The first DLC for Heavy rain is short, yet spicy. The DLC for Heavy Rain has been dubbed the Heavy Rain Chronicles. The first chapter, The Taxidermist, has already been made available for free to those who preordered the game. According to Sony, those who did not pre-order can download it through the Playstation Store starting on April 1st for $4.99. In either case, this DLC is not an independent game, so you must have the Heavy Rain disc in your PS3 to play the content.
The Taxidermist places you back in the shoes of journalist Madison Paige from Heavy Rain’s main story and occurs prior to those events. She’s doing a story on the Origami Killer, a serial killer who has murdered several young children and left origami figures on their bodies. Madison goes to the house of someone she suspects to be the murderer. You sneak around the house and discover some strange things (he is a taxidermist, after all). Eventually, the suspect returns home while you are in it, and decisions must be made quickly.
For the uninitiated, when you come across something in the environment with which you can interact or an action sequence unfolds, prompts appear on the screen to show how you must move the right control stick or what button you must push to perform certain actions. Certain prompts indicate that you must move the control stick very slowly, push a button repeatedly, or push and hold a series of several buttons simultaneously. One additional twist in The Taxidermist DLC is that in certain sequences, you must choose the direction you want to run and push the right control stick in that direction very quickly. As in Heavy Rain, this control scheme pulls you into this scene, making it both suspenseful (because you don’t know what’s around corner), and intense (whether you are hiding, or running and fighting for your life).
The cinematic presentation of this chapter adds to the intensity as well. For example, the screen splits when the suspect arrives home so you see what he is doing while you continue to control Madison and develop a strategy. That creates true tension, and this chapter of the Heavy Rain Chronicles made the hair stand on the back of my neck quite a few times.
Although the overall sequence may only take ten or fifteen minutes to complete, the full experience of the DLC will take longer. When you finish the chapter, a screen shows you that there are five different endings and puts a check in a box next to the one you just obtained. Immediately my mind ran through several different ways the scenario could have played differently. The game gives you the option start the chapter at three different points. That’s a great option because if you want to change a choice or replay an action sequence towards the end of the scenario, you don’t have to play though the beginning of the chapter to see what changes. After exploring, you will discover several different strategies you can employ in this scenario. So, while this chapter is very short, it retains what made Heavy Rain great — feeling the consequences of your choices and success (or failure) during the action sequences and fueling the desire to dive right back in to see how things could have played out differently.
Aside from the length of the content, my main complaint about The Taxidermist DLC would be that the main flaw in the game’s controls is highlighted here because of the level design. As I mentioned in my review of the main game, you control your character by holding down the right trigger and pushing the left control stick in the direction you want to move. Because there are several small rooms and tight corners in this DLC and the camera angle changes suddenly, it was too easy to start moving in the wrong direction, and often it became confusing about which direction I was going. And thus you are exposed to the clunky character animation that occurs when you quickly change directions with your character quite a bit in this short content.
For those who pre-ordered Heavy Rain, download it now if you have not. You’re getting it for free, and it’s a great, albeit short, ride. For those of you who must shell out $4.99, it’s a closer call. If you absolutely loved Heavy Rain, the tension it created, and exploring different scenes to see how they might have turned out differently, then I would recommend purchasing it. If you are looking for a meatier storyline, then you might consider waiting to see whether the future chapters of the Heavy Rain Chronicles might go that route.
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