Heavy Rain is one of those games that is going to be very hard to review without spoiling things, but I'm going to take a crack at it here.
I like suspense / drama in movies, but it hasn't ever really translated across into a game for me before. At least, not like it did in Heavy Rain. The game sets you up to care about the characters, and I did. The game places the characters into impossibly bad situations, and I watched and helped them make choices. I always wanted to know what was going to happen next, and I kept playing until it was over and I got my ending.
My ending? Yes, it was the ending that I deserved, and feel very satisfied in earning. After beating the game, I went online to visit forums to see what other people had happen to them. Some people had very similar endings to mine, but some key parts were different. They had made different choices and decisions about how they played the game that put them up to that point. Some people had lost characters through their action or inaction. Some people had people live that I did not. Some people posted about experiences that I could relate to, and some people posted about experiences that I had no idea that could happen.
I very much admire the work that went into this game. That's not to say that it doesn't have its flaws. There's a couple of plot holes that don't make a bit of sense in the scheme of things, and one giant one that they never explain and seems that they hope you just forget about. Moving around was a bit awkward, and I found trouble with figuring out when I needed to hold a button or press a button, or tap a button repeatedly in stressful conditions. This probably needs an example for people who haven't played it, when your character is faced with a stressful condition, their actions appear onscreen shaking and jumping around. It's hard to tell when the X button appears shaking if you need to press it repeatedly (which would appear as a pulsing button) or if you need to hold it down (which appears as a button with a small arrow like pointer in it.
Game play itself plays like a quick time event movie. It flows extremely well from success to failure, and it allows you failures, or to try again, up to a point where you either run out of time, or have made too many failures. At that point, depending on what's going on, you may be in danger of losing your character. There is no save and reload from right before and let you take another crack at it (although I will admit to being guilty of shutting off the system at one of these points that I could just not figure out). Once the game saves (which it does often) you are stuck with whatever happened. If you lose a character, the other three will carry on the story without them.
This system makes for some truly stressful moments in the game. When a gun is pointed at you, and you know that if you make the wrong decision, it could be your last, you really feel it. This is exceptionally well done. At one point after having talked down a crazy man with a gun, the character on screen and I both were rubbing our foreheads being glad to have just gotten through that alive.
I can't recommend giving this game a try enough. I really hope to see more out of this studio like this (and not like Indigo Prophecy, from what I hear). I truly believe this game is the next step in interactive story telling, and while it may not be for everyone, those that like that sort of thing, will love this game.
