The game maintains an engagingly uneasy relationship with literalness. Awkward face button combinations are used to implement and evoke both the exertion of squeezing through an electrified fence, and the psychological stresses of pointing a pistol at an unarmed man in a dressing gown. During the heat of the moment your character will actually resist direction, the control cues dancing and shifting under the beat of adrenaline.
Perhaps inevitably for a game whose storyline turns on a single revelation, Heavy Rain’s replay value is a little suspect. The more you revisit it, the more evident the script’s conjuring tricks become. Life-or-death decisions prove less than decisive. You’ll spot the places where Quantic Dream has economised, feeding two plot branches into one scenario with a faint, telltale “pop” of non-sequiturs.
Nevertheless, that first playthrough is one I’d encourage anybody with 40 pounds in their pocket to experience. Hopefully Quantic’s competitors will follow their example, making off with some of cinema’s other archetypal tales – outer space odysseys, Wild West yarns, syrupy rom coms, rags-to-riches sport flicks, purple-prosed arthouse offerings – and reshaping them into “interactive drama”: every cliché, every idle director’s gesture, every theme Hollywood has milked to the brink of extinction, reinvigorated for another generation.
Releases of this import arrive once a hardware cycle, at most. Heavy Rain is more than a mere work of art – together with its flawed predecessor Fahrenheit, it marks the birth of a genre.