Deleicht.dk a world of games and me

Heavy Rain – The best movie I’ve starred in…

Heavy Rain - Hold-up scene

So I've been playing Heavy Rain heavily this week and, although I'm not done yet, it's already the best movie I ever starred in (thanks Brian, you know what I mean). It starts of amazingly slowly....actually so slowly, that it killed my desire to play for nearly half a year. Then all of a sudden, one day with too much time...I took it back up, and I haven't look back.

It's funny that I like it, because the game isn't fun at all. It's got bad controls (moving and camera I mean), it has frustratingly slow animations (when you do them the third time because you forgot which thing to take from the medicine closet) and it's action sequences are based on quick time events. So why is it that I'm compelled to get up at 6.30 in the morning to squeze in an hours play before work? The answer is that this is a movie, not a game. I'm directing, starring and producing my own movie...and it's epic FUN!

I'm trying to play out the movie as I would "in real life"...like that time when I had to decide wether or not to crawl through a tunnel full of glass to save my kidnapped son...and yeah, I would do it you know! Espcially if Madison would come by and heal my wounds with bandages and pills - win! Anyway; Heavy Rain is thick with athmosphere and interesting choices...often these choices are taken on pure intuition in the spur of the moment, which is the thing that makes them interesting. Often I'm left with a sense of "hey wow wait what" after a scene, why did I make that choice? Any rational human being would have done the opposite...but that's the fun part, you're not allowed to take well founded intellectual choices, you take choices based on pure instinct.

Like in real life you just react, you just answer the questions and you just DO. I'm amazed at how well Heavy Rain simulates this. Yes the controls are bad, yes the gameplay is sometimes slow as hell and yes it's based on quick time events, but the decision-making is wonderful, intriguing and very enjoyable indeed.

You should play it...just to check up on yourself - how would you react with a gun in your head and adrenaline pumping? It's not real life I know, but it's equally fun none the less...and there's no risk of you or your family dying, which is a good thing.