Your Story
I'll be honest, when I first started playing this game, I nearly sent it back. The beginning dares you to put it down and do something else.
But then, some part of me decided to give it a legitimate chance. So, I put it back in my PS3 and gave it an hour. Then, I gave it another hour. And then... well, I didn't put it down until it was finished.
The story inches it's feelers onto you and pulls you in without you even realizing it. You somehow find yourself playing just to see the next seen, and finally find out who the Oragami Killer is.
While there are several games that offer the player a chance to choose where the story goes, none do it in such a way as Heavy Rain. Everything is dependent on your actions, and unlike games like Mass Effect that give you a few simple choices that you know mean good or bad, Heavy Rain lets you make the decisions you want to, without knowing where the moral skew lies. You make your decision, and hope the story goes where you want it to.
But the story has a mind of it's own. It will throw everything at you, from people with guns threatening to kill you or someone else, to people trying to beat on you, to puzzles to move on to the next story bullet.
Speaking of puzzles, sometimes you don't realize you're solving one. The task is before you, and you find yourself trying every possible action to complete it. In one scene, you're trying to convince a Alzheimer patient to remember something, and have to use clues from the environment to make them remember.
And you run a chance of not seeing all the scenes in the game. The game doesn't force you to stay in any one place, letting you leave when you want. If you leave before a scene starts, you miss that scene. Sometimes, you miss a key moment, sometimes you miss a scene that could get that character killed.
There is a possibility to make it through the whole game without anyone dying, but it cannot be done by simply turning the system off and retrying. The game goes on without you if you die, and that has a dramatic effect on everything else. So try to get it right the first time.
My only complaint about the game is the control scheme. Sure, it's cool to have the level of interaction Heavy Rain has (you control when/how your character drinks something) but most often, the control symbols appear on screen without very much context as to what they will accomplish. In one scene, my options where to try and resuscitate a NPC or just leave, and each option was right next to the other. The option I thought would rescue my buddy turned out to be the option to leave. Also, toward the end, it told me to do a specific action to save my character, and I did, but it didn't register and the character died.
Then, there's the end. The ending is fantastic, but afterwards, you don't want to play again. The last scene is a complete recap of how everyone's story ends, and that is your ending. That's the culmination of all your work, and you don't want to ruin it by starting a new game.
Fans of compelling stories should definitely check this game out.
