Heavy Rain

Did you ever play Fahrenheit, the 2005 "interactive thriller"? Then you're in luck: this is the brainchild of the same games director, David Cage (aka David De Gruttola) and in many ways is the culmination of the previous game's dry run. Heavy Rain seems like Fahrenheit 2.0: another weather motif (rain rather than snow), another serial killer, another series of playable characters whose lives intersect, and a few quasi-spiritual/supernatural themes thrown into the mix.

The controls are intuitive, the characters well drawn and the plot incredibly compelling. Having the game play out from intertwining perspectives is no mere gimmick: for one thing, all of the characters can get themselves killed, and the more characters you lose dramatically lowers your chances of solving the mystery of the Origami Killer. That's an important thing to know from the outset: mistakes have severe consequences in Heavy Rain, and while there are regular automatic saves you can't manually save different versions at different points. Fuck something up and you either have to go from the last autosave, or gird your loins and live with it.

The interactivity comes exclusively from the entire game being a series of Quicktime events. Compared with movie's it's damned impressive, but those used to being the agents of their own destiny in a game may find it restrictive. Ultimately no matter how creatively the developers use the buttons and (especially) thumbstick to control the action, all you're ultimately doing is responding to cues on the screen.

There are other minuses. The voice acting is uncomfortably monotone and the body movements so close to being natural that things drift into the uncanny valley too often (one offputting example: characters' arms flop listlessly as they move). Similarly, the script is too often just slightly off, with strange, weirdly European idioms and sentence constructions reminding the player that this game, ostensibly set in the US, was actually created in France. However, lovers of suspenseful games of the Silent Hill 2 mould – or people who love thrillers but wish they could determine the protagonist's action – will be in paradise.

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