Heavy Rain Review: Is Ethan Mars a Good Dad? We Settled It.
Paul finally got his Force a Friend pick and made Ryan play his favorite interactive thriller from the couch, old-school style. Clunky controls, unforgettable choices and 18 endings.
Heavy Rain (2010) is Paul's go-to game for new friends. He says, "Come over, I won't touch the controller, I just want to watch you play." He did it with his buddy Andrew, he did it with Josh years ago, and for his long-awaited Force a Friend pick, he did it with Ryan. We all sat on Paul's couch like it was 2002, passing snacks and shouting at the TV.
A heads-up: this is a mature game about a serial killer who targets children. It's dark. We'll keep things general and steer clear of the big twist.
What is it?
It's an interactive movie, basically a Choose Your Own Adventure book. You play four characters hunting the Origami Killer, who drowns kids in rainwater: grieving father Ethan Mars, private investigator Scott Shelby, FBI profiler Norman Jayden and journalist Madison Paige. Characters can die, and the story keeps going without them. There are 18 different endings, and they're completely different.
The genre is hit or miss for us. Josh hated The Quarry and loved Telltale's The Walking Dead. Paul loves Until Dawn and Detroit: Become Human but couldn't stand Beyond: Two Souls. Heavy Rain is the standout.
The controls are... a choice
Hold the right trigger to walk, and Ethan keeps marching two steps past where you meant to stop. Spin the stick to whisk scrambled eggs. Hold four buttons at once like you're playing Twister. And when a dotted outline tells you to move gently, Ryan mashed it every time. Josh estimates he nailed about 17% of those on the first try.
If it would have let me, I probably would have thrown that baby across the room with how hard I pressed.
He got the hang of it by the end (except the slow ones). And the quick-time events, which usually get a groan, really work here. Fail one and there are real consequences, like a scar you'll carry for the rest of the game or a character who doesn't make it. Play on the hardest setting.
The story
It starts sunny: a big house, a happy family, drama over the dishes. Then a tragedy at the mall changes everything, and the world turns gray and brown and never stops raining. Josh calls the shift a masterclass in storytelling without dialogue. Two years later, Ethan's other son, Shaun, disappears, and the clock starts.
The first couple of hours are slow. Josh compares it to walking out halfway through an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and Paul compares it to Breaking Bad's first season: the train keeps speeding up until you're going 100 miles an hour.
How far are you willing to go to save your son?
That's the question behind Ethan's trials, a series of increasingly brutal tests that send you crawling through broken glass and through a maze of live electrical wires. Each one is deeply uncomfortable, and that's the point. You're not just watching Ethan make these choices; you're making them, button press by button press. We won't spoil them, but watching Ryan go through them was half the fun. Where Josh carefully prepared for one trial, Ryan grabbed the nearest tool and got it done. ("My son's going to drown. I don't have time for all that.")
The other characters
- Scott Shelby was Ryan's favorite from start to finish: a big, old-school PI with a typewriter and a vintage car.
- Norman Jayden has a cool augmented-reality evidence system that's a little half-baked. By the end of Ryan's playthrough, Norman had gone fully rogue.
- Madison is the weak spot. We all agree her writing doesn't hold up. Then Ryan accidentally sent her out a window while mashing the wrong button in a burning apartment. "NO!" Paul had predicted that exact moment in the pre-dive.
Ryan's ending was one of the better ones. Watching him and Josh's wife lose it over a nervy final scene was the highlight of the whole experience for Paul.
The big question
Paul says Ethan Mars is a great dad. Josh says he's terrible. (He lost two kids! He forgot to feed Shaun!) Ryan was the tiebreaker:
He dove in front of a car. He went above and beyond. He did anything you could ever expect of someone who loves their child.
Josh conceded. The VGP podcast officially endorses Ethan Mars for Father of the Year.
The VGP take
It's like if the people who made The Fast and the Furious were told to make the movie Seven.
Paul gave it a 9.6. It's not in his all-time top 10, but it's above Stardew Valley and Apex Legends. Ryan gave it a 9.1 and calls it one of the best games he's ever played, despite the controls. Josh gave it an 8.8: unforgettable, with a better story than Hellblade II, though the controls drag it down.
It's about nine hours and very replayable. If you're an adult, have a PlayStation and like a good thriller, play it on the couch with a friend. Just don't give them a dying controller like Paul did.