‘Heavy Rain’ an interactive storytelling experience

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The first question a lot of people ask when they see “Heavy Rain” is a reasonable one.

If you’re going to make a game focused completely on cinematic storytelling, with twists, turns and psychological thrills, why not just make a movie?

But the game lives up to its self-applied moniker of “interactive drama.” Instead of just watching a father struggle, sacrifice, and compromise everything he thought he knew about himself to save his son, you experience it.

The “quick-time event” button-prompt gameplay doesn’t truly mimic real life more than any other video game, but it does give you a feel for the situations in a novel way.

You have to act quickly and decisively to get through unscathed.

But that’s another point where the “Heavy Rain” experience differs from the norm — if you don’t input the proper command in time and your character gets the cold shoulder from a witness, socked in the jaw, or even killed, the game isn’t over.

It just becomes part of the story — some doors close and others open. The game encourages you to take ownership of your decision and indecision, your victories and failures, in a way previously unheard of in gaming.

Granted, there are only so many endings to the story and, sometimes it’s clear when a decision either way ends up sliding neatly onto the same greased rails.

Nonetheless, by the time the credits rolled, I felt great satisfaction in how I had shaped the story: My path wasn’t perfect, some lived happily while others died senselessly, but it was mine.

Great achievements in camera work and virtual actor performance are required for the total immersion the game seeks to create and, for the most part, it succeeds.

Impressive graphics and stylish split-screen perspectives keep the game interesting whether it’s a slow moment at home or a break-neck action sequence and, great recordings from the central voice actors make their characters believable and sympathetic.

Voice work for the secondary characters ranges from decent to questionable, however, particularly for the children. There seems to be an odd predisposition toward barely concealed French and English accents in the working class New England city that serves as the origami killer’s hunting ground.

If you’re the kind of gamer who can’t stand cutscenes and always skips past story exposition to get to the gameplay, “Heavy Rain” probably won’t do much for you.

But if you can appreciate a somber and occasionally upsetting story and are willing to step outside of your video gaming comfort zone, you won’t regret partaking in this creative new endeavor.