Heavy Rain game review: Press X to Jason

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So praised. So weird. So melancholic.

My biggest problem with Heavy Rain: Move Edition was that my neck couldn't handle playing it. When I played it for the first time in April 2015, I got terrible neck pain and headache for several days. It was just that my body couldn't stand the constant swinging of the controller. After that, I didn't dare to play this game for a long time.

I just don't understand these "movie-like" games where you can hardly play yourself at all. And is Heavy Rain trying to be a Sims game when you have to e.g. take a shower, take a shit and shake a juice can? It makes zero sense, it's just insanely ridiculous. Why not other games like Resident Evil have these stupid things? And just shaking the damn juice was the worst thing for my neck!

It wasn't until the end of the game that I was shocked. It was a real jaw-dropping moment. There are probably 17 possible endings, and of course I got the worst option: All the characters died. I didn't get to save the little boy. :( I killed one of the playable characters on purpose, the others died only because I'm so bad at playing. So who I hated so much that I wanted them dead? Take a wild guess.

 

I thought should I sacrifice my neck and replay the game just to get a better ending? Or even just to be able to rescue the kidnapped child?

 

So after a long break I returned to the game Heavy Rain. Like I said, back then my biggest problem was that my neck couldn't stand playing the Move version of this game. This second time, however, my neck, which was already completely shit, held up surprisingly well. Maybe it's because I didn't shake the juice can this time? It turns out that it's not mandatory in the game at all!

Life felt quite empty and purposeless after for a few days I focused solely on Heavy Rain. I played through the last chapters of the game so many times, because I wanted to see all the possible different endings (there are about 17 of them in the game).

About a million different things annoy me in the game, especially the gaps in the plot. No explanation was given for Ethan's memory lapses, origami, and why he saw people drowning. Why wasn't Ethan held accountable for the murder of the drug dealer he committed? At least you can't claim that he didn't leave evidence of himself at the murder scene... How did Shaun or the other victims survive for days in the cold rainwater without dying of hypothermia? Why was the killer chasing the Kramers?

Song: Press X to Jason

 

 

Heavy Rain: Who is the killer?

 

Heavy Rain game spoilers below!!

 

Be warned!

 

The killer in Heavy Rain is the private investigator who is investigating the case, Scott Shelby. As a child he had a brother who died by getting stuck to cold water. Their asshole father wouldn't help the poor boy.

Will there ever be L.A. Noire 2?

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The answer is of course no. The studio no longer exists. We (I) desperately need more games like LA Noire.

Warning: This blog post has a big spoiler about L.A. Noire

 

 

Here are some old musings from my first playthrough of L.A. Noire:
 

I managed to get through the game on a Saturday night. Is that a good way to spend Easter? I would have liked to watch Breaking Bad on Easter, but the DVD box didn't arrive on Thursday, but of course on the next post day, i.e. Tuesday after Easter.

On Saturday night, one street crime was still undone, and it bothered me when I didn't know which Desk it was. In the end, there were two options left, Vice and Arson. I found it on Vice the next day.

I only had 3-4 crime cases left when I accidentally read a big spoiler about the ending of LA Noire. I had already been wondering just how low Cole Phelps can sink? Demotions after demotions. I don't know how upset I would have been if I hadn't known about his death beforehand, because even now it felt bad. And that way of dying was very stupid. The whole damn game for nothing? And if you play through those cases or the game again, then its going towards Cole Phelps' death all the time? Make it make sense.

Well, thinking rationally, wouldn't it just be fair that at the end of all games the playable character would die, when they die quite a lot during the game anyway. Only if you survived the whole game without dying once, then the character could survive at the end, that would be fair. 

However, the stupidest thing about LA Noire is that suddenly, in the last cases, you have to play as a completely different character than before. There was no sense in that game character change. Really annoying and pointless. Took me out of the game, so to speak.

In LA Noire, it's hard to kill people, that is, pedestrians. They almost always manage to avoid the car. The best way to kill them is when the person has already fallen to the ground, for example because they were startled by a madman driving on the sidewalk. ;) On the other hand, in LA Noire, the police won't come after you no matter what you do, so you can cause a mayhem in peace. If only you could. I also had to try to kill my police partner. When I finally managed to do it, it was instant game over of course.

 

Perhaps the funniest coincidence was once when I died while walking towards the door of my own car. Just a small touch from a passing car, and I died. A bit of the same thing, i.e. a mere touch was enough to cause the death of another character later. A bit of a contrast to that was when in one of the cases, while chasing a criminal on foot, some machine completely crushed Phelps into a pancake. I don't really understand those deaths by a light touch, I've been properly hit by a car many times without dying. I just accidentally rammed my partner twice with a fire truck, and he didn't die.

I also managed to drop into the void and die that way. So I found a bug in the game. I went through the house and the next thing the car dropped in a white void until he died and "officer down". Unpleasant, because right then I was going through the city along its edges and I didn't remember where on the map I was going. I was looking for cars at the same time, I always had to go through all the parking lots and cars, for the Auto Fanatic trophy.

That feeling and that moment when you find the last car and you achieve 100% game completion. In the words of Homer Simpson: I am not easily impressed. Wow, a blue car. Sky blue. I was also missing one newspaper for a long time, and it happened to be the very first one. D'oh.

But what to do next? 5 stars from every case? I'm still missing some trophies. I already started getting 47,000 dollars in damage for the Public Menace trophy, they say it's best done by driving the fire truck to the gas station fuel pumps a few times. I already destroyed two of them. I already got more than 32,000 dollars in damage with that other guy once, but I ended the case too quickly. All those destroyed cars for nothing. The second time I started doing the same thing, but the guy got hit by the car and died just then.

 

LA Noire is one of my all time favorite games, and I have played it through countless of times. The above text was from my very first playthrough.