HEAVY

I have a quite a bit of work to do, but the servers seem to be down for the district website. So what am I doing instead? Why, I'm listening to music and thinking of awful things to post on Twitter, of course. Yes!

I feel that I need to write about Heavy Rain, the highly anticipated PS3-exclusive adventure game from the team behind Indigo Prophecy: a game that never really found an audience back in 2005.

Heavy Rain really comes as a breath of fresh air in a market that is filled with shooters and casual games. At its heart, HR is an adventure game through and through. The game play is comprised of examining areas for clues, making dialogue decisions, boring daily activities, such as brushing your teeth. None of that sounds very exciting, true, but the mundanity is frequently broken by intense moments of peril. This is where the game truly shines, despite the fact that these scenes are simply QTE's. My roommate watched me play for several hours today and we continually jumped out of our seats and yelled frightened obscenities at the screen, which is something that we never do, not even for the most suspenseful films and TV shows.



The only caveat to the enjoyment of HR is the horrible fucking control scheme. You feel as though you are controlling a blind person in a tar pit. It's slow and awkward and even five hours in, I am still not used to it. For all of the money that Sony put into this project, you would think that they would have made some noise about the controls . . .

The game really is greater than the sum of its parts, though. It's a mature, dark, moving, chilling, and often scary interactive narrative. I wish I could stay home all day tomorrow and play that shit.

Booyah.