HEAVY RAIN’S CAGE ON THE CASE FOR NORMALITY
The most heartening part of 1up’s new interview with Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain director David Cage isn’t the part where he notes that they’ve entirely reworked the quick-time-event mechanics or the fact that the taxidermist scene shown off so far was created solely for demonstration and hasn’t given away any of the story itself.
It’s that he makes the case that Rain will be more about the banal complexities of real life, compared to Indigo‘s ‘fantastic’ final third:
We tend to believe in our industry that we need to tell simplistic or spectacular stories, where the hero saves the world, destroys evil, or has supernatural powers. This is because the videogame, as a medium, has been too immature to tell complex and subtle stories. I made this mistake myself at the end of [Indigo Prophecy], where I felt my story needed something spectacular because all I had so far was normal people leading a normal life. I realized that the “normal” part was the one that worked the best, and that it wasn’t necessary to save the world to tell something exciting anymore. Heavy Rain will be about normal people in real life, and I believe it’ll be much more emotionally involving, as gamers will easily relate to the situations and characters. This is a new approach. In Heavy Rain, you won’t be a superhero or a gangster. You’ll just be someone real.
That’s something we would happily like to see far more of.
Exclusive Heavy Rain Developer Interview
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