This post is spoilerific for Quantic Dream’s loved and loathed PS3 game, Heavy Rain. I already have two posts about the game here and here, but this one is different. Stop reading now if revealing the main twist of the story is a problem for you.
I mean it.
Really.
Still here?
Awesome – let’s dig in.
First, I want to make it clear that I really really enjoyed Heavy Rain. I think it is more than successful overall in what it sets out to achieve, and it is fun and engrossing. I do not believe it to be perfect, for a string of relatively little things, and one big piece of narrative fail. Despite this bit of nonsense that I’m about to dig into, I would still rate it about a 90 on a scale of 100, which means I must have really liked the rest of it given how much of come to really dislike one particular bit.
Heavy Rain places you in the lives of four main characters – Ethan Mars, who’s quest for his kidnapped son Shaun is the backbone of the story, journalist Madison Paige who becomes embroiled in the search, and potentially with Ethan, FBI agent Norman Jayden who is brought in to assist the local police department, and Scott Shelby, a local private eye who is ostensibly acting on behalf of the families of other young boys who have been kidnapped by the same serial killer that has kidnapped Ethan’s son. You are afforded a great deal of control of each of these characters, during multiple sequences or chapters devoted to telling that character’s part of the story, and have significant influence on their actions and decisions. You are also in some scenes, with the press of a control, privy to their private thoughts about the situation they are in. (These private thoughts give you some amount of guidance, if you wish, in which actions or dialogue responses you may want to take with the character.) The key here, however, is the degree of control you have over the characters except for one key moment in the story. And therein lays the rub.
If you’ve played, you know the scene I am talking about. Scott Shelby, accompanied by a woman named Lauren (who is a prostitute and who’s own son was a prior victim of the same serial killer Shelby has told her he’s hunting) go and speak with the owner of a repair shop (clocks and typewriters, apparently) about tracking down a clue in the form of a message typed using an old typewriter. The two of you show up in the store with you in control of Shelby and Lauren tagging along not under your control. You speak with the store owner (an old friend of Shelby’s) about the message in question and he goes off into the back to check his records. Once he does, the player loses control over Shelby as the camera lingers on Lauren engrossed in a small figurine atop a display case. The clocks all chime loudly and oddly and then the player has control over Shelby again who declares that he should go in the back to check on the store owner… and when you guide him back there you discover that the old man is dead, apparently killed literally moments ago by the serial killer.
Except, as the climax of the story reveals, Shelby is the serial killer. So, during a scene/sequence where the player is supposed to be completely in control of Shelby the game removes that control, stages a scene out of sight where Shelby kills the man, and then returns control to the player who doesn’t know what the character he’s been controlling just did.
Um, no. That is all shades of wrong.
Narratively, the game has broken faith with its player. If I am in control of a character then I am in control of that character. You cannot empower the player in that manner and then through slight-of-hand have the character do something that the player is unaware of right under his nose. It means that I as a player cannot believe in the agency I have with that character, since it’s clearly a sham. I cannot begin to explain how much of a cheap trick this is, and one that diminishes the overall experience of the game. My decisions, my choices, become meaningless.
I think the game plays fast and loose with Shelby most of the time you are playing him, since while it’s possible to interpret many of the actions available to him as appropriate for a serial killer pretending to investigate his own crimes so as to cover up any evidence he may have left behind it is again playing narrative Three-Card Monte with the player. I can appreciate the shock of discovering the Shelby is the killer, but too often his actions and thoughts are written so as to be subject to interpretation so carefully that it feels like the character would have to know that someone (the player) was spying on him constantly. And in this case it’s the authors of the story who know the player is “spying” and write things so manipulatively that you don’t think Shelby could be the killer, until you look back on his actions with the knowledge that he is.
If you were a participant in the story, someone other than Shelby, looking at the private eye’s actions one way through most of the story, and then with more insightful eyes once you learn he’s the killer, that’s fine. That makes sense. But while you are playing that character? That’s chicanery.
Additionally, when you go in the back to “check on the old man” (who is already dead), Shelby reacts as if he is surprised and then you are able to control Shelby quickly investigating the scene which all plays out as if Shelby did not know the man was already dead. Why would Shelby behave like this? In case Lauren wandered in (which she does eventually), but that’s an iffy maybe? The bottom line is that there is no reason for the selection of actions you the player have at your discretion for Shelby since he knows he’s the one who did the killing! (Why, for example, stick your head out the open back window to see if the killer escaped that way – and knowingly leave fingerprints doing so – if you just moments ago opened the window yourself to make it look like the killer escaped that way. Who are you trying to fool… yourself? Narratively this is terribly shaky ground.)
Frankly, I can tolerate the narrative tap-dancing that occurs to keep the player from knowing the killer is Shelby until the end. It is him committing murder without me knowing while I am in control of him, during his scene, that breaks it for me. I’d be more accepting if say I was controlling Ethan, or Madison, or Jayden and not Shelby during a scene where Shelby went off to do his dastardly deed… but I am not. I am puppeting Scott Shelby and while the camera distracts me he goes off and commits murder. That’s not cool.
I look forward to seeing what Quantic Dream and Heavy Rain’s primary author/designer David Cage does next… but whatever it is, when I play it, I’m going to carry with me the nagging suspicion that the story is lying to me.
Story by Design 