Even now, with just a decade having passed, Heavy Rain often feels like a curio from another age. But as time goes on, people will look back less and less fondly on Heavy Rain ’s cruelty, its sexism, its stigmatising attitudes to mental illness and sex work. Heavy Rain ’s success proved just how desperate audiences were for mature, complicated crime storytelling in games – they still are to this day. In the light of those problematic misfires, it seems that Heavy Rain ’s ugliness is not just surface deep, but part of the very fibre of its making.
Opprobrium rained down on Detroit for its wretched stabs at racial-political allegory, with one infamous segment giving a light-skinned android the chance to make a public speech emulating Martin Luther King. But they carried over its flaws, too: its gratuitous shower scenes and emotional tone-deafness. But there is no reason to be charitable at all.īoth games carried over features from Heavy Rain : its slow-going gameplay, interactive control schemes and branching narrative arcs. Being charitable, I suppose you could interpret the game’s sexism as a misjudged homage to the insipid female archetypes found in old (and many not-so-old) detective films. Women in Heavy Rain are defined almost entirely by their capacitiy for sex and motherhood. Madison is one of few women of note in the game the second-biggest female role takes the form of Lauren Winter, a sex worker whose son had been murdered by the “Origami Killer” years before. Another crass non-sequitur sees her drugged and tied up in a man’s basement. After applying makeup and ripping her skirt, she inveigles her way into the club’s back office and stripteases to land what she can only assume is the big scoop. One low point sees her re-routed to a seedy nightclub for a side-quest of spurious journalistic value. Madison Paige, the game’s sole female player-character, is continuously leered at by the camera it takes only a few minutes of playing as Madison for the game to ask her to undress and shower. His drug habit, however, is treated with all the worst cliches, and the withdrawal tends to surface in such jarring bursts that it’s always tempting to trigger a relapse just to end the scene quicker. His is intended to be a narrative of addiction, which the player can either opt to overcome, or succumb to, depending on the merest press of a button.
FBI agent Norman spends the game suffering withdrawals from a fictional drug called “triptocaine”. Indulgent cruelty is far from the game’s only problem, however.
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