Video Gamers Podcast - [Deep Dive] Heavy Rain - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Gaming Hosts Paul, Ryan and Josh are here with a doozy of an episode. It’s time to find out what Ryan thought of Heavy Rain after being forced by Paul to play it. We break down this iconic game, chat story, what works and see where we rank it on our video game leaderboard. It’s another awesome video game deep dive from your favorite gaming podcast!  Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Disratory and Ole Jake Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Hello fellow gamers and origami fans. Welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. Today we are deep diving one of my personal all-time favorite games, which I'll admit is not for everyone, 2010's Heavy Rain. Whether you love the game or not, or have played it or not, I think it's going to be a lot of fun to talk about here today. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, he should be so lucky as to have Ethan Mars as his own father. It's Josh.

Now, we're going to get this question answered on this episode, Paul. We are absolutely going to find out the answer to this question. Oh, I have it on my outline because I am firmly in the camp. Ethan is a great dad. No. You are firmly in the other camp and ryan is gonna be the tiebreaker ryan is gonna be the tiebreaker all right and then joining josh and me you can find him tripping on ice and tripping over live chickens in a supermarket it's ryan why the chicken crossed the road because ethan threw him across a grocery store. I still love the GoPro angle. Like, yeah, it's so great.

Or no, it was Norman, not Ethan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of characters in this game. There are. There really are. I am so excited to talk about this game. This is great. But before we do start our deep dive, Josh, I think you've got a review you're going to read.

I do have a review. And this one is a doozy of a review, possibly one of my favorites that we've ever gotten. You know what? If you haven't left us a review yet, please take a minute to do that. If you're on Spotify, you can rate us five stars. If you're on Apple, you can rate us five stars. But on Apple, you can also leave a written review and let us know how we're doing, what you like about the show.

And there's a good chance that we're going to read it like this one that comes in from Real Guilty. And it's titled So Good You Wish You Could Join Them. And it says, I had been looking for a video game centric podcast for months, maybe over a year at this point. But those I never found scratch the itch, so to speak. Thankfully, I recently found the Video Gamers podcast, and I think this is the one. Their production value is high with smart, creative decisions. Audio quality is great and no distracting background noise and no obnoxious sound effects when they transition to ads. Paul, Josh and Ryan have great chemistry. They share the

topic of conversation with each other equally and don't excessively belabor it. Even if one of them has an unnatural love of hero shooters and could probably go on about the subject matter for days. Their format is tight. They keep the regular show, which covers current games and gaming news to a healthy 30 to 40 minutes, but they also have deep dives that cover older games, which I'm all about, and that just eclipsed an hour. This consistency reveals a level of professionalism and craftsmanship that must be recognized. As a 38-year-old dad,

I think it's a good sign when you wish you could join a conversation with guys you've never met to talk about video games, and that's how good the Video Gamers podcast is. Keep up the great work, gents. Signed, Guilty. Heck yeah. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Guilty. good the video gamers podcast is keep up the great work gents signed guilty heck yeah yeah guilty you have an awesome review amazing review and i gotta say we've always said our goal is just

to sound like your friend group the way you would want to talk about games with your buddies that's what we aim for so i guess at least for real guilty it's working i don't know about anyone else craftsmanship's not a word that gets thrown around about us a lot but i'll i'll take it that's what we aim for. So I guess at least for real guilty, it's working. I don't know about anyone else. Craftsmanship's not a word that gets thrown around about us a lot, but I'll, I'll, I'll take it. Yeah, that's awesome.

So number one, thank you real guilty for the awesome, amazing review. And again, this is your reminder to everybody else that's listening that hasn't left one. Just, just,

just go ahead, you know, pause the episode, rate us five stars, leave a review. You might just hear your name. Rate us five stars. Leave a review. You might just hear your name on the show. Please. There you go.

We're not beyond begging. Please. Very nice. All right. So jumping into our conversation about Heavy Rain, I do need to give a couple of warnings here. So first of all, a spoiler warning. We are going to keep things general. At first, we'll talk about the general plot and the controls and

some of the things like that i'll even ask you guys to give like a short spoiler free review of whether or not people should check it out and then at that point we'll give a full-blown spoiler warning and then we're just gonna go all out we're gonna talk about all things spoiler then and then also we normally don't do this but I do want to issue a little bit of a content warning. This is a very mature game. I mean, I said that in the pre-dive from a couple of weeks ago. This is a game that deals with various types of abuse and child kidnappings. And we're not going to go into really detailed explanations of those things, but we are going to throw out some pretty dark terms.

So if you listen around younger kids, just to give you a little bit of a heads up, you might just want to be careful about that. Yeah. It's still family friendly. It's just going to be a little bit heavier format because this is the type of game that this is. Yeah. I mean, we're chasing a serial killer in this game. So by nature, we're going to have to talk a little bit about what happens in the game. All right. So let's start out by reading a description of the game on Steam. Experience a gripping psychological thriller filled with innumerable twists and turns. The hunt is on for the murderer known only as the Origami Killer. Four characters, each following their own leads, must take part in a desperate attempt to prevent the killer from claiming a new victim.

All right. So we're covering this game today because of our force a friend format, right? We talked about how it's been a long time coming for me to pick a game. Josh, just want to give the people like a 30 second explanation of how we do this. Yeah. So everybody's got that friend that you wish you could make play a game that you love or that maybe you hate. And that's exactly what this format is. So we do this thing called force a friend where one of us will get to pick another person on this podcast to make them play a game. We've been doing this for a little while now. We opened up the option

for listeners to hijack one of us that went over swimmingly because you know, we did listener hijacks for almost the past like 10 months. So poor Paul never got a chance to pick one of us to play a game. And then we finally got caught up. We said, Hey, listen, it's our turn again, Paul, it's finally your pick. And then you picked heavy rain and you picked Ryan to have to play this. And Ryan did. He's had two weeks to play it.

He beat it. And now we're here to talk about the game, to get Ryan's thoughts on it, and to find out what he thought about having to play this. Yeah. So a lot of my questions and outline will throw things to Ryan first, because he's had the freshest eyes on this. I have played through this game several times. This is my go-to when I make a new friend. If we're going to hang out, I'm like, hey, have you ever played Heavy Rain? And if they say no, I'm like, dude, just come over and play.

I'm not even going to touch the controller. I'm not going to tell you anything or give you hints. I just want to sit back and watch you play. I did this with my buddy, Andrew. I did this with Josh. Now I've done it with Ryan. Ryan and I, I got to watch Ryan in all three play sessions. Josh got to watch Ryan play about two thirds of the game and in the pre-dive. And if you want, you can go back two weeks and listen to the whole thing. But long story short, I basically said, I love when you get to make decisions in games and I love when they're story driven. Heavy Rain really fits that bill. And this game has 18 different endings. And this is not like Mass Effect where at the end of the trilogy, it's like, what color do you see destroying the Mass Effect relays? This is like

actually completely different endings. And I also said that I thought this would be one of the funnest conversations because this game is so bananas and like off the wall. This game drives some people totally wild and they think the game is trash. There are other people who call it a masterpiece. There's not many people that are like in the middle. There are some, but man, this is going to be fun to talk about. So Josh, you and I are coming into this already having experience playing the game. I had to pick Ryan. I assume you can't wait to hear Ryan's thoughts because Ryan was very good at internally keeping things until the very end of the game.

