![]() When Cage talks about mechanics, he really means gameplay. They are what draw players in or alienate them. To strip them out fully would leave us with a CGI film. And unfortunately for Cage, mechanics do exist and are inseparable from gaming itself. If the aesthetics of Heavy Rain are disturbingly off-kilter for a game dedicated to setting an example in that area, then Cage has committed the far worse sin of backing those flawed images with flawed game mechanics. What do these glasses mean? Why didn't Cage play Condemned and realize that using standard detective tools in a gamey manner could be fun and tense? (In other words, there are in fact emotions that Cage cannot see in "mechanics.a thing of the past.") Why didn't Cage play Batman: Arkham Asylum and realize that super tech can work if it's portrayed against an overly-exaggerated art style? What does Norman Jayden himself really do that other characters could not? Why does crime exist as it does in a world where ARI also exists? Even if Cage is trying to emphasize the difference of his world from our own it would be smarter to set it in the near future, like 2015 or, easier yet, not mention the specific year at all.īut above all else, the glasses leave me with questions that Cage does not answer. These images would be better suited to Deus Ex: Human Revolution's Cyberpunk chic rather than Heavy Rain's Detroit vogue. The bright blue hues of the world seen through ARI and the fantastical head-spaces Jayden conjures out of them to work through his case in (Mars with a desk on it, the edge of a cliff) do not contrast with the game's normal world, and they certainly don't compliment it. Heavy Rain came out in February 2010, so this is hardly equivalent to 1982's Escape from New York being set in a dystopic 1999 and becoming "outdated" 20 years later. Speaking of surreal, in the oddest art/gameplay design decision I've seen in years Cage has Norman Jayden utilize a futuristic holo-computer/sunglasses named ARI to instantaneously detect evidence in the far-flung future of August 2011. I can't explain why it's presented like this-there's no satire of psychology or the State going on, and this is not Terry Gilliam's Brazil-and as a design it sticks out from the rest of the world's post-industrial decay. The psychologist's office is a sci-fi cathedral straight out of Neon Genesis Evangelion, where religious symbolism informs every facet. One particularly surreal aesthetic blunder in the game's art design is when Ethan visits his psychologist, voiced by David Cage himself, to spill his guts. Heavy Rain attempts to be down-to-earth in everything from emotion to art design to gameplay, but it's moments like these that jar the player, even if they do not notice it on a conscious level. It's all very stylistic, like a Hong Kong film circa 1980, but. A fight between Jayden and the killer follows, where they swing katanas, throw each other over desks and into glass, and pummel each other with endless punches. Since this is a mystery and Cage is not yet ready to reveal the identity of his killer, he appears in a fine coat, wearing a fedora, with a huge scarf covering everything but his eyes. Late in the game, one of the other player characters, FBI agent Norman Jayden, visits a night club where he confronts what he rightly assumes is a serial killer he's been hunting. ![]() I'm sure we can come up with reasons in real life for a man living in these conditions to own that TV, but in fiction we are not and should not be wholly "realistic." We only give impressions of life.Īnother mistake. Worse, it interrupts the genuine emotion in the performance by Pascal Langdale, Ethan's voice actor, like a scratched record. In the dreary grays of the townhouse den, it just doesn't fit. We are briefly reminded of Ethan's elitist house, and here Ethan is in a ghetto but still more privileged than anyone else around him could be. If your whole point in making a game is to portray the despair of your protagonist so that players feel his sadness, that TV is a misstep. He has moved to a poorer part of town, so giving him a rundown little house full of dull, muted colors is a solid (if easy) way to show Ethan's mental landscape.but then we go into the living room and see that all poor Ethan has to amuse himself is a 40 inch flatscreen HDTV. ![]() It is the first of many aesthetic blunders.Ī notable one occurs after one of Ethan's sons dies and his wife has divorced him. ![]()
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