Bad Case of the Mondays

We had Monday off and I was just beside myself trying to find something to do. I slept in, and, well, that was all.

I'll use this space to wrap up a loose end from earlier last week. I had been playing Heavy Rain, a brilliant film noir style murder mystery game with an amazing spin on both storytelling and gaming. Watch:


To the untrained eye, or casual gamer, this peice will look like a movie, not a game; it'll play like one too. The gist of the whole thing is not how you play the game, it's how you think for the characters. Heavy Rain is sort of tough to explain: it is a narrative expereince, you control several different characters all in some way (most of which don't meet until the end or subtly cross paths at various midpoints in the game) surrounding the insidious murders of the serial "Origami Killer," known for taking young children as his victims and leaving a folded piece of orgiami and an orchid on their bodies.

However, the approach to solving this mystery is not straight forward gaming: mostly, you just have to be quick witted and press various button combinations when the pop up on the screen in order to react accordingly. Example: during the prologue to the game, you are playing Ethan, father of two and loving husband. He has just lost his son in a mall and is trying to run through the crowd to catch him before he stumbles out into the street. During this tense part of the early game, players learn how simple button strokes literally can mean life and death for these characters.

And as it goes on, the game gets more and more exciting. There are portions of gameplay that put the entire body of a character in gamers' hands, and those tense moments lead to nervous waiting for when something will happen, triggering another quick-time event.

This game is clever and new, a great little package that does a big thing: reinvent narrative gaming. I've always joked that when I run the school at where ever I become a professor, I'll teach a class on Video Game Narrative. This will for sure be on my list for that class.

From start to finish, I was completely immersed, invested in the characters, trying to help them solve their flaws, and right up until the end was completely wrong about who I speculated the killer was. We need more games like this, and I need more days off to play them.