Yeah. And I am very excited about this. You had mentioned that you and I had played this game together a long time ago before this podcast was ever even thought up. And I had a blast with it. I'll say that right now. This game has always stood out to me. I really enjoyed that time together. I want to point out so that Paul doesn't sound a little bit creepy here about like, yeah, I like to watch people play this game. From the corner behind the bush. Like, Hey, you want to be friends? Have you played heavy rain before? But you know, the reason for that is, is that you get to make a lot of decisions in this game and those decisions matter. Right? And so this is one of those games with kind of a branching storyline where based on the decisions you make, that affects the outcome of the game. We said it in our pre-dive when you picked Ryan initially, that characters can die,

your choices matter. And so that's why it's kind of neat to watch somebody play because you just kind of see how their brain works. And we're going to pick on Ryan a little bit later on when we get in a little bit of spoiler stuff, because there's one mission that Ryan and I did very, very differently at one point. And it was kind of funny because I knew it was coming up and then watching Ryan play it really made me chuckle at that point because he just approached it absolutely completely differently than I did. And that's the entertainment portion of having a friend or somebody play this game. And so that part is why that is interesting to do. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And Ryan, I was going to say, we've kept you on the sideline a lot here in the beginning of the episode, but will you just kind of walk us through what your expectations were? What did you envision this game being before you even played it?

Honestly, I had no idea what this game was, what it entailed, anything about it. And it was really, really difficult not to look it up, at least watch a trailer. I wanted to be totally neutral coming into it and hopping into the first play session with you so i really didn't know what to expect i i knew you guys obviously raved about it i knew you had your arguments and you know i was excited to see why would ethan be a bad dad or a good dad you know so i was really excited to hop in and i know you know i trust your opinions on i love i love story too um making choices it doesn't matter as much to me as it does to you but i still enjoy that so i was just ready to buckle up and go for a ride

and the the part that was so cool about it too is us playing together it was like a throwback you know to our old days of playing games when we were young which was so awesome it was it was even never playing this game together it just felt nostalgic because that's how we grew up. We only had one system and we took turns playing games or we would just play couch co-op. So yeah, it was really cool. And I was just really amped to just get started. Yeah. I was wondering if there was like added pressure having to play and make decisions with us

or if it would be more fun by spending time together. But it might have even been a little bit of both. Probably both. Yeah, I would say it was both. I definitely wanted, because obviously there's so many different paths you can go that I had no clue what any of them were. You guys have played it multiple times. Well, probably not Josh. He doesn't play anything more than once. But wanting to make the right decision, but also just laughing and having fun with what happened. So yeah, it was definitely a little bit of both. Yeah. Now we have to talk a little bit about the genre of Heavy Rain. This is absolutely firmly cross-haired, right in the middle, interactive movie. I mean, this game does have like a little bit, if you want to call it like light puzzle

solving elements. It definitely has a little bit more action toward the final third of the game, but this is like a good old fashioned choose your own adventure book. I don't know if you guys loved those in grade school. I loved them. I mean, this is where you just get to experience a story. You have some agency, you make decisions, you get to see the consequences of those decisions, whether good or bad and see where it leads. And these are not always liked by people because some people feel like the gameplay is just not there. It's maybe too passive for them. So I kind of wanted to ask you guys, have you ever played a game like this before? If so, what comes to mind? Did you enjoy it? What are your thoughts?

So these are very hit and miss for me, to be honest. I can't quite put my finger on what makes a good one for my brain and what doesn't. We did cover The Quarry on this podcast, which none of us liked. We thought it was abysmal. often reference the walking dead tell the telltale series walking dead which is absolutely phenomenal paul you rave about the wolf among us which the wolf among us too maybe later this year um and so it's really weird because there are times where i just go this is just stupid man this game's not fun the acting is bad like i don't feel like my choices matter and then you know i kind of go like i don't like this genre but then there's a game like Heavy Rain where it just absolutely grips you. Your decisions matter. The characters are interesting. There's a twist or some story element that really makes you go like, whoa. And then you talk about them for a long time. So yeah, I would not qualify this as a genre that I would say I enjoy normally. But there are a few standouts to me that really shine.

And so it kind of makes me question my own brain sometimes because I don't know what that special formula is. Yeah, I'm trying to think of any other that I've played that are this intense on the decisions and stuff like that, like a selectable movie, basically. I'm trying to think. I can't think of anything that i've played i know recently uh bear grills has something on like on on netflix or something where you can it's an interactive show but you just click it with a remote and he's like yeah like banders yeah it's like the lions got out of the cage you save the tourist or go fix the electrical cage, you know, and then you can pick and stuff. My son loves it. So he was playing that the other day and it was pretty fun.

But as far as games go, I'm trying to think. I don't think I've really dipped my toes too much into this genre. Yeah, they're kind of all over the place. Like Josh, I either love him or hate him. I love Until Dawn. I love Detroit Become Human. But then I completely hated The Quarry and Beyond Two Souls even more. So yeah, it's really kind of up and down depending

on each entry. All right. So let's talk a little bit about the very opening of the game. Really just talking about the prologue. No spoilers yet. You start out playing as a man named Ethan Mars. He's an architect. He's got a beautiful wife. He's got two young sons, Jason and Sean. You definitely remember their names after playing this game. You're shouting these names a lot. And you quickly learn that this game has super goofy controls. We talked about that in the pre-dive.

Most of the complaints around this game are either around the writing or around the controls. And you have the ability to hear Ethan's thoughts. And it sounds very echoey, so that way when you hear the voices, you know that it's inside his own head. Now, this game does not give you any clear objectives. There are no waypoints, nothing like that in this game. You just sort of walk around and respond to what's going on around you, which I think is actually one of the neat aspects of the game. It's also divided into very short chapters. You tend to swap back and forth between these four characters very often. But Ryan, I kind of want to throw this to you first.

I feel like the first third of this game watching you play was a little bit rough because these controls are very weird. Do you kind of want to explain what the controls are like and did you find them to be kind of unintuitive yeah you could say that that's a word for it i had some other words throughout the playthrough that i would have used four letter words some four letter words and multiple others but um yeah it's it's there's a lot of ways to go about it it's just it didn't you never really, maybe until the very, very end, felt comfortable controlling the game. It was always kind of, walking was very troublesome. You had to hold your right trigger to walk.

And then if you just held it and didn't put the thumbstick, he'll just keep walking. And so then you'll like walk an extra two or three steps past where you're trying to go. And I did a lot of like turning around marching back and forth trying to get to the right spot oh yeah um you got weird uh controls where when you're trying to like pick up an item you go um with the right thumb stick up and then around you know clockwise or counterclockwise to do different things so it just never it never like was fluid and just kind of worked like i said until the very end you finally got used to these goofy controls and you started to be able to do it kind of just naturally but um yeah man those those were those were a big issue for me through

the playthrough now josh you and i got to watch ryan do. It was one of my great dude. It was great. Watching Ryan struggle to control his character. It's the slow one. The slow one was the hardest thing. There's also a camera angle that's a little wonky. So it's like if you're in a room, but you go up to the refrigerator, the camera angle might switch. But when it switches, you're still walking. So when it switches, now you turn around and you walk back out of the scene. And so you're getting this just back and forth camera angle.

