If you're feeling like you don't have a point of reference here, Heavy Rain is, essentially, a deeply devoted marriage of adventure-game storytelling and quick-time event gameplay. The story of the Origami Killer, as seen from the perspective of multiple characters, is the focus, and it plays like a very deliberately paced police procedural. This is, far and away, the thing that struck me the most during my time with Heavy Rain: the story, the setting, and the characters lack the oversized flourishes and archetypal cartoonishness that even the most serious video games tend to indulge.
There's a grit and a pallor to Heavy Rain's presentation that reinforces the everyday weight of the situation. The crummy apartments, seedy motels, muddy crime scenes, and drab police precincts don't just feel like location types, but actual places, thanks to a preternatural attention to detail. Saying it's photorealistic would be irresponsible and hyperbolic, but it looks real enough. One touch that I particularly appreciated was the ability to move about the environment during dialogue sequences. So many games are intent on locking you into a face-to-face two-shot that it's surprisingly rare to see a little walk-and-talk in a game. Beyond some technical hiccups indicative of the non-final software, the only fault I could really find in the presentation concerned some awkward voice acting, which occasionally betrayed the game's non-English-speaking origins.
I've pretty deliberately avoided talking specifically about the story in Heavy Rain here because, well, it doesn't pack the same punch without the game's greater context, and I feel like it really needs to be experienced whole-cloth to be appreciated. With a few hours under my belt, I'm genuinely intrigued by how this Origami Killer story will unfold, and what the fates it holds for its collection of flawed protagonists. I'm also fascinated by its world of mundane details and the abstract, tactile feel of the gameplay. The lack of compromise promises to make Heavy Rain an incredibly divisive game, and one that will be hard to ignore.
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