I finished playing through David Cage and Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain a few days ago, the latest interactive mystery thriller from the same folks who made Indigo Prophecy for the Xbox and PS2. While I did enjoy it and I certainly admire the attempt to raise the bar for storytelling in games, I find myself wondering if it was entirely successful. The story is ambitious, and the presentation is nearly unmatched. The graphics are gorgeous, the music evocative, and the atmosphere tense. It is definitely one of the most unique games of the year… but is it even really a game? There’s something about it that feels fundamentally unsatisfying, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

I seem to recall that Indigo Prophecy was billed as more of an interactive movie than a game, and I think that same description fits Heavy Rain as well. It primarily uses quick time events with button sequences to accomplish tasks, also taking advantage of the Playstation 3’s six-axis motion sensors (they are planning an upgrade for the Playstation Move this fall). It’s certainly not boring or unengaging — there is more action than I expected there to be, and the interactive fight scenes and chase sequences definitely get your pulse racing. However, the majority of your button presses only help to guide the story along a certain track. Sure, you can change tracks multiple times and in some interesting ways, but you don’t really have that much freedom and most of the time you’re not even aware of the choices you are making. Plus, the fact that you are controlling four different characters throughout the game, some of whom interact with each other at different points, makes it difficult to identify with anyone and find reasons to make choices in the first place.

The other weird thing is that there are no real fail states in Heavy Rain. You can eventually have certain characters die, but the story continues on without you anyway. When you fail to do something you attempted to do and you don’t get the chance to correct it, that takes away any feeling of accomplishment you might get. I guess this might motivate some people to play the game over again to experience different paths, but I think it would be even more frustrating if you were trying to get to a specific branch point and you fail, and can’t just immediately retry. Personally I didn’t think it had much replay value anyway because so much of the game’s enjoyment relies on the story and one major twist.

I suppose this is all high-level nitpicking because, given the choice, I would definitely want to see more games like Heavy Rain. My only serious complaint is that the movement controls are really frustrating (okay, and some of the voice acting is questionable), but I definitely dig the fact that they’ve brought new kinds of experiences to a video game, and managed to sell it to a mainstream audience. All I’m saying is that it felt like something was missing, and in the end, I might actually prefer to just watch a non-interactive movie of the same story. That’s not a particularly good thing… or is it?