It was like watching somebody play video games for the first time. Like, honestly, it was pretty hilarious to watch Ryan struggle with this. But then I will say, to your credit, Ryan, the second play session where we all met up and you played, you could obviously tell that you were starting to wrap your brain around it because you were getting a lot better at stuff like that. So I don't know why they designed the controls this way. Well, I think it's Ethan. Stop throwing the plates. I told you be gentle. Yeah. Because sometimes you're supposed to like rapidly tap buttons or you just push it once. Sometimes you have to do almost like the game

Twister, where you have to do all these things with your fingers, like hold R1, then L2, then triangle. Now you have to mash the X button and things like that. And then my favorite is sometimes they give you a little dashed outline, and that means you have to do the control very slowly because your character is trying to do something gentle like rocking a baby josh what percentage of those do you think ryan was able to complete the first time oh 30 no maybe you're gonna go like it went right every time 17 if it would have let me i probably would have thrown that baby across the room with how hard. Yeah.

He definitely did struggle with the, like, you need to go real slow. Like, you know, you gently pull the trigger and then Ryan would just mash it. And then, you know,

oops, he bumped the baby's head against the dresser or something. And then he's like, Oh no, what was that? Oh, so wild. And we also have to mention that this game is riddled with qtes

oh so quick time events were still relatively new i think back in 2010 i know now they're kind of like a dirty word and if you put qtes in games people kind of go bananas ryan since you're kind of like new to it here with the game being almost 15 years old, do you feel like the QTEs are a huge drag or does it work for this kind of game? Dude, that's one of the things that made the game, honestly, for me. Weirdly, right? Yeah, I love QuickTime events and I love like it is a playable movie and there is some parts where you have to interact and stuff.

But without the quick time events, I think it really would have dragged on a lot more because that added that tense, immediate, like, I'm playing this game. I have to hit these or something bad is going to happen or good. You don't know what the outcome is going to be, but you have to hit those quick times. I think it added so much to this game that it would have been severely lacking without it. All right. I got to back Ryan up on this one because I know there's people right now that are going quick time events suck. Like, what are you guys talking about? Good. Like it does help that I'm pretty solid at a quick time. I will. I got to give you credit. You did way better than me, like on my playthrough at that part. But I will

agree that I am not generally a fan of quick time events. I think it's just kind of lame. Let me control the character, not just push a button at the right time. But in this game in particular, the way that they're used is they generally always come with either a funny outcome if you fail it or a critical outcome if you fail one. There are points in the game where if you fail the QuickTime event, it changes the course of the game. Now, sometimes it could just be something like your wife telling you to be careful with the plates and you set it down too hard and she yells at you. And then other times, I don't want to get into spoilers, but it can be much more drastic if you fail them. But I think in a game like this,

their use of quick time events is you participating in the story and interacting with the character. And the way that they do them builds tension, it builds stress, and it just works. And I know that there's a lot of people out there that say, no, I hate quick time events, but this game just does them the right way to where you feel like they matter. Yes. And you have to put it on high difficulty. If you pass every QTE in this game, it's not going to feel as fun or as high stakes to give you like an example without going into spoilers. If a character swings an ax at you and you have to press a button to dodge and you miss it, you can get partially sliced across your chest and you will see that injury for the rest of the game. Like anytime that

character is not wearing a shirt, you're going to see that. And I love the fact that this game has those little flourishes and it does feel very immersive. You feel like you're taking the actions of the characters, even if it's a stupid ass stirring scrambled eggs while they're in a pan, it tells you, spin that right thumbstick clockwise, and you do it, and you see the whisk moving. And it really does draw you in to the story. Those are eggs? Oh, I know. I know. That was the worst animation of the game. So maybe that's a poor example, but you get what I mean. All right, we're going to go ahead and take a short break, and then we're going to get into the story, which is definitely the highlight of this game. This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy.

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Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game rise to it with the bmo eclipse rise visa card the credit card that rewards your good financial habits earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month level up from bill payer to reward sl Terms and conditions apply. All right, guys, the actual story of Heavy Rain. This is going to include just some very minor spoilers. We're really just talking about the opening hour of the game, going into the very first chapter. You are still playing as Ethan. The game kind of takes its time to show you that he has a very lovely family. He has a very uneventful life. The drama is over the dishes. And so you take your family out for a nice afternoon. You go to the mall and your son, Jason, wanders off after

you're buying him a balloon and you are trying to hunt him down. This is the birth of all the press X to Jason memes. You end up noticing that your son has wandered outside. You go out and you realize that he's about to get hit by a car. You try to jump and save him. The car ends up hitting both of you and your son, Jason dies and you go into a coma for six months. Now this is basically the end of the tutorial. It ends with your young son dying, which is like bold move, Cotton. Games don't start like this, right? So anyway, you end up waking up from your coma. Ryan, tell us a little bit about what's going on with Ethan and how does this set up the story for the rest of the game? Well, so after his son passes you know when he wakes up from the coma

you kind of end up you're in uh so he he's separated from his wife they get divorced and he's a single dad now and he's got an apartment kind of lost that beautiful life that he had before and the you know the apartment's kind of dumpy and and so he's trying to kind of get a hold back on life get a grip back on life and you're you're kind of have a weird relationship with your son you can tell things are kind of strained um because of everything that happened and uh and yeah then you just start kind of going on through through this kind of playthrough and and going back to that you know you walk around and do different things you've got to put your son to bed and get him ready for the next day.

All just kind of standard life stuff as the story starts to develop with where he's at. Maybe forget to feed him. No, it was on the wall, 6.30 or something, right? Maybe refuse to give him his teddy bear at bedtime. That's what's so cool. There were so many different, I mean, I know how you said, I think there was like 18 different endings, but imagine all the different paths you can take,

however many different paths. I'm sure they have a number with all the different choices. Like I give him his teddy bear, but I mean, I couldn't feed him for a while. He went and got, what did he get? Like chips or something himself? He went and got his own snack. Yeah, he's like, I'm hungry.

And he went and got a snack. And you told him he had to do his homework and he got mad. And then you noticed on the board, that's because you had it on the board. You're going to eat a snack and then do homework later. And so he reacted and got mad at you because you switched it up. And that's one of those crazy, there's so much. And to give kind of the listeners an idea, I guess a mental image is like if you press the left trigger, it pops up these kind of spinning little action icon things that you can do. So it's his thoughts of dinner or homework.

And you can pick them and he'll say a little bit of dialogue. And then you can pick from there what you want to do as you kind of explore the space. So that's how you progress in the game. You have to explore each space, figure out what you need to do, and look for clues, and then you kind of progress from there. And then depending on what you choose,

you'll get different interactions. Yeah. I want to say one other thing here too, because this is something that's hard to convey, but the beginning of the game is this bright, sunny, this guy's living his best life. Multi-million dollar house. Nice house,

you know, perfect family, all that stuff. And the way that the game transitions after Jason dies is one of the, like the best, like, I don't even want to call it subtle cause it's not, but you start to realize it.

Like everything is jury. Ethan's just got this haggard look. I don't even want to call it subtle because it's not, but you start to realize it. Everything is dreary. Ethan's just got this haggard look. His kid is just out of it at this point. The life is out of his eyes. I mean, that's what I'm saying. Exactly. When you go from this sunny intro to now this, it's like a gut punch almost,

but it's a weird... It's subtle in the way that it like comes across at first because you think, oh, well, you know, of course he's going to be upset, but it's like, it's just that transition really sets the tone for like the whole rest of the game. And it's, it's like a masterclass in like just game design and telling a story without necessarily using dialogue and stuff like that. And I have to give the game credit because you instantly go from like, oh, what a happy life and all this stuff to like, this sucks, man. This poor guy and his...

