Whoever this old guy is, he’s obviously some sort of creep. Command prompts flash up on screen, and I make sure Madison ignores any advances he makes as he pours a couple of glasses of alcohol. Outside the sky is overcast and rain patters against the window, the interior poorly lit to give the room a rather cold and even creepy vibe. I’m trying to find out if this man has any ties to an alleged suspect as the Origami Killer, but just as I have Madison ignore his advances he casts aside my inqueries. He hands me a glass, and I’m pretty sure in a few moments I’m going to have to start running around the house away from some psycho rapist or something.

A command prompt appears, offering me the opportunity to take a swig from the glass just handed to Madison. I shrug, used to this sort of pointless interaction by now, and continue with my line of questioning. Then things get fuzzy.

The world around Madison begins spinning, she loses focus. The game isn’t prompting me to do anything as I see this old creeper smirk and laugh to himself. Crap! As a dude, I’ve never been raised with the sense that there are malicious perverts around every corner. I haven’t been taught to be paranoid when someone hands me food or drink unless it is Halloween candy. It didn’t even occur to me that the drink would have been tampered with. I pressed one button and now Madison was passed out.

The reality of the situation was a lot different than I expected. Madison awoke, hands and feet strapped to a table. Given the bland concrete design of the room, I was most likely in the old creep’s basement. In the corner was a dead body, and before me was the old psycho. He was wearing an apron and wielded a drill or sawblade or something that was going to wreck my shit up. Holy crap, did I just kill the character?

Heavy Rain is loaded with these sorts of experiences. Every lesson learned in video gaming for the past twenty years were just about useless here, as it was focused more on delivering a narrative than it was in being a simple “game”. The phrase “interactive drama” may sound all kinds of coffee house pretentious, the sort of thing uttered by a hipster wearing a Killers t-shirt with an iPod in one hand and a Richard Dawkins book in the other would say, but it is completely accurate. Heavy Rain isn’t delivering a “win or game over” experience. It’s delivering an experience altogether.

A lot of comparisons can be drawn to the older Shenmue franchise, which contained a number of scenes that placed button prompts into cut-scenes to determine what would happen. However, if you screwed up the scene didn’t reload from the previous checkpoint. In fact, “failure” isn’t always applicable here. The decisions made will have a gradual effect on the outcome of the game, and even with a few failures or screw ups it is still possible to get the “best ending”. At the same time, it is possible to kill all of your characters and have some sort of conclusion delivered. Sure, it won’t be happy, but this isn’t a high-tech version of Candyland where there’s always a winner or loser. It’s a story, and it takes advantage of the fact that it is interactive to generate more immersive emotions from the player than most games can ever hope to achieve.

The focus here is on delivering an emotional experience, and as such the writer and designer, David Cage, made sure to even mess with our preconceived notions of what games desire. The entire “tutorial” of the game is filled with pointless actions such as grabbing a box of orange juice, then shaking it, then opening it, and finally taking a drink. It all feels worthless and unnecessary at first, but in the long run it is getting the player familiar with the different prompts and methods of interaction.

It’s all par for the course until the game decides to teach the player how combat works. It pits him in a fight with the character’s son using fake swords, with the button prompts being used to use a fake swing against the kid. Yet if you persist on striking at the child, he’ll start to look more and more like he’s not having a good time. If you refuse to hit the buttons at all, then the kid will win and will be happy. It informs the player how these action sequences are going to work, but simultaneously lets them know that failure is not the end of the world and that, sometimes, it is better to just do nothing.

Unfortunately, they also know that, when prompted, most players will press the button. The prompts attempt to reflect the sort of emotions the character may be feeling at the moment, and as a result a player may be “tricked” into doing something they didn’t want to. Multiple options may float around a character’s head, going in and out of focus, and even swapping what buttons they are mapped to, all in an effort to get the player feeling the same uncertain and nervous feelings of the character.

It is a highly effective method of input. A lot of people use terms like “quick-time-events done right”, but that suggests the entire purpose of the button prompts is to test the player’s reflexes. Sometimes it is the player’s reflex that dooms a character or causes them to make a mistake. This game doesn’t use quick-time-events. They simply create an alternate form of input for action and combat.

A form of input that works. The modern game design mentality seems to have an obsession with “bigger is better” in order to generate memorable experiences, but there’s a major misunderstanding as to what makes something memorable in the first place. People don’t remember mundane details well, and you’re not going to remember fighting an eight-story tall monster if you’ve done it a dozen, two dozen or even hundred times before. People remember emotions, and thus remember emotional experiences. Someone may not remember what kind of car hit them when they got into a car accident, or what state the license plate was from or even the color, but they’ll remember what they felt before, during and after the accident.

This is why Heavy Rain is such an effective game. I don’t remember the precise words exchanged in the gameplay example I started this review with, but I remember how I felt during the whole process. This same thing can be said for the majority of the game.

In fact, to compare, it’s been a much longer time since I played Heavy Rain than when I played Bulletstorm, but as I sit here there are very few rooms, encounters or scenes from Epic’s big shooter that I can actively recall. Yet I can remember at minimum half of the scenes from Heavy Rain, and that’s just trying to be generous to Bulletstorm. This is a game that players will want to return to not only so they can see all the possibilities, but just to experience all of those emotions again.

That’s also what makes it the perfect game to introduce friends or family to in order to teach them that games can be more than just games, but can also be art. The entire thesis is that video games are much more than a high-tech version of Candyland. Heavy Rain is a lot like Watchmen in terms of what video games can be. Like comic books, however, the industry is flooded in juvenile concepts of “grown-up” material and “adult” concepts, while throwing around terms like “sequential art” and “interactive entertainment” to sound like we’re something more than we really are.

Sure, we can be, and there’s always a market for dumb fun, but Heavy Rain is the sort of game that makes you feel like a smacked ass for calling a game like Bulletstorm or upcoming Duke Nukem Forever “mature”.