Ian Bogost - How to Turn Heavy Rain into a Restroom Simulator

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How to Turn Heavy Rain into a Restroom Simulator

The Urinal Sublime

February 27, 2010

short url: http://bogo.st/1x

tags: videogames

I'm still working my way through Heavy Rain, and I'll save my comments about the game until I finish. For now, I broke it in an interesting way that's worth sharing.

When you are playing as Norman Jayden in the police headquarters, it is possible to go into the men's room. One plot element requires this, but later you can visit again to regain your composure or to relieve yourself. It's a nice touch.

I found myself wondering if I could pilot Jayden into the women's room, which is right next door. The result was unexpected and sort of lovely.

To enter, wait for a woman NPC to open the door, and then shimmy in after her. You'll have enough time to do so if you're quick about it. However, once you do, the game registers that Jayden has entered the bathroom scene, and it changes the camera view accordingly, showing the interior of the men's room.

You'll be stuck behind the wall and unable to continue without restarting the scene, but the result is a strangely calming restroom simulator. Men come in and out, making use of the urinals and basins and then departing again. You could just leave it running, like a very strange kind of simulated fireplace, one that displays a bathroom.

Comments (6)

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very beautiful

increpare on February 26, 2010 10:05 PM

This is one of those things where you just wonder what was going through the programmers' heads.

I'm guessing this was a late bug find and the solution was just to teleport the player to the bathroom... I can't figure out any programming reason why this would happen by accident; I can't imagine you'd deliberately make a new object named "police station bathroom door".

Or, now I think about it some more, Occam's Razor says the level designer just cut and pasted the men's room door to the women's room door!

Chris Lewis on February 27, 2010 12:44 AM

What do you think about this game, Ian?
I'm starting to feel that the real game starts when you finish it the first time, and then you start to explore all the possible choices you can make.
I'm believing that the core mechanic here is not the so long discussed QTE, but the exploration of a non-physical space.

Federico Fasce on February 28, 2010 4:56 AM

Federico, I haven't finished yet (I should do today), but I'm already getting the sense that you describe. Particularly since many of the QTE acts are (to me at least) utterly unobviously connected to the choices they represent. In a number of cases, I've done things I didn't know I was doing.

Ian Bogost on February 28, 2010 9:38 AM

Brilliant. I wasn't planning to do a second playthrough so soon after my first, but I may have to just for this.

Sinan Kubba on March 1, 2010 2:02 PM

Interesting. It reminded me of After Dark, the screen saver software. I loved the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and the "Itchy and Scratchy" ones.

For those of you who can't remember: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)

Alvaro Cavalcanti on March 3, 2010 1:47 PM

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