We’ve finally been able to sit down with Heavy Rain and have an extended session on Quantic Dream’s hyped up ‘interactive experience’. It’s good to know how it actually makes us feel, how it plays and how – while we can definitely see why people might claim the contrary – it’s not just a sequence of quick time events strung together with some flashy graphics. Needless to say the preview hasn’t given us enough to form a final verdict on the game, but we can already see Heavy Rain will be – how you say? – ‘divisive’.

Our brief taste of the game began controlling Ethan Mars: married family man, architect, owner of a beautiful house in suburban heaven (or hell, depending on how you see it) and content with all that life brings. We would skip ahead to what happens in the story, motivating Ethan to go on a hunt for the Origami Killer, but that would miss out the most thrilling aspects of the experience. Alright, so that’s being ever-so-slightly facetious, and ‘thrilling’ isn’t the word we should be using, //and// it’s being a bit unfair as the opening section served as little more than a scene-setting extended tutorial.

Still, when a game has you wake up, get out of bed, walk around in your pants, have a wee then brush your teeth (with a bit of sixaxis shaking) within the first 10 minutes of the game – all under player control – you know it’s something you have to talk about. While initially jarring, the subtle on-screen prompts soon become second nature, and the gentle, rather banal opening does a good job of making sure you know everything you’ll need to know throughout the whole game – there’s even a potentially copyright infringing fight sequence to battle through during the International Dad Simulator 2010 section.

Much has been made of the control scheme already – we’ll avoid calling it ‘innovative’, as it’s more a simple case of interesting presentation than a new landmark in input mechanisms. Less has been made of how Heavy Rain drags you as a player into its world. We admit, it took us a bit to suspend our disbelief but suspended it soon was, and we found ourselves relating to Ethan and his plight, sympathising with him and sharing at least some of his worry and grief through the situations the game throws at him. We can’t say the same for the other characters, unfortunately, as we simply didn’t get enough back story or involvement from what we saw of them.

This will surely change with the full game, but it does seem that the story of Ethan will be the spine holding the whole woven tale together, and he seems an ideal character to carry it. We began disliking him for his smug, knowing grin as he enjoyed the best life had to offer, and by the end of our preview we actually felt a twinge of something for the poor bugger.

… continued