I never got around to picking up Heavy Rain when it first came out; the acting in the demo didn't appeal to me and there seemed to be a lot of glitches. LA Noire on the other hand, I picked up day one; it seemed like it accomplished what Heavy Rain only wished it could. The acting was top-notch, and the faces didn't look like robots, they looked real. Then I played it. I liked it a lot, but I had this nagging feeling the whole time I was playing that the entire thing was just an elaborate illusion, and as soon as I started to look below the surface the mirage would vanish and I'd be left with linearity disguising itself as flexibility. I don't hate linear games, in fact sometimes the more open games are just too much of a commitment for me, but LA Noire is a game that appears to be open, and feels like it should be open, but it really isn't. For me to have fun with LA Noire, I had to role play. I had to pretend the possibilities were endless, because to care at all about the moment to moment detective work I had to feel like the clues and the connections were being uncovered as a reuslt of my own ingenuity, not a result of the repeated sequence of easily dissected tasks.  And while I played, I had a lot of fun.
 
Then I decided to finally play Heavy Rain, and I was blown away. The acting still wasn't to my taste, and I ran into a few glitches, but the level of choice I had, and the natural way I fell into the various roles I was assigned, felt like the true realization of a detective story videogame. LA Noire failed because of its linearity. The existence of a "game over" screen, and the constant fear that I will get a question "wrong," makes each choice not a decision that I make based on my true feelings, but a choice dependent on what I think the game wants me to choose. Heavy Rain is able to exist both as a game with clear motives and objectives for the player, and also a mirror reflecting your own traits back at you. Even if you don't play the game as an extension of your own choices, you will play the characters almost as different roles that you, the actor, are portraying. How you want the story to go says a lot about the kind of person you are, the kind of narratives you enjoy.

 In Heavy Rain either choice is right. But really, neither is right. There's not going to be a sound cue to let you know after the fact, the choice just is, and the only consequences are narrative ones.

I realize these games were trying to do different things, so to say one succeeded over the other is like saying apples are far superior apples than oranges are. But for me, when I played LA Noire, Heavy Rain was the experience I didn't know I really wanted instead. LA Noire insists on telling its own story.

 We can't control any of that. And in the end I felt detached from him and the story. I didn't really like Cole. He didn't make the decisions I wanted him to, and he made mistakes I wouldn't have let him make. It didn't matter how real his facial animation looked, I didn't feel connected to him. The characters in Heavy Rain on the other hand, with their wooden performances and uncanny valleys, felt like my own creations. While Heavy Rain has its own illusions and the possibilities to choose from are never infinite, it hides its strings far more effectively than LA Noire does. And I think that's what made the difference for me. It felt real.