Wading through the turbulent waters of Heavy Rain's narrative took a lot of time, effort and ability to skip over random plotholes, but the character that stood out the most as a strange entry in the narrative is agent Norman Jayden, a weird dude with fancy spectacles and a penchant for shaking and hallucinating stuff. While main protagonist Ethan Mars is wandering around shouting Jason at everyone and their mother, Jayden is entering crime scenes, using his fancy glasses to make everything highlighted and descending gradually into madness. Old Norman is responsible for finding the Origami Killer you see as part of the FBI, but what they don't know is the fancy technology with the glasses he uses causes him to completely trip out and he's reliant on a mysterious drug that makes everything nice again. The main problem I had with Norman was he just kinda felt like he was thrown in to the character list just for the hell of it. We already had an investigative cop in the form of Scott Shelby as a playable character, so Norman had to differ from him so they gave him a set of specs and a drug habit that made no sense whatsoever and set him off to save the day. Heavy Rain's plot was, for the most part, pretty good. I really felt it was let down by these sections overall and the game would have benefited from removing them altogether.
Dan Curtis is approximately one-half videogame knowledge, and the other half inexplicable Geordie accent. He's also one quarter of the Factory Sealed Retro Gaming podcast.