I felt worse for his son than I did for Ethan. Oh, yeah. Because I'm like, well, this kid just ain't the same anymore. Oh, yeah. It's very sad. And the game is constantly raining and it turns very Brown and everything is more gray and Brown in color. So this is kind of where things start to get pretty dark. So we've, we, we learned that Ethan has been suffering from blackouts.

He wakes up in the street. He doesn't know how long he's been out of it or what he's been doing. And we know that there have been a string of kidnappings where kids have been taken and then they end up being found dead holding an origami figure in their hand. And there are orchids that are placed near the body. So Ethan ends up having one of his blackouts while taking his son, Sean, to the park. And when he comes to, Sean is gone. And Ethan is holding an origami figure in his hand. He's also standing in an alleyway. So he's not in the park anymore either. Not in the park. So Ethan obviously got something going on upstairs.

Yes. So now all of a sudden, Ethan realizes, my son is gone. Am I the origami killer? Is the origami killer someone else who's taken him? My son's only got a few days to live. We know that when these children get kidnapped, they don't have very long. And so the game now starts swapping you between these four characters. You've got Ethan Mars, the father of Sean. You have Scott Shelby. He's a private investigator hired by the parents of the previous victims. You have Norman Jaden, who is an FBI agent who's been called in to help investigate. And you also have Madison, who is a journalist who's looking into the origami killer. So I wanted to ask you guys, and this is kind of where we're going to quickly end the non-spoiler section here.

Did this story work for you? Did you find it compelling? Did you want to learn more or did you find it to be uninteresting? I think in the beginning of the game, it's a little slow. Like in all honesty, and I think Ryan felt that too. Ryan, obviously you can back me up if you thought the same thing, but I will say that the first couple hours of the game is just setting the tone of the game and kind of introducing you to the characters and just even who the origami killer, this whole sequence where somebody's out there just kidnapping kids and then slowly killing them off. And I felt like it took a little while to get going in that regard. I will say that once it's going and you start to know who the characters are and you are introduced them like one by one and stuff like that, it really starts to pick up at that point. And then you get into like the back half or maybe even back third of the game.

And that's where to me, it just becomes an absolute masterpiece. And so I do think that there's people that probably get three, maybe four hours into this game and they kind of go like, well, yeah, it's kind of neat. There's some neat characters and stuff, but I don't get it. And it's like, it's almost like watching an M night Shyamalan movie, you know? And then just like leaving halfway through and then just going like, well, I don't understand this movie. Wasn't that great? Like you're missing like the payoff, you know? And so this is one of those examples where I think if you don't see the complete story, you're really missing out at that point because it puts everything together at the end of the game.

So would you say then that slow beginning part was a necessity to the game overall? I mean, there's probably ways they could have done a lot better, in my opinion, than making people bored for the first part of the game overall i mean there's probably ways they could have done a lot better in my opinion i could have cut an hour like then like making people bored for the first like part of the game you know do you want to me you know i'm going to red dead argument over red dead redemption that we have that has been ongoing forever yeah yeah yeah so you're on to me. I knew where you were going, Ryan. I think that I kind of, to mirror what you said, I think it did start a little bit slow. But to me, typically, especially because of what you guys have said and what Paul said about the game,

I knew there was going to be a good payoff. And I usually don't mind a slower start to things because I know that most of the time there's a reason, unless it's a bad story, you know, kind of wasted some time but um once you get into it there is the payoff so it is worth it it is good to know all the things that you did learn in the beginning when it was slow and and i think it was just a brilliantly told story and uh speaking of m night shamalan there was some crazy stuff that happened and some crazy twists.

And so I think it was extremely well done, just story-wise overall. Yeah. I mean, I think that's like a great spoiler-free review of the game. I mean, Josh, do you kind of agree? Or would you tinker with that at all? No, I think that's spot on.

You know, I will say, I think it helps to on. Um, you know, I, I, I will say, I think it helps to have somebody, whether it's a friend or us like telling you, dude, oh man, this game is wild. It's wild. Like you're gonna, you're gonna really like understand what I'm talking about. Like after you play it, if I was somebody that was just like renting a game to play and brought this home and stuck it in. I do think after two or three hours, I'd kind of be like, what the heck, man? You know, this is just like a life simulator where it went bad for somebody like I can definitely see that. But man, if there is a game where getting to the end of the game is the payoff and makes you realize why every

decision in the game mattered, you mattered. This is one of those. It's a little bit like Breaking Bad in that sense. I've had so many people tell me that they think the pilot of Breaking Bad is really boring or that the first season didn't hook them. But if you keep staying with it, it's like the train is going 10 miles an hour in season one, and then it's going 30 in season two, and then it's going 50. And then by the time you get to the final season, you're going 100 miles an hour, and it just keeps building. I will say, in some ways, the second playthrough is almost better than the first because you're less concerned about figuring out the story, and you can just goof off a little more. Like, if you have your canonical ending where you've made all your decisions,

and now you just decide to be a jerk to your son just for the sheer lulls of it. It can be very funny. Like if your son's watching TV, just turn it off and he gets super mad at you and you just like start messing with people. And that can be a lot of fun as well. So it does encourage, you know, I think two playthroughs of this game is a lot of fun. All right. So final warning, if you think at all, you might be interested in playing this game and I highly recommend that everyone does, pause this episode, please don't let it be ruined. Go play it. Come back to this episode later. It'll be waiting for you. So, you know, I'm just, I'm going to third that one because again, if you're never going to play it, fine, stick with us.

You'll hear why we think what we think about this game. But if you actually intend to play this game, you do not want to know about what's going on and some of that because it will ruin the game for you at that point. There is not that payoff if you know what's coming. And so in that case, if you're going to play it, come back to us later because it'll be worth it

but otherwise you're going to ruin the game for yourself and then you're going to be like i don't understand what these guys were talking about all right here we are this is what i've been waiting for this is why we wanted to come welcome we gotta go into spoilers we gotta start with ethan's trials this is really when the game kicks into high gear. And it's about maybe just under halfway through the game. But Ethan basically, he gets a letter in the mail. It has a ticket for a locker. You go retrieve a box.

It's a little bit in that sense, like the Bourne identity where, you know, Jason Bourne goes and gets this box and it's full of like cash and passports and a gun. And it's like, what is going on? So Ethan gets this box and it's got several origami figures, a gun, and it has an SD card and a video player that has video of his son, Sean, in a locked well with a grate over it, starting to fill with water. Now I did say this game's very dark. They know that all of the children who have been kidnapped were drowned in rainwater. And so we realize that these children are being placed in these wells and there's only a certain amount of time before they fill with water. And so that's kind of like the running figures that have five different trials. And for each one that he completes successfully, he will get a clue to where Sean is being held. And the killer's notes say, how far are you willing to go to save your son? All right. Now these trials, without getting

into details yet, they're called the bear, the butterfly, the lizard, the shark, and the rat. And they do get increasingly more dangerous or more violent as you go through the game uh we don't have to necessarily break down all five but ryan where do you want to start what what trials should we talk about first um let's do the butterfly that's the butterfly glass electrical. So going to the abandoned electric warehouse. Yes. Tell us about it. So you got to go to this warehouse and you work your way in through this side, kind of

side door area and you come to this door and you open it up. Okay, this is the way I have to go and it's like a tunnel. Like you got to crawl up into it, almost like a vent. Once you get in there, there's just glass all the the ground of this tunnel that you got to crawl through and uh good thing i had paul there because i probably would have just bled out and died but you're crunching your way dude you're sprinting through this is one of those ones where you're supposed to go slowly and i'm just army crawling through like rambo through there and uh the whole screen started to get red and and i'm like, whatever, I can make it. And Paul's like, you might want to slow down.

