My favorite style of YouTuber is: “one that hyperfixates on one mundane element of a blockbuster online game and will get unusually poetic about it”. Once you provide me a five-hour video essay about an obscure journey recreation from 1998, I’ll cover within the closet. However for those who idly surprise the place the rivers in Skyrim go, I’ll observe alongside dutifully like a child elephant. That is how I ended up spending a lot of my afternoon watching David Cage characters pissing. One video creator determined to painstakingly rely each occasion of playable pee time in cinematic journey recreation Heavy Rain. That is important work. That is necessary work.
This act of, uh, “analysis” has been carried out by YouTuber Allie Meowy, who spends an hour taking the viewer step-by-step by means of the assorted toilet belt unbucklings and musing on every urination with a essential lens that completely no person deemed obligatory. That is nice. I will not spoil precisely what number of pees you possibly can pee within the choice-heavy crime thriller. You may have to look at the video (or skip by means of it) to search out out. I’ll say it is not an enormous or spectacular quantity. It’s a very plain quantity of pees for a narrative that follows 4 individuals over 4 days. However it’s not the variety of pees that is necessary, it is the stains we discovered alongside the way in which.
“We’ll construct on our information of the piss mechanics all through this video,” says Alllie, with an alarming quantity of straight-faced professionalism. “In most video games you shoot individuals and it means nothing. In Heavy Rain, you piss and the narrative could be very barely enhanced. And you already know what? I believe that is stunning.”
As anybody who has ever yelled “Jason” in a shopping center can attest, Heavy Rain is a magnet for irony. It’s inconceivable to get pleasure from this (or arguably any recreation by Quantic Dream) with out cackling out loud at sure moments. For all their want to be grand, significant artistic endeavors, these video games are laden with nonsense, each intentional and unintentional.
But the video isn’t just a litany of gags on the expense of 2010’s greatest and worst choose-your-own-misery recreation. Because the piss countdown progresses, Allie’s intense scrutiny ends in some weirdly attention-grabbing observations. For instance, Madison, the one playable girl within the story, flushes the bathroom mechanically, whereas all male characters require the participant to activate the flush themselves. In lots of situations, you’ll pee and be unable to scrub your arms. You’ll usually eat or rub your face quickly afterwards.
The piss isn’t dynamically tracked by the sport, she additionally notes. You may drink carton after carton of orange juice and you’ll by no means turn out to be bursting to go. And a few of the loos within the recreation’s US setting (not-quite-Philadelphia) lack a sink as a result of that is how some loos exist in actual life France, the place the sport’s designers had been based mostly.
“You may simply go the entire recreation with out taking a piss even as soon as,” observes Allie. “I do not know why you’d need to try this however it technically is an choice for gamers preferring a pissless play fashion.”
And identical to that “pissless playstyle” has turn out to be one in every of my favorite phrases of the 12 months to this point.
The video additionally acts as a surprisingly thorough breakdown of the sport’s storyline. If in case you have by no means performed Heavy Rain, and may’t face doing an entire playthrough your self, I can now suggest this because the definitive technique to have the story summarised. Sure, the main target is on urine. Sure, the phrase piss happens roughly 150 instances in the middle of the video. However I’ve in all probability discovered extra about this Cage recreation up to now hour than I did after two playthroughs when it first launched.
Pee is on the mind right here at RPS, it appears. I not too long ago reviewed My Summer time Automobile, a mechanic sim in which you’ll be able to drink your personal wizz to cut back each your thirst bar and urine bar on the identical time. In the meantime, first-piss-on-shooter Urge received Edwin’s consideration for being “probably the most attention-grabbing open world shooter in an extended whereas, and likewise, probably the most revolting“. Anyway. That is all of the piss we have now for the second, reader. Now, wash your arms.
