I’ve been playing Heavy Rain now for two evenings, and I’m probably 5 or 6 hours in. Before they made Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream released a game called Indigo Prophecy, which I absolutely loved despite the game’s severely flawed denoument. I can say now that although Heavy Rain contains no science fiction beyond some advanced technology that likely doesn’t exist yet, the same basic feel is in place: what Quantic Dream terms “interactive fiction”. I’ll try to lay out how I feel about the game in an entirely spoiler-free way.

But what’s struck me most about the game up to this point is the notion of consequences. In most games, the sole consequence is death. Your character dies and you reload. But imagine for a moment that you couldn’t reload. Imagine that the game could continue after your death. The only game that I’ve ever played with any kind of similar system was Ultima III, back on my Commodore 64. In that game, when one of your characters died, the game would immediately save the character’s death to the floppy disk. In Heavy Rain, the game constantly saves your progress, your decisions, your advancements, and your failures. And it makes the consequences of failure far more severe than in any game I’ve ever played. Your decisions are irrevocable, your failures final.

Last night, I was dealt my first major failure in the game. The character didn’t die, but having experienced what that character has gone through, I know for a fact that he’d rather have died than failed. But no – that isn’t quite right, because if he’d died, he’d have failed, and the consequences of that failure would remain despite his death, so he had to survive in order to succeed. But he did not succeed. And I felt – through him – what it’s like for a man to throw himself heart and soul at something and fail. In Heavy Rain, like in real life, there are no retries. And I find that I love that. It’s just a game, and I love when a game makes me feel something, even if that something is a total sense of defeat. Just as long as I’m not expected to retry until I succeed.