And this goes to, too, where it was cool with how everything that happens and the choices you make follow you through the game is where his arms were jacked up after that. His sweater and his arms were jacked up. But once you get through there, you slide down this slide, and you pop into this area with a bunch of electrical terminal areas areas with wires all through them and it's like a maze so this also comes into play with the uh the control issues that we had a little bit there so so you have this maze and you got to navigate your way through it uh without getting electrocuted and those kind of button combos come

into play but with the camera switching or or it kind of goes into overhead view sometimes the the thing you're needing to do hides behind those little transformers and you can't see it so i i walked in to these dumb electrical wires like 10 times i don't know how he didn't die i i was zapped and burned though oh yeah he got cooked oh he was he was medium well his sweater the whole rest of the game was all just charred all over the front. And then his body was all burnt all over his chest and stuff. Don't you treat his wounds after the run? How do you treat a burn wound?

Like any medical professional would. You pour isopropylene alcohol on it, right? You poured. Poor Ethan. You took medicine and poured disinfectant all over this poor man's burns ethan was not happy with you you don't want germs on the burns dude you got to stop infection i love that ethan's like you've done enough help i think that's literally what he says to madison at the end of it oh man but you did get you did successfully

i failed that one when i played that was one of the ones that i failed yeah oh really so so that that's that's like a good like appetizer yeah to where things get a lot worse the lizard is the trial that's the where you have to cut off one of your fingers in front of a video camera in order to get the clue. Now, Ryan was like, cool, I'm good. Like at this point, this is when Ryan got a little cocky and is like, I got the controls. Ryan just grabs an axe and sits down and was ready to chop it off. Yeah, I'm ready to go, baby.

This is what I was talking about at the beginning of the episode, man. This is where Ryan, like we did not direct Ryan at all. Even if he was stuck, we just didn't say anything. But this one is funny because for me, this is the trial that stands out the most. And I remember doing this one with you, Paul. And the kicker on this one is you have a five-minute timer to cut off your finger in front of a camera to save your son. And you start walking around this like shady abandoned apartment. And it's like, you find a, you know, a knife on the ground and you're like, oh, okay, well, this is what I'll use to cut my

finger off. When I did the playthrough, I'm looking all over the apartment and it's like, oh, I found like some paper towels. Oh, I'll use that to stop the bleeding. And there's like some disinfectant in a cabinet. And I'm like, oh, this way i can disinfect it and like by the time i'm ready to go i've got this whole spread on the table and i'm like all right i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it and then i'm gonna cauterize it i'm gonna bandage it i'm gonna do this ryan is like oh i gotta cut off my finger he looks down at the ground finds a knife and he's like let's do this and sits down let's freaking go and i'm like this is the one time where i was like i mean ryan you do have some extra time you know and that's when he was like oh yeah okay let me look around a little bit but he was just ready to just be done

with that man yeah dude i got my son is gonna drown i don't got time for all that extra nonsense we don't got five minutes yeah and there's so many different things you can do to prepare and how you treat it. Ryan, did you decide on, was it the hatchet? Yeah, the axe. That's what you used, right? Yeah. It's like a little axe. And then my favorite part is that you did get the rod that you put in the fire. So it's glowing red and you knew you're like, I'm going to use it to cauterize the wound. But then after you cut off your finger, and by the way, you did not bite down on the stick. You didn't do all the prep you could do. No.

So Ethan is screaming bloody murder. And then once again, you go for the disinfectant, just pour it all over your hand. And now Ethan's screaming even more, almost to the point of passing out. I mean, Ethan went through a lot in your playthrough i mean you completed the trial but it was not necessarily the easiest way he's a tough guy after playing with me that's for sure well and the thing too is i thought i thought i could like disinfect it and then cauterize it or something for some reason but no it he was just he was out of it after that and then left and i'm like oh i guess i don't need to cauterize but then i loved

the bandage for the rest of the game was always like red like it was all bloody and red blood yeah yeah now did you ever get a chance to watch the video when he uses the scissors no i forgot about that no i didn't go you have to look it up i'll go look if you do the scissors without treating the wound or anything you get an achievement called butcher which which has always cracked me up. It is one of the funniest. Oh, excuse me so much. I can't,

uh, this whole thing is, this is a hard, like, this is what the game does really well, right? It's like puts you in these situations where you are just super uncomfortable. You do not like it.

It's weird because it's like, it's such a good story, but it really pulls you into the story with kind of like how you have to participate and observe. And I mean, the second you realize you have to cut your finger off, everybody just starts squirming, dude.

Yes. And it's like, no way. And then it's every bit as visceral and horrible as you think it is. The game does not pull punches, you know? So watching Ethan actually do this and then just start flipping out because like, that's what anybody would do. You just cut your finger off, man.

You know, is, is it's just done really, really well, but it really pulls you into it at the same time. And to Ryan's credit, he did choose like the best instrument where you lop it off in one hit. When you go with like the scissors, it's like, also a crunch crunch crunch crunch you keep going yeah yeah that would be terrible man it's it's pretty rough man all right so uh shockingly it's already time for another break and then we'll come back and talk about my next favorite trial all right ryan this was really fun to watch unfortunately josh missed out i believe

on this trial but when you do the shark that's when you are told go take this gun in the box you're gonna go kill this man i was there for that one oh you were there yeah he's a drug dealer ryan shows up as ethan knocks on this dude's door. He opens. He's like, what are you here for? And then, Ryan, do you want to talk about what happens here and the decision you made? Yeah. So you're supposed to kill this guy.

You're sent there to do so. And you come in and it ends up they get into a battle and a fight. And they're going back and forth. And the other guy pulls out. he has a shotgun, right? Yeah. Yeah, he pulls out a shotgun. He's blasting away through the apartment. And you end up knocking him down, and then you kind of regain control and get your gun back.

And you point at him, and then he starts to cower. He's like, stop, I got kids, I got a family. Don't shoot me, don't shoot me. And he gives you the option on what you can do. you spare them or shoot them so anyways i started blasting you know yeah right away and he goes he goes uh what did he oh well the guy because because as he's chasing you shooting the shotgun you see that the bedrooms are made for like little girls they're like little bunk beds and it's kind of like princess pink pink princess stuff all over the place you can tell he's he's got kids but he's also you know scummy drug dealer and he's trying to shoot you with a shotgun mind you as well

absolutely broke into his house though well you went to the front door you guys are defending ethan on this and it's like dude you go to this guy's house he don't know who you and he's like, dude, you go to this guy's house. He don't know who you are. He's under duress. So the guy runs out of shells, right? Like he goes to pull the trigger. There's nothing there. And then he realizes he's lost and he goes, don't shoot me. I'm a father. And then Ryan blasted him.

He goes, I'm a father too. Boom. Just straight blasted him. Yeah, right away. That was the line. I'm a father too. Boom. Just straight blast that guy. Dusted him. Yeah, right away. No hesitation. I'm a father too. Heck yeah, that's what I would do. He's a drug dealer, man. I kept thinking, what would I do for my son?

