When it’s Heavy Rain. It’s not so much a riddle as it is the only reasonable outcome of a week of post-consumption positing. To understand the often-enjoyable, always-bizarre experience we had with it, it’s important that we – meaning you and us – come to a common understanding of what exactly constitutes a videogame. If you go by the dictionary classification, then Heavy Rain is a scarily snug fit: “any of various games played using a microcomputer with a keyboard and often joysticks to manipulate changes or respond to the action or questions on the screen.” There’s a clear need to update that factoid with something a little less 1983, but at its basest level, this is what a videogame is in much the same way that the Olympic Games can be descriptively distilled to a horde of cretinously fit people generally prancing about and wanging stuff up a field.

My name is Norman Jayden. I will be your favourite character this evening.

We accept this definition, but there’s also a host of expectations that defy basic explanation. If there are guns in a game, it follows that we’ll be asked to take careful aim and shoot at stuff. If there are driving sections, we defer to our default driving game stance without thinking, our digits primed and ready to pounce on either of a couple of possible control setups. There’s dialogue, so we have a precise idea of what we want to say. All of these assumptions and many more don’t apply, and to the detriment of Heavy Rain, go to form a bedrock of prejudice and contempt long before the tutorial has reached the comparative comfort of its third thrust.

Heavy Rain is unforgivable. Because it’s not the one at fault. Within the first ten minutes you have a choice; you can either hoy all that accumulated baggage out of the nearest window, or you can sit alone and grumble to yourself about how the controls are stupid, or how quicktime events are the worst thing ever to happen to gaming. We urge you to take a deep breath and do the former, because it’s only in identifying where the blame lies that you’ll be able to truly enjoy the game. It’s our preconceptions which are at fault.

Those of you with a few years behind you may remember Fighting Fantasy books. Ian Livingstone – now Life President of Eidos – and fellow visionary Steve Jackson came up with the notion back in the eighties that fiction would be far more interesting if it was interactive. The books contained short, randomly numbered paragraphs, each with a story event and the necessary instructions required to find the next part, based on largely bipolar choices. The problem is that, structurally, this is precisely what Heavy Rain does on a scene-by-scene basis, with the very obvious difference that rather than adding interactivity to fiction, it feels more like it’s taking it away from videogames.

Jayden's ARI interface let's you find clues as well as tie them together.

The game contains a litany of redundant interactions. Open the cupboard door. Look inside the cupboard. There’s some crisps. Close the cupboard door. Look out of the window. Until the latter stages of the game, these actions constitute a considerable chunk of available experimentation, and none of them have any ramifications whatsoever. To open the cupboard, or not to open the cupboard, that is the question. To shave or not to shave. To lean over the chair, or not lean over the chair. Shakespeare would shit his own bed.

… continued