I liked Heavy Rain! Really liked it, actually. Funny thing is, I enjoyed the three short cartoons found within the game a lot more.
I've been meaning to poke around for these for a couple of months now, and watch them as their creators had originally intended (instead of on a small screen within a video game), and on a rainy Saturday morning here have finally found the time to do so. So here we go!
There are a few scenes in Heavy Rain where you'll find TV sets. When you encounter them, you'll find that each can be turned off or on. When on, they're playing not some drab news report, or a noire crime thriller, but...colourful, light-hearted cartoons.
They not only make for a pleasant break from the dreary, serious tone of the game, but are amazing works of art in their own right, each the product of a team of students from France's Gobelins school of art. So let's take a closer at them!
Click to viewPYRATS
The most memorable of the three is probably Pyrats, the cartoon playing during a pivotal scene at Ethan's home early in the game. Produced for the 2006 Annecy international animation festival, it's the work of Yves Bigerel , Bruno Dequier, Ben Fiquet, Nicolas Gueroux, Julien Le Rolland and Gerard Labady.
Click here to visit Pyrat's official website.
Click to viewVOODOO
The second film is Voodoo, an animated short by Romain Baudy, Ludovic Bouancheau, Liane Cho Han Jin Kuang, Yann Le Gall, Marietta Ren & Sébastien Wojda Marioni. It's a little darker than the others, but no less humorous for it.
Click to viewCOCOTTE MINUTE
The third cartoon in the game, Cocotte Minute, deals with a pair of chickens in a race not only for glory, but for their lives. It plays during Shelby's interrogation of Gordi Jnr, upstairs at the little snot's private party. You can thank Thibault Berard, Sylvain Marc, Loïc Miermont, Amandine Pécharman, Nathalie Robert & Romain Vacher.
You can visit Cocotte Minute's website here.
So, there you go! Amazing, no? It's quite a unique occurrence to find stuff like this sprinkled throughout a game, especially when it's not some kind of marketing or cross-promotion stunt, so hopefully the next time Heavy Rain creator David Cage and his team at Quantic Dream sit down to make a game, they can do it all over again.