GamesCom 09: Heavy Rain

“Heavy Rain” is a hard game to sell. “Heavy Rain” is barely a game to begin with, muses David Cage as he presents the game to the journos that have made their way to the Radisson SAS a few meters down the street from the revered halls of GamesCom.

We are shown a new scene in which Ethan Mars, a newly unveiled protagonist, spends an afternoon with his son. Cold stares, blaring sounds from the TV and a saddening atmosphere are the main characteristics of this scene.

Ethan Mars, the 4th and last character to be shown of the game before release, once hot shot architect, now a broken man who lost his older son in a crowd and subsequently in a car accident.

The TV is illuminating the night, not their mood.

In the scene which we are shown, you have an afternoon’s time to do whatever you please in or around the house: from doing homework with your younger son to shooting some hoops — it’s basically a more mature “The Sims”, only that the way you decided to spend this afternoon will impact the story-line you will get to experience.

As the afternoon comes to an end we put the kid to bed, then Cage stops the demo saying something is about to happen. We end on a cliff-hanger, then, in more ways then one. It leaves the onlookers wondering what is going to happen, how everything is going to fit together. Cage knows this, but he hopes that once the game is out for people to play, the realization of what “Heavy Rain” is will set in, just like it allegedly did for his previous work, the well-received “Fahrenheit”/”Indigo Prophecy”.

While “Heavy Rain” is already very impressive, mind a few technical quirks here and there, a dark shroud hangs over David Cage. His words are carefully chosen yet he struggles to get them out, the last year has made him more chubby, less confident, visibly nervous. He has no more nails left to chew. When he is not trying his hardest to explain his vision for “Heavy Rain” to a bunch of dudes in their mid-20ies who would rather be playing “Call of Duty”, he is staring of into the distance.

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.

I ask Cage if he feels understood. “No”, he replies. It is hard to present a game like Heavy Rain to the public, he explains; it is hard to choose where to start. Had he shown us today’s scene first, one would’ve assumed it was a very pretty “The Sims”. He instead opted to come out of the gate with the taxidermist demo, a vertical slice. What was the take-away point for most people? It’s a series of QTE-s, a maddening preposition to the game’s director.

Slowly wandering through the halls of GamesCom, there is no doubt about it, why these misunderstandings came to be. The sight of most of the visitors inspires a degree of repugnancy that is hard to describe without having experienced it first hand. A bunch of overweight, dumb, overly “hardcore” dudes looking for their next thrill-ride: “Call of Duty”, “Halo”, “Diablo 3″ — “Heavy Rain” has a hard time to fit. This game only offers such thrills seldomly. It is mostly focuses on exploration and story-telling. It is not exactly uplifting, either. It is a story of love lost in the struggle of every-day life. A story, that is very close to David Cage. I am afraid to ask why.

Flashback to a rehearsed joke, yet a profound self-realization: Our protagonist Ethan is watching a tape of his two kids playing in the grass. One of them cheerfully says: “When I grow up, I want to make video games!” “Please don’t”, replies Cage.

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