ranzware
My favourite genre of YouTuber is: “person who hyperfixates on one mundane detail of a blockbuster video game and gets strangely poetic about it”. When you offer me a five-hour video essay about an obscure adventure game from 1998, I will hide in the closet. But if you idly wonder where the rivers in Skyrim go, I will follow along dutifully like a baby elephant. This is how I ended up spending much of my afternoon watching David Cage characters pissing. One video creator decided to painstakingly count every instance of playable pee time in cinematic adventure game Heavy Rain. This is vital work. This is important work.
This act of, uh, “research” has been performed by YouTuber Allie Meowy, who spends an hour taking the viewer step-by-step through the various bathroom belt unbucklings and musing on each urination with a critical lens that absolutely nobody deemed necessary. That’s great. I won’t spoil exactly how many pees you can pee in the choice-heavy crime thriller. You’ll have to watch the video (or skip through it) to find out. I will say it’s not a huge or impressive number. It is a very plain amount of pees for a story that follows four people over four days. But it’s not the number of pees that’s important, it’s the stains we found along the way.
“We will build on our knowledge of the piss mechanics throughout this video,” says Alllie, with an alarming amount of straight-faced professionalism. “In most games you shoot people and it means nothing. In Heavy Rain, you piss and the narrative is very slightly enhanced. And you know what? I think that’s beautiful.”
As anyone who has ever yelled “Jason” in a shopping mall can attest, Heavy Rain is a magnet for irony. It is impossible to enjoy this (or arguably any game by Quantic Dream) without cackling out loud at certain moments. For all their desire to be grand, meaningful works of art, these games are laden with nonsense, both intentional and unintentional.
Yet the video is not just a litany of gags at the expense of 2010’s best and worst choose-your-own-misery game. As the piss countdown progresses, Allie’s intense scrutiny results in some weirdly interesting observations. For example, Madison, the only playable woman in the story, flushes the toilet automatically, whereas all male characters require the player to activate the flush themselves. In many instances, you will pee and be unable to wash your hands. You will often eat or rub your face soon afterwards.
The piss is not dynamically tracked by the game, she also notes. You can drink carton after carton of orange juice and you will never become bursting to go. And some of the bathrooms in the game’s US setting (not-quite-Philadelphia) lack a sink because that’s how some bathrooms exist in real life France, where the game’s designers were based.
“You can easily go the whole game without taking a piss even once,” observes Allie. “I don’t know why you’d want to do that but it technically is an option for players who prefer a pissless play style.”
And just like that “pissless playstyle” has become one of my favourite phrases of the year so far.
The video also acts as a surprisingly thorough breakdown of the game’s storyline. If you have never played Heavy Rain, and can’t face doing a whole playthrough yourself, I can now recommend this as the definitive way to have the story summarised. Yes, the focus is on urine. Yes, the word piss occurs approximately 150 times in the course of the video. But I have probably learned more about this Cage game in the past hour than I did after two playthroughs when it first released.
Pee is on the brain here at RPS, it seems. I recently reviewed My Summer Car, a mechanic sim in which you can drink your own wizz to reduce both your thirst bar and urine bar at the same time. Meanwhile, first-piss-on-shooter Urge got Edwin’s attention for being “the most interesting open world shooter in a long while, and also, the most revolting“. Anyway. That’s all the piss we have for the moment, reader. Now, wash your hands.
Kurt Indovina
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