Editor's note: Dennis has a bone to pick with Heavy Rain creator David Cage. He contends that choices based around reaction time can lead a gamer to an ending he doesn't want. Watch out for those spoilers! -James
(Warning: Heavy Rain spoilers throughout. Turn back now or forever hold your peace.)
Betrayal is the only word to describe the emotion I felt during the conclusion of Heavy Rain. It quickly turned to a fit of apoplectic rage, which made me seriously consider putting my DualShock controller through my relatively new 46-inch plasma TV. Luckily, my wife managed to cut through my righteous indignation and advise me that it wasn't the television's fault. She was right, of course. It was David Cage's.
I could sympathize with Ethan and his plight. I hated that his older son was stupid enough to wander away in a mall when he seemed too old to do so — honestly, one of many implausible moments in Heavy Rain. The down-on-her-luck prostitute becomes a would-be private detective. The insomniac journalist turns out to be a pretty good nurse. The protagonist gets horizontal while his son is on the verge of drowning in a storm drain somewhere. If Heavy Rain wanted to impersonate a movie, it should have impersonated a good movie, not a twist-based narrative that felt akin to a bad M. Night Shyamalan film.
Ethan and his son were sympathetic characters. They were the narrative core of the interactive fiction. I personally couldn't have cared less about the rest of the cast; I just wanted to save Shaun. But I didn't because I failed to get Madison on her motorcycle at the end. I swear I pressed that "R2" button at the right time, but rather than driving into the sociopathic police Lieutenant giving "shoot to kill" orders without evidence, Madison skidded out and was put into a squad car.
I knew right then that Ethan was dead. I was playing the game with my wife at the time, and she reacted with annoyance when I angrily stated my intention to restart the scene. She just wanted me to play through it, and so I pushed on, but somehow I knew that this single event had sealed Ethan's fate. The moment of betrayal came when Ethan got shot.
The controller also decided not to recognize me hitting the "X" button to make F.B.I. Agent Jayden reach down and save Scott from falling into those grinders. I know I meant to save him, but the game didn't. Perhaps if I hadn't already been certain that Ethan was dead, I might have considered that bringing in the true perpetrator could have saved him.
I put up with a lot from Heavy Rain. Highly-contrived fight scenes paraded out as excuses to pretend I was actually playing a video game. Characters seemed to take every opportunity to pee when it was presented as an option and often didn't wash their hands afterward. A lot of tiring, repetitive sequences added nothing whatsoever to the narrative. I put up with it all just so I could see a father and his son reunited. Instead, the police shot Ethan repeatedly, and his son cried over his corpse.
I learned later that I could go back and replay that scene, and this is how I confirmed that getting Madison on the motorcycle was the pivotal moment that could save Ethan. That eight hours of gaming could come down to a single, clumsy set of button presses is such a lapse of game design that I still am struggling with it. Moreover, it was a betrayal of all the emotional connections that David Cage asked me to lend to his game.
Yes, I could replay the ending, but it was too late. If Heavy Rain was a movie, I'd already seen how it turned out, and Ethan died. Going back for a replay was like watching a bonus feature on a DVD with alternate endings. I could imagine that this is how the movie actually ended, but I know the truth. The movie ended the right way the first time. In my movie, Shaun is crying over the body of his dead father, which has been shot to hamburger, while the blood pools darkly underneath him.
Let Madison die. Let Jayden get chunked up in those grinders. Let Scott go free. I don't care. I can't even imagine what my reaction would have been if I'd triggered the ending where Shaun drowned. Video games should be about fun, first and foremost. The tragedy of a father losing his son, or vice versa, isn't fun. We don''t need Heavy Rain to convince any of us that video games are capable of evoking genuine, emotional moments. This would be one of the only excuses I might be able to accept for these endings — but only if Heavy Rain was truly breaking new ground.
I would love to ask David Cage what the hell he was thinking. I'd also request that if he should ever again feel the need to make an avante-garde film for my mainstream entertainment system, that he plug in a PlayStation 3 and a television in the lobby of one of the art-house theaters I go to specifically for a foreign film experience that may be depressing as hell.
Dennis Scimeca is the Editor in Chief of the website Game Kudos and a contributor to Gamer Limit.. If you tweet him @DennisScimeca, he may get back to you, but his shiny new toy (iPhone) often distracts him.