HEAVY RAIN, Interactive Stories and the New Genre

Earlier this year I played Heavy Rain, a PlayStation 3 exclusive five years in the making, and it comes as close to successful interactive storytelling as anything ever made.

I first became aware of the game in 2006 when a non-playable tech demo, a three-minute scene called “The Casting,” premiered at E3. The demo floored me, and still does, with its precise camera work, strong voice acting, and detailed animation that gave a virtual actor the weight of a real performance.

French director and writer David Cage describes Heavy Rain as “a very dark film noir thriller with mature themes” about how far you’re willing to go to save someone you love. You play four characters whose lives intersect through the Origami Killer’s serial murders. Each time you inhabit one of them, something shifts, and you start thinking like them.

Heavy Rain works because of its semi-explorable world and control scheme. A free-roaming game like Grand Theft Auto lets the narrative drift; something as closed as Dragon’s Lair reduces it to a reaction game. The PS3 controller’s dual joysticks handle movement, but holding L2 surfaces the character’s current thoughts as selectable options. Some thoughts blur under pressure, and choosing at the wrong moment makes the character say or do something off, pulling the story in a different direction.

Heavy Rain surfaces a tension that film never has to resolve: character narrative versus player narrative. In a film you experience the story through the character, feeling sympathy or anger or joy through their performance. In Heavy Rain, the experience belongs to you. Your story differs from everyone else’s, shaped not just by the game’s branching structure but by your own thought process as you move through it. That first-hand participation makes it stick.

Eurogamer France called it the culmination of a genre “halfway between cinema” and gaming, one that “has always seemed interesting in its intentions but rarely conclusive.” Cage made it conclusive. The question now is who picks up the form next.