So, unlike other games where you can shoot your way through your feelings, Heavy Rain bravely suggests that a person might just need to get along the best they can. I mean, Ethan might not even make it to the final scenes of the game he can die in his attempt to fulfill the Killer's demands, his plot unresolved. These people are up to their neck in the mire of self-loathing and guilt. It doesn't absolve Ethan, and it doesn't forgive the Origami Killer for his actions. The strength of Heavy Rain is that it doesn't try to fix any of this. The former plows through the self-mutilating, physically-taxing scenarios that are put in front of him that will allow him to rescue his child and prove that he is a responsible dad in the eyes of the Killer.
The latter creates baroque and complicated serial killing scenarios attached to orchids, origami, and rising rainwater levels in the city. It never comes the father, the only one who could help, is drunk and far away.īoth Ethan Mars and the Origami Killer operationalize their extreme feelings of responsibility and inadequacy. The one child, the surviving child, says he'll go get help. You do the interactions with the controller, the pulling and the button presses, but he doesn't budge. The camera lingers on the scenario as one child tries to pull the other out of the pipe. His brother drowned while he watched, his foot stuck in the bottom of a broken drainpipe. With the Origami Killer, we see the same kind of narrative. The world keeps going on, and despite any feelings to the contrary, Ethan has to be there to help his living son make his way through it.
It's a brutally oppressive, bleak series of scenes, but it feels profoundly real and tragic. Every character interaction that Ethan has is painted with the player's knowledge. Smile and provide a warm, strong presence for the child that you have while the child that died languishes in oblivion.
He has to put on a happy face: Push the merry-go-round buy the snack play on the teeter totter. He has to take him to a muddy, swampy public park. Instead, death exists in this game to put us in the shoes of the aftermath.Įthan Mars's son has been dead for a few months, but his other son still lives. Death isn't just something to be evoked to get us into the headspace of the vengeful dad.
Unlike so many other games, Heavy Rain doesn't play these profound losses as tragic backstory for the sake of it. Any moment, any accident, could pull someone across that line it could be someone you're responsible for. Heavy Rain holds tight to the idea that the line between life and death is perilously thin. How does one get over the loss of a child? How could a person ever recover from preventable death of a sibling? These are heavy themes that might smack of exploitation to some, but I've yet to really get over how Heavy Rain portrays these things. These two stories are intertwined thematically, and both turn the various narratives of Heavy Rain into a story of loss. The game opens with Ethan losing his son in a shopping mall before losing him forever to a busy street, and a reveal later on tells us that the Origami Killer is motivated by the negligence of his father that caused the death of his own brother. I want to avoid spoiling swaths of the game, because I think the game's "twist" is so badly implemented that it needs to be experienced fully and wholly, but in broad strokes the game eventually comes to be structured around dads and what the responsibility of a dad is.