This incessant whining about graphics bothers me a bit, but perhaps it'll call attention to the rest of the game, sometime... So far the only thing that has come out of it is "omg qtes like, suck" and such.
Madison looked around the front of the house and checked the mailbox. This was our first look at how the interaction of this game would take place. Whenever Madison would approach an interactive element, a small directional queue would fade into view on the bottom right corner of the screen. Pushing that direction would coax Madison to do that action. Speed and rhythm counted in these sections. For example, you could open the mailbox very slowly or quickly; even though the segment looked like a cutscene, you were still in control.From just a few minutes of searching, Madison found women's catalogues in the mail and discarded heels in the garbage. With a note of caution, Madison proceeded up to the front door. Most of the following actions were completely controllable during the demo -- even elements that seemed like they were relegated to cutscenes.
On the front porch, Madison knocked on the door but didn't get a response. The next element of interactivity was revealed here, when a separate queue popped up on the lower left corner of the screen. A set of words were written in a circle around the small icon of a controller. Tilting the controller in the direction of a word or phrase would make Madison speak those words. She called out White's name and yelled hello a few times before walking away. After checking a few more things around the front, Madison headed into the backyard.
Finding that the back window was too high, Madison -- again, using contextual directional inputs and movement controls -- moved a few barrels over to the window in order to make it into the house. Tapping a button repeatedly, she forced the pane open and slid inside.
Looking around, Madison made a few notes into her recorder and worked her way though the home. Again, you can interact with a number of different things, but what you do is completely up to you. Madison slowly walked upstairs and -- after noting the creaking floorboards -- proceeded to explore the upper floor. Then the attractive journalist made a chilling discovery.
Upon entering the bathroom, she discovered a body in the tub, blood coating the porcelain like paint. It was here in the demo that I found Origami Killer to be the most powerful. The emotional response of Madison as she nervously spoke into her recorder was incredible. Seeing her eyes dart around and hearing her charming voice suddenly falter expressed the perfect emotional tone.
The investigation came to a close when Madison arrived at the bedroom. It was filled with the corpses of women, properly stuffed, preserved and positioned around the room in utterly twisted normalcy. After taking a few pictures, Madison prepared to leave. And then (of course) the killer showed up at the home. Once he entered the house, the screen split in two and began to show White's actions on one side and Madison's panicked actions on the other. While White went about his daily routine, you needed to decide how to escape alive. Cage explained that there are a number of different actions you could take, but during the first run-through, Madison tip-toed over the creaky floor, snuck downstairs and made it outside. Jumping onto her motorcycle, and, a few well-executed QTEs later, Madison escaped unscathed.
But that was just one possibility. Cage brought the demo back and showed us that Madison could be discovered by White, she could fight him, or she could even die. Seeing Madison fight the knife-wielding killer was pretty thrilling, because buttons associated with particular items on screen would animate on top of those objects. For example, after being knocked onto the bed, Madison madly clawed for something to defend herself with. As the killer reared back, the camera shook around and you could make out a button prompt stuck to the side of a nearby vase. Hitting it in time would cause Madison to snatch it up and crash it against White's head, buying her more time to escape.
My descriptions can't properly convey how atmospheric and emotional Heavy Rain (Origami Killer) was. This is a game you need to experience yourself. Sure, at its roots it's just an adventure game, but its execution is brilliant so far. Cage ended the demonstration by noting that there will be around sixty scenes like that to play through and no matter what happened, there would never be a game over. Even having a character die, the story would continue on and be influenced by your actions.
Heavy Rain will be exclusive to the PS3 and I can't wait to play it from start to finish. The designers of Quantic Dream might have an emotional masterpiece on their hands.
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It shows a female journalist investigating the house of a taxidermist, with her starting outside to search for clues. She eventually makes her way upstairs and discovers murdered women in a room right as the taxidermist arrives home, presenting gameplay where she has to tip-toe and hide to escape without being caught or, ideally, seen. In my experience, it's the closest a game has ever come to feeling like a horror movie, helped significantly by superb visuals and character models as realistic as anything else out there.After demonstrating the scene once, with a successful escape out the garage door -- and a short laugh at the end when the character's motorcycle takes a few tries to start -- Cage loads the game up a second time to show an alternate approach. This time the character makes noise, so the taxidermist hears her. So she then has to move without getting caught, hearing calls like "Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty" and "Come on, visitor, show me your face" in the background as her heartbeat volume rises. Eventually, the two come face-to-face, and button-pressing minigames appear on the screen for quick movements: tap Triangle to run down stairs, tap Square to hurdle a ledge, jam on Triangle to try to open the garage door, etc. You'll have some control within these sequences -- you can choose different paths by changing your point of view, and you can jump back and forth over the ledge if you want -- but mostly, these scenes continue the theme of making things look as pretty as possible while being simple to control.
Because of the way the scene played out the second time, complete with the taxidermist chasing the character outside as she sped off on her motorcycle, Cage notes that the story surrounding this scene would be different than if things had gone as they did the first time around. It wouldn't be a simple process of sending the police to his house for an arrest because of his awareness. Apparently, there are enough different options that under the right circumstances, you'll even be able to kill the taxidermist.
Once Cage finishes showing this second playthrough, however, he returns to his point about not reading too much into the scene, saying that the full game will feel more like a "dark thriller" than a horror movie. "Imagine many scenes like this, each one having a different context, a different scenario," he says. "I don't want you to believe that Heavy Rain is a story of serial killers, and you're stuck in many houses, and you need to escape, and each time it's the same game."
Yet with little more than a promise of "themes never used in games before," I find myself as excited for the game as I have been for any in recent memory, and the majority of that comes from the similarities to Indigo Prophecy. That game wasn't without its faults, but conceptually, it was incredibly refreshing, and it's rare to see a game that experimental with a significant budget behind it, which added up to one of the most memorable games I've ever played. And now to see that approach evolve, with some of the best graphics in the industry, makes Heavy Rain hard not to like.
I'm not sure if my excitement comes from Quantic Dream's talent, or because they are the only ones attempting games of this sort, but there's something important worth paying attention to here.
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