Heavy Rain Retrospective

"Heavy Rain" has now been out for a little over a month, so it's time to look back and see the wake left by the game meant to change the industry as we know it. How was it received?

Critics: "Heavy Rain"'s Metacritic rating is 87. There's a mostly constant wave of review scores from 100 on down to 70, with three reviews giving scores in the 40's. If you consider that a 70 is about as low a score that reviewers will usually give a serious title, these scores run the gamut. Many reviewers loved it, many hated it, and so they resolved nicely into an above average score.

Positive words and short phrases critics used to describe "Heavy Rain": momentous, revolutionary, incredible, emotionally engaging, transcends the current definition of a video game, ground-breaking, not just a masterpiece but an ingenious step of its own

Negative words and short phrases critics used to describe "Heavy Rain": flawed, disappointment, technical issues, plot that's shocking but not sensible, not good enough, mediocre to bad voice acting, unexplained plot twists, the spectre of what might have been

Sales: I hate VGChartz because their actual sales numbers don't seem transparent enough, so I can't tell what's real, what's current, etc., but I don't have any other reliable way of finding sales for any game. Regardless, VGChartz has "Heavy Rain" as having sold a little over a million copies so far. Which puts it already at exactly the same sales that "Shenmue" had over its entire lifetime. So I'd say the sales have been pretty decent for an "artsy" video game.

Peter Molyneux: But of course, reviewers and sales don't matter when Peter Molyneux ("Fable," "Black & White," "The Movies") has an opinion! Molyneux the game offered a glimpse of the future, but he was unable to play it for more than 90 minutes because the game world was too dark and emotionally engaging for him. That last bit is what makes Molyneux a bit like Fry in "Futurama": His stories always go on one sentence too long.