Heavy Rain is often lauded as something that drastically changed the game industry. The mistake here is assuming that it’s a game at all. Heavy Rain is best described as a poorly written interactive movie. Well below even the bad movies of generations past, it does a disservice to call this a narrative arc, as a narrative has an element of distinction about it. In Heavy Rain, you’re given limited freedom to manipulate vectors that pull the story like some sort of choking moron (or just a particularly idiotic lash-shaping minigame).
Novel actions are replaced by making actions that should be simple, difficult. Heavy Rain retains a constant, staunch ignorance of such interaction. So much ignorance, that by the end of the game, the characters themselves won’t have kept with the story, often recalling events that never happened, or creating memories from the ether. There’s something remarkable about how Heavy Rain has managed to make idiots out of everyone in the game industry, particularly with so many poster boys defending it as though there was merit to defending a bad murder mystery no one had ever heard of.
However, everyone in the industry has heard of Heavy Rain, and there’s something deeply disturbing about how praising the average makes up for any glaring problems. Or, more to the point, how a game that will play through by itself without ever needing to be interacted with could be considered a game. Fatale pulls this stuff too, and is equally praised. Art is indeed whatever you can get away with, especially these days.
That too is part of the problem. The nervousness of the game industry as to whether or not it’s art. It’s actually rather surprising that artistic acceptance became an issue to the medium, since synesthetic experiences are some of the most powerful an individual can have. There’s a shared denial that videogames aren’t an artistic medium, and the primary reason is because nobody wants to talk about why. Nobody wants to actually educate themselves on what’s important in an artistic experience.
So instead, we get games like this, and banter that goes around in circles about this game or that game justifying the medium, rather than simply discussing the medium itself. Heavy Rain is further proof of the denial of the game industry. The industry is so uncertain about what it is, that it’s not even willing to challenge itself. The problem with mediums like videogames is that individuals are not challenging themselves, they expect to be challenged. And in a certain respect, they are, but in a way that enriches them intellectually is rare, because the medium is not challenged. If all challenges are external, the internal problems of the medium and those at the heart of the human condition can never be addressed.
Recommended: No