Failing Every Prompt in Heavy Rain Makes it Hilariously Entertaining

We’ve all got those go-to videos saved away for when we need a good laugh, haven’t we? You know the type—no matter how many times you watch them, they never fail to crack you up. My all-time favorite is “Heavy Rain – Covered Market [Super Klutz Edition].” It’s a gem from the NahmanJayden YouTube channel, where the player purposely botches every single button prompt during a chase scene in the game Heavy Rain.

Even if Heavy Rain is a complete mystery to you, this video is side-splitting. But if you know the game, it’s a whole different level of funny. Let me break it down for you—or just go ahead and watch the video if you’d rather skip my detailed explanations, that’s cool too.

Heavy Rain is a game that came out in 2010 from the minds at Quantic Dream, penned by David Cage and directed by Cage alongside Steve Kniebihly. At that time, a game so heavily focused on storytelling was a bit of an anomaly, especially outside the niche visual novel space. Yet, Heavy Rain was this ambitious, big-budget action-adventure built around a gritty mystery: four characters haunted by the menace of the Origami Killer, a serial killer who manipulates rainstorms to carry out his deadly deeds. Despite its superficial resemblance to third-person combat games like the Uncharted series—with its cinematic cutscenes and quick-time events—Heavy Rain veers off in another direction. There’s no traditional combat; it plays more like a TV drama where your job is to push the right buttons at just the right moments, so the “show” unfolds as intended.

If you mess up those button presses, don’t worry—the game simply moves forward, rather than stopping and forcing a restart. This was a smart move, inviting players not usually into gaming to dive in and enjoy the narrative, without needing lightning-fast reactions. But it’s clear the designers at Quantic Dream didn’t expect players to miss too many prompts as they’re generally pretty easy. You’d have to be trying to get them wrong. Yet, when you do miss them, the game treats you to some amusing alternate animations indicating failure.

Unless you’re the mastermind behind that fantastic YouTube video, purposefully flubbing every prompt in a nail-biting chase scene, you might not realize how uproarious Heavy Rain can be. The outcome’s so delightfully ridiculous that it makes you wonder if the game would be better off as a comedy rather than the intense drama it aims to be. Since Heavy Rain launched in 2010, the gaming world has seen more titles embracing physical comedy, like Untitled Goose Game and Thank Goodness You’re Here. While Heavy Rain wasn’t crafted with humor in mind, I can’t help but think this scene might have inspired some of those comedic elements in later games. It’s comedic brilliance, through and through.