You know, he's eight. I would, drug dealer, gone in a heartbeat. No question. No questions asked. It was funny to see your guys' reaction, which is why I would say, not only to play this game, but if you can, just go old school, sit on a couch and play with a buddy. Even if you switch off on trials or do what we used to do as kids too, every 30 minutes or every hour you switch off,

to see how different people play it and to see the different reactions and then your friends' reactions when they see what happens. It was so fun. Oh, yeah. So Ryan did complete all five trials. So Ethan knew exactly where Sean was at the end of the game. The last trial is kind of neat. Ethan has to drink a phial of poison, and they tell him you're going to die within an hour,

and that'll give you just enough time to save your son and say goodbye. So, like, the emotions of these scenes is very visceral and very real uh so ryan the time has come now that we're kind of like done with ethan's story as we're going to talk about the other characters briefly you got to answer the question ethan mars great dad or terrible dad dude not only is he a great dad, he is a great-ass dad. What? What he would do for his child. Thank you. If he was a good dad, he wouldn't have lost both of his kids.

He dove in front of a car. After he lost his son at the mall. Then he was in a coma. Then his son gets kidnapped. He forgets to feed and to make do their homework. I didn't forget to feed him. You forgot to feed him. We didn't say he's perfect.

He's not, but he's a dad, man. Oh my goodness. Dude, he went above and beyond and killed a man, cut off his finger, got electrocuted, crawled through glass, drank poison, drove the wrong way in traffic. He went and did anything you could ever expect of someone who loves their child. There's no more he could do. Except for losing his kid at the park.

He blacked out from trying to save his original child. He can't control that. Yes. Ryan, thank you. Team sanity. 100%. Yeah, dude. He is a great dad.

Some unfortunate mishaps. Life happened, but he was a great dad. Some unfortunate mishaps. Life happened, but he was a great dad. Some mishaps. This is understating things a little. All right. Mistakes were made. He's a good dad. I concede, guys.

The two of you together. Official dad. Yeah. Official dad of the Video Gamers Podcast. Yes. No. We officially endorse Ethan Mars, Father of the Year gamers podcast yes we officially endorse ethan mars father of the year all right there's some i i would love to do a three-hour podcast on this game but i know we

gotta move quickly um fbi agent norman jayden we can largely skip through him the only thing i'll say is that since he's the fbi agent he's more of like your regular detective. He's gathering clues, and they do give you opportunities to sit down and go through your files, and you can analyze clues, and you can also geo-analysis clues where he'll tell you if it relates on a map. So if we found an origami figure, well, let's geolocate what origami shops are out there, know things of that nature i think it's a cool idea i think it's a little bit half-baked i think this is one of the weaker elements do you agree with me ryan yeah i felt i think it was neat and it was a good concept and

i was excited when i first saw it it did become like very labor some like i it was it was just i kind of wanted to get through it. And I remember telling you, I'm like, which one? The Geo only was like two or three times the whole game, but you want to check it because you don't want to miss something. And then, yeah, it just kind of felt like I just wanted to rush through that part to get to all the other awesome parts of the game. So yeah, it was cool, but I could have done without it. I will say I love how Norman gets super unhinged at the end of the game.

Because Ethan, in your playthrough, Ethan gets arrested for being the origami killer. They think it's him. And you busted him out of the police station. You go, dude, police brutality was not a problem for Norman in this one. He's hitting Mad jack in the face pistol whipping him he's threatening to blow up his whole shop by shooting propane tanks

i will just quote one thing from norman that made me laugh so hard because i don't think i ever chose this in any of my playthroughs when you go confront a guy that they think might be the origami killer he's like's like a religious, insane person where his psychosis is being manifested in religious terms. And he thinks that your partner is the Antichrist. And your way of dealing with him is, and I wrote down the quote, you're not going to kill the Antichrist with a revolver.

He's much too strong for that. Lieutenant Blake is going to leave our planet right now and return to the realm of shadows, which made me laugh so hard that you're trying to like reason with a nut job and you're just like jumping straight into the psychosis with him. Oh, I just honestly wanted Blake to die so bad. I was hoping that the guy would kill him. That he'd just shoot him.

All right. We got to move on to Madison. Madison, look, I sense that when David Cage wrote this game, he's like, we need to have a female protagonist, right? So let's just throw in Madison. And it seems like they didn't really know what to do with her. And I'm not saying this trying to be woke. I'm just criticizing the writing of the game. Really, Madison is only around to be topless, taking showers, act sexy, or help Ethan. She doesn't seem to really have any goals or anything of her own. And I think that she is like, I think her chapters are the weakest in this game.

I almost feel like the game might have worked better if you just took her out of it or like actually give her some real motivations and fully write her story. Do you guys agree? Or am I crazy? Madison is easily the weakest writing in the entire game because this game tells a pretty masterful story. The problem is, is that Madison just doesn't make a lot of sense yeah this woman makes very poor decisions the the way that they introduce madison other than a shower scene to just be like oh look you know let's get this in the game is like is her standing outside

like meeting ethan at a shady motel where she doesn't know who Ethan is. And then she's all of a sudden like in the room with this stranger and then just starts staying with him. Like who does that, man? So it's just, Madison's story is where the game makes the biggest jumps and the things that just kind of make you go like, nobody would do that. So anyways, let's talk about how Madison was the best character.

Yeah. No, I agree. She was definitely... It almost... It just felt like just kind of thrown in there, like just rushed. It didn't make a lot of sense. She's all of a sudden, like you said, just in the hotel room with them. She's taking care of them and tending to all his wounds.

And then within like... Says she loves him. Yeah. and then within like says she loves him yeah within like a day she loves him and it's been a day yeah i'm like i mean maybe not well taking care of his wounds and that might have been my fault but uh but uh yeah she just didn't there just wasn't much there you didn't feel connected to her as a character like you did to the rest ethan needed somebody to help him. He needed somebody in the game that was kind of on his side, and this is how they got that character. It's just kind of sloppily done compared to the rest of the game.

And that's the thing is I think the rest of the game holds up so well that you notice this one character in this kind of one part where it's like, this just doesn't add up. Yeah. And I will say she does have some really fun moments when she goes to investigate the owner of the apartment where Ethan cut off his finger. It's this old retired, super creepy surgeon. And Ryan right away was like, I don't trust this guy. And he was trying to make her drink a drink. And Ryan's like, I'm not taking that. But he ends up getting Madison caught, and she's tied up down in his basement.

And he says, I just missed surgery, and I don't have the tools. I just used whatever's around me. And I'm like, dude, this guy's like that. That to me, that churns my stomach a little bit. That's just really, that's where the creepiness and the comparisons to the saw franchise definitely come in uh and then ryan treated madison at the end of her story very poorly when she is trying to escape an apartment that's on fire and he just yeeted her out the window and she jumped to her death it was an accident it was not my one of my biggest goals was to have everybody

survive and i wanted that so bad and i 100 would have done it um and and i and i saw the propane tank and i went and accidentally hit the window to look and i'm like oh this is the window i can't because i'd already previously looked at a window and it's like jump to your death or find another way so that's what i was going to do and i was trying to just spam a button to get back to the propane tank to shut it off to help with the fire and i was spamming x and that's jump out the window and she goes okay and she climbs out and then just boom plummets to her death the second i hit it i was so upset i just i yelled no and that's exactly what i said in the pre-dive i said there are going to be moments you're going to be shouting no. And Josh and I are just going to be sitting back laughing

because you're going to make a mistake at some point. And to your credit, you played this game extraordinarily well. And it was not even failing a button press. You were preemptively trying to do the action and got too close to the window and she jumped. Yep. Yeah. Very unfortunate. Scott Shelby, Ryan,

the entire time we played this game, you just kept saying over and over, dude, Scott's sweet. Scott's the best character. The whole time having no clue that there's this whole twist coming where he's actually the origami killer. Why was he your favorite character the whole time?

