the main characters whom you’ll be able to control one by one you can build up some interesting synergies, and I often found myself wanting to have a switch between one or the other character just to analyze and to comprehend the actual situation from their perspective.

The game is not very long; it takes around 10 hours to complete the story. My advice is to try to dig into everything, even if it takes a little extra effort because it helps to unfold the most potential in our characters. Sometimes you will have to reload chapters and try to complete those quick time events again, but that is really the only critic I can mention about this game. If one of our main characters get caught or dies, then the plot may take a serious change, which might be interesting for a second or third playthrough.

-Misha-

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Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Developer: Quantic Dream

Genre: Interactive movie

Release date: March 2, 2016 (PS4 PAL)