Jason! Jason! Jason! Jason is now on PC with Heavy Rain
Wakka wakka
Quantic Dream today bring to PC perhaps the best of David Cage's PlayStation-exclusive QTE storysprawls, Heavy Rain. I'm damning with faint praise there, but the murder mystery told through the perspectives of four characters is an interesting one at times. Also, it's hilarious to repeatedly fail QTEs to shake a carton of orange juice then just stand there with your digiman staring blankly as the camera dramatically shifts around him. Heavy Rain does have a PC demo so you can see for yourself. Quantic's Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human will follow over next few months.
I'll refer back to my own earlier description of the game:
"Heavy Rain is a murder mystery about various folks tracking a psycho killer (qu'est-ce que c'est?), a game which undercuts itself in a ludicrous way and is best known for the ha-ha-hilarious bit where your kid gets 'napped and you roam around a shopping centre mashing a button to scream his name. Promising at times, inevitably fucks it into the bin as all Quantic Dream games do."
That was a little curt, a little too sassy, so let me be clear: the writing is awful, and Quantic Dream filling their digiworlds with QTEs for mundane movements only makes them feel more hollow. If my game dad can be mystified by the challenge of opening a wardrobe door, you've created something ludicrous that I will only find funnier the more you insist it's MATURE. However, this does mean it has the funniest slapstick routine ever committed to binary (music not the original, obvs):
Heavy Rain is out now exclusively on the Epic Games Store for £16. The demo is over here.
Beyond: Two Souls, the game starring Ellen Page as a supernatural superspy (also the game which caused Ellen Page's lawyer to send probing e-mails after it was discovered Quantic Dream had attached her scanned 3D head onto a nude body), will be next. A demo is due this Thursday, June 27th, and the full game will follow on July 22nd. Detroit: Become Human, the game about oppressed sentient android slaves which David Cage has either the gall or stupidity to insist draws no parallels to slavery and racism in America, will get a demo this summer then launch in the autumn.
"Heavy Rain has always been a very special project to me," director David Cage said in today's launch announcement. "It was the first time I was writing about my personal experience as a father, the first time I created a game based on something I experienced in real life. Years later, millions of people around the world have shared the emotions I felt when I lost my son in a mall, and have answered this simple but deep question: how far are you prepared to go for someone you love."
Frankly, I don't think much of David Cage's parenting if his reaction to losing his son was to burst out laughing while shouting his name over and over and laughing and shouting and laughing and laughing. And did he really try to find his kid in Westfield by cutting off his fingertip, drinking deadly poison, and murdering a man? David, this is... is this a confession? I mean, I'd go for a little less stonewalling around reports of serious workplace problems at Quantic Dream, but you probably should also confess if you done a murder.