10 Things You Didn't Know About Heavy Rain
We unravel some mysteries even deeper than the Origami Killer himself.
Whether you see David Cage as a pioneer of a bold new form of interactive narrative design or as a total creep with some questionable attitudes, we can all agree that, for better or worse, his games have been unique and influential. Well, apart from Beyond: Two Souls, which had the impact of a small fart in a reservoir. Developer Quantic Dream's methodical, cinematic works have inspired titles such as Life Is Strange and Until Dawn, and their contribution to the interactive drama genre is unquestionable.
2010's Heavy Rain was undoubtedly the studio's watershed moment. Made after their ambitious but flawed sophomore effort Fahrenheit and before their aforementioned disaster Beyond: Two Souls, the game was rightly well-regarded for its solid tone and then-groundbreaking presentation. While not as well refined on the gameplay front as most recent title Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain was certainly more focused. Its tale of a bereaved man on a desperate quest to save his kidnapped child from an idiosyncratic serial killer had a grounded, neo-noir-like resonance about it. The backdrop of a gloomy city undergoing a seemingly endless downpour was reminiscent of David Fincher's seminal work Se7en, and films such as Memento and Saw also had clear influence.
Over the game's four-year development, many ideas were trialled and scrapped, and in the decade since its release, many interesting tidbits have surfaced about Heavy Rain, how it evolved over time and what could have been had things gone differently...
10. David Cage Wrote 2,000 Pages Of Script For The Game
Heavy Rain is an incredibly dense game, with its multilayered branching narrative presenting the player with a near-endless combination of choices and consequences. To achieve this, David Cage wrote a script that was over 2,000 pages long. To put that into perspective, the average screenplay is between 90 and 120 pages - equalling roughly one page per minute.
Now there are games that top that figure - Hideo Kojima's writing immediately springs to mind - but what's impressive about Heavy Rain's script is how much of it will have had to depend on the previous actions of the player. While the earlier scenes would have been straightforward, later parts of the script would have required a huge amount of variation. Each scene would be dependent on not just which characters were still alive, but how those characters had interacted with one other previously and how their earlier scenes had played out.
To create a seamless script that felt consistent with every player choice and wasn't completely riddled with plot holes (though some did slip through) must have taken a significant amount of effort and attention to detail - especially considering that much of it isn't even experienced on a single playthrough.