He was just like kind of that old school private investigator just like a big burly man that that was trying to help people at least we thought um didn't know that he was just a psychopath but uh he everything about him i just loved he was just rough he was uh uh but but still trying to be there and and he knew a lot he was kind of on point with all the um investigations so i don't know he drove an old school like bel air like he had an old school car like just old school typewriter yeah a typewriter everything about him was just kind of that old pi you know kind of vibe to him so i just i really loved it i loved all the the parts um of his like quick time events when you're playing him i loved you know except for bashing that baby against the

wall or whatever but but all the other parts were were awesome everything about the playthrough as him i loved i thought he was um his his character uh voice actor did a great job i thought he was written very well um overall he was i mean he is still my favorite when i walked in here i was a private eye now i'm a babysitter who would have thought i mean you know he's got like some funny lines a bunch of one-liners and stuff yeah just likable too like the game does a good job of making you like him um without being obvious about it which which I liked. It's like he's just a good character. And because he's a good character in the game, you kind of start to just go like, ah, I like this guy, man. You're like, yeah, I'm playing him again for a little bit.

Now, I do need to mention that Lauren is a character in the game who is the mother of one of the children who died. And ends up like being scott's partner and shelby and her end up in a lake in their car and she's unconscious ryan intentionally i will add allowed lauren to die ryan said nope i'm leaving you behind and at this point i'm like i don't know what to make of your playthrough r Ryan. Was there something about Lauren you didn't like? Or you just thought it would be funny? Or what led to that decision? She double-crossed us.

Oh, because she turned you into Gordy Kramer's dad? Exactly. Yeah. Get her out of here. Snitches get stitches, man. Yeah. Yeah. Snitches get stitches for sure.

Absolutely. You wiggled out of those ropes. You kicked out the window and just took off immediately yeah no she she she made her choice and now she's gonna live with it you know 40 feet underwater at the bottom of the lake dude you turned scott like as much as you loved him you kind of were unintentionally playing into the fact that he's a serial killer i did because charles kramer you shoot everybody in his mansion, which by the way, even just watching you play,

like my heart rate was like 120. I could feel the excitement as you were murking everybody in that mansion. And then at the end, you get to Charles. He starts like freaking out because of his heart meds. You go take them out of his desk and just

walk away and and let him die which was so funny like you really played into scott before you even knew what he was i did i didn't even think about that yeah man it actually worked really well you know with you unintentionally making him a little bit psychotic at the end killing lauren killing charles yeah that's the way it was meant to be all right so i wanted to talk just a little bit about how gnarly this game is yeah i mean ryan you and i have played some gnarly games over the years manhunt is usually the first game i think of in terms of dark material. I still don't know how you and I got away playing that in the living room of your aunt's house with other kids in the house. I will say Heavy Rain is in the same ballpark.

You might even argue that it's darker because it involves the killing of children and stuff like that. Were you surprised at how much the game was willing to go there? And did you still find it enjoyable or did you think they went too far where it held back you being able to fully engage i i usually have a rule like my uh on road trips and other things my wife like a lot of these crazy women love to listen to murder podcasts and my rule is always i'll listen to whatever with you but no kids um i hate if it's if it's like they're having something local here for the Phoenix Children's Hospital on a sports radio give-a-thon where they tell all these really sad stories about these children that are so sick.

I just can't handle it. So it's kind of like ignorance is bliss. Just get it away from me. But this story, the way it laid out and was portrayed was just, you felt so connected to it. So you had to know what happened and what was going to happen and the rest of how everything played out. So I just, I loved it. I absolutely loved the story. It was an amazing story. At no point was it like a hindrance to the to the game because

there's you know really not that much gameplay let's be honest so um i thought it it was it without it being the way it was this game wouldn't even have been close to to where it is and how how great it was so yeah the story was huge for me and i can vouch for how invested you and my wife were watching the final scene because you had Norman and Ethan both find Sean and Ethan breaks Sean out while Norman is fighting Scott up on the catwalk. And you guys were freaking out so bad thinking that you killed Sean because it took you like an extra minute to find the crowbar. And guys were like is he dead Paul just tell me Paul Paul is he dead did I take too long and you kept saying that and then you're giving Sean CPR and Sean's not waking up and I'm just sitting back I'm like I'm not gonna ruin it and when he took his breath you guys were so elated I could

tell how much you were like invested because sean can die he can die in this game um not in the way you were worried you can take i think as long as you need and and he's fine uh finding the crowbar but i think that also helped because you had one of the better endings for sure minus madison oh i was so worried and i remember saying i'm like just cough come on cough like in the movies you're you're alive yeah that's exactly what you yelled yeah all right so i do want to mention just a couple of quick things here before we close out the show and uh give the game our leaderboard rating so there are several endings ryan in your ending with ethan he has saved sean he gets his name cleared because everyone knows Scott was the killer.

And you see at the end that they have a new apartment and they're starting a new life together. I would say that's the second best ending. The best ending is if Madison is still alive. You see that it's now been a couple months and they're married and they're now kind of like healing as a new family. The game can also be incredibly dark. Remember how you had um ethan arrested and then you broke him out with norman if you leave ethan in jail and if sean dies ethan is framed as the origami killer and at the end of the game he hangs himself in prison what so that's like how this game could end yeah it can get that bad it's pretty wild uh also if sean dies but you're not framed as the origami killer and if you romanced madison you will go stand over sean's

grave and she basically tells you like hey it really sucks um i'm gonna help you through this and ethan's like okay i'll meet you in the car and then as she turns he shoots himself like there's wildly different endings to this game that are that can be very optimistic or really dark there's also the final ending i'll mention for ethan is if you leave him in jail but he's then rescued by norman and madison then your ex-wife Grace shows up, and it's kind of implied that they're going to get back together, which is kind of like an interesting ending. There's one thing I want to say. The real

villain is Grace. Yeah, she's mean. The dude lost his son. It's not like he didn't care. It's a little obvious that she blames him for that, too, because he's not a good dad. Yeah, well, whatever. Anyways, he dove in front of the car, then he lost his son, and he was in a coma for six months.

And then she's just like, well, peace, you suck, I'm out of here. And she just leaves him. Like, what a horrible wife. Yeah, that dude's bad luck, man. Yeah, I know, right? Trouble follows him, that's for sure. So, I'll kind of skip over madison and norman i'll just say you did get the best ending for madison you also got the or not the best sorry that is dead that is as bad as it is not sorry i meant norman norman you got the best

ending he's kicked his addiction and he did reach the warehouse at the end. So he's a good investigator, and he kicks the drugs. And then there's Scott. Now, since you killed Lauren, it can be a little bit different at the end of this game. If Lauren is still alive, but nobody catches Scott, she will confront him in the street and say, I know that you were the killer. I found out because I asked all the other parents, none of them say they hired you. You're the killer. You've been going around feeding off their misery and collecting evidence that you've left behind to destroy it. And then she shoots him because she says, I made a promise.

I'd kill the man who killed my son, and then she kills Scott. Now, there's also a pretty wild ending where if you kill off Lauren, and if you don't save Sean, and no one shows up to the warehouse, then Scott actually gets away completely free in the end, and he's gotten away with all his crimes, and he's just going to go off and find his next victim. So you can have that ending too for Scott. That's crazy. That's so wild. There's so many different ways to play it. It shows that your choices matter in this game because there's so many branches that you could

wind up going down, but then there's branches off of that too, which is really cool. So yeah, it shows you that they cared about the story and that your choices matter and that you're going to get to see the payoff or the consequences of those later on in the game yep so anything we missed anything else that we need to mention here before we each give it our leaderboard rating i don't think so no i think we covered it all pretty well yeah it's it's a game that everyone should play even if you think you don't like interactive movies, if there's one that might change your mind, I think this would be the one. This is the one that if you're going to branch into it,

the problem is, is that it can then ruin a lot of the other games in the genre for you. Cause then you're like, what the heck, man? Yeah. So let's go ahead and each of us give it a rating. It's been a while since we've rated a game.

We have our updated leaderboard. If anyone doesn't know, you can go to video gamers pod.com you can take a look each of us give the game our own rating and then we average them out for a consensus score we do it on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0 ryan i want to hear from you first like i'm going first what yeah what are you gonna rate this game and if and i have your leaderboard pulled up i don't know if you do uh but if you have any questions i can like let you know what that game is next to based on your rating i i got mine up and this one was actually pretty tricky i mean i think everyone could tell i very very much enjoyed my playthrough of this game um it was enhanced obviously by sitting playing playing with you guys while we were over at Paul's house.

So I think the story was brilliant. I think it was a little slow to start, but it was so gripping. And that second, like two-thirds of the game, just made for such an awesome playthrough. This one was kind of teetering real high up there for me, and I wasn't sure what to do because I was thinking 8-9, 8-9, 8-8, something like that. I wanted to go in the nines because I had so much fun, but those controls are just so dang hard.

They're very goofy. It was very frustrating, but I also, near the end, I got the hang of the controls, and I didn't really have to think about it anymore, except for the slow press ones. Those always got me, and always will. But again, just after the small little bit of this game that I played, because there's so many other cut scenes that I haven't seen,

or haven't, you know, choices that you make to make the game completely different, leave so much there, and sitting and talking about it with you guys. Like I got to go nine one. This is an all timer for me. This was beyond one of the best games I've ever played. This was so much fun. So you've got it tied with some stuff here like Hollow Knight, Destiny 2, Fallout New Vegas, Hogwarts Legacy, Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. Like this is really high praise. with some stuff here like hollow knight destiny 2 fallout new vegas hogwarts legacy zelda tears

of the kingdom like this is really high praise i was a little worried you were gonna put it below fortnight at 8.9 that was my only request if you if you said 8.8 i was gonna say can we just tie it with fortnight just please that's what i was because i was looking and i'm like i'm like do is it a nine is it up there in the nines for me? And then I started looking at the other, you know, games at the high eights. And I was like,

I liked it more than all these games. So I got to put it at the nine one. Okay. That's super high. I did not know if you were going to go quite that high. I assumed it would be somewhere in the, you know, mid eight range is kind of what I thought it might be.

Cause I know I'm higher on this than most. What about you, Josh? I kind of sense that as much as you love it, I figured you were a little bit lower than me and Ryan. So I'm very curious to hear. Well, we'll see. I'm a little bit lower than Ryan, to give you a clue. But dude, this game is one of those games that is ultra memorable. You don't forget about Heavy Rain, and there's not a lot of games that do that, you know? So like in that thinking alone, this game would rank really high for me because the

second you, I realized what the game was, I got super excited for Ryan. Cause like, it's a memorable game. Um, you know, the gameplay elements and the controls and the quick time events and stuff like that, like they don't't they're not always good but the story is incredible the characters are really well done the twist is really well done like you just leave like playing this game really happy usually i'm gonna rate it pretty high man i like a comparable game for me is hellblade 2 because it's kind of a story narrative walking simulator type game so it's like i kind of do that in the same vein um and the story is infinitely better in heavy rain than in hellblade

2 um for sure so but i mean i do kind of view them similar but then i'm gonna put it in 8.8 dude that's resident evil 4 this is the you know metal know, Metal Gear 5, you know, Apex Legends. Like it's just a really, really good game. In some ways, it's almost the anti-Souls game where Souls is so gameplay forward with like minimal explicit story. Yeah. And then Heavy Rain is like the other side where it's all story. It just works though, dude. It's like, yeah yeah it really just works well so it deserves it yeah so for me i i've i've made no hints at you know how much i love this game i mean i've made it very explicit i even

said on the pre-dive i wonder if playing it again is going to make me tempted to put it in my top i was gonna ask yeah and my answer to that is no. As much as I love Heavy Rain, it's not cracking my top 10 of all time. However, as I look at my leaderboard, you know, this is definitely below God of War, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk, Disco Elysium, Tears of the Kingdom. There's no way I'm putting it quite that high. But I will say I am going to put it above stardew valley apex legends i'm gonna give this a 9.6 and i'll tell you why it's not that i'm saying this is one of the best games ever made

i think this game has serious flaws even with the writing by the way you want to hear a crazy thing you know how uh in the beginning jason when he's like wandering into the street and carrying a balloon and it's kind of like this kid's a little old for all that in the original script he was four which would have made sean two and then sean would have been four when he gets kidnapped and that's where they said no we're not we're not publishing the game with killing four-year-olds so they they forced him to make them 10. If they had been four, I think that does resolve some of the goofiness. You even said at the time, Brian, like, how is he dead by being hit by the car?

Well, if he were four, that makes a little bit more sense. There's definitely holes in the story. But do you know what I think this is? This is like if the people who made The Fast fast and the furious were told to make the movie seven, and these are like two of my favorite things. I love the movie seven, which could not be more serious.

And I love fast and the furious for all the over the topness and, and heavy rain kind of gives you the best of those two worlds. Yeah. Yeah. It's not critically the best, but two worlds yeah yeah it's not critically the best but for me personally this is what i want i want over the top violence over the top decisions but to but for it to be in a way that's not like so heavy i can't enjoy it it's almost too over the top so that way it's almost a little bit like separated from reality, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Sweet. All right. Yeah. I'm so glad we got to finish Heavy Rain. And Ryan, I know that you've been picked three times in a row, but this now means you get to choose another game for a future Force of Friends. So at least there is also some benefit here on the back end as well. Any final comments?

Anything we need to say before shutting this one down? It's a good game. I mean, the fact that all three of us rated it so highly just kind of goes to show you that it obviously does something right. I wouldn't be the kind of person that would say this is my genre of game either, but some games

just stand out no matter what genre they're in, and this is one of those. Yeah, and I think it's what? Only like nine hours or so? Yeah, yeah it's perfect perfect length honestly it doesn't have a lot of welcome either a lot of replayability with all the different choices and stuff yeah it was i thoroughly enjoyed my time thank you paul for picking me for this game because i probably never ever would have touched it so i had an absolute blast especially being older yeah i will say i can't imagine playing this on pc because you're gonna need like motion controls and stuff like i feel like it plays better on console also which is

not something i say very often but what a great console game and paul sabotaged me he gave me a dead controller and i failed a quick time event that's that that is true we did reload that save because you because norman got stomped by mad jack and he died but that was because the controller died so we're like quick reload the old save all right well that wraps up this deep dive i'm so glad we were able to talk about heavy rain finally please remember to sign up on patreon you can do that at multiplayer squad.com even if you go at the highest tier you can pick a game for us to play please remember to rate the show five stars join the free discord and follow us on socials at video gamers pod we will be back on thursday on those episodes we cover recent gaming news so make sure to come check that out and until next time happy gaming

sean jason jason jason jason all right see everybody Jason! Jason! Jason! Jason! All right. See you, everybody.