Heavy Rain is like no other video game, mostly because it's not a traditional video game. Heavy Rain is a sort of choose your own adventure where you guide the characters along a myriad of potential paths.

This game is completely about the characters and their experiences within the story. It shows that a lot of effort has been taken to make sure the characters show their emotions just as a real person would, given the situation.

This style of story-telling is a very fresh departure from other games in that your actions are directly tied to and influence the story. It's a very dramatic and very emotionally intense game. While revealing almost anything would seem nearly sacrilegious for this game, going over the prologue shouldn't be a problem as they're introductory stages.

You begin the game as Ethan Mars, one of four playable characters through the game, waking up in bed. Today is Ethan's eldest son's tenth birthday. His loving wife is picking the boys up from school and is taking care of almost everything. This prologue stage gets you used to the controls, which I'll go into detail sometime later.

Even here, you have the options to do some work--Ethan is an architect--or slack off around the house. Once you're done working, or slacking off, the wife and children come home. After setting the plates and playing with the boys, it's lunch time. Before sitting down, you have to go get Shaun from upstairs. He sees his bird has died, and Ethan tells him of the nature of life and death.

Cut to the next scene at the mall. Your wife and younger son, Shaun, go to try on shoes, while you watch over Jason, the birthday boy. He wanders off like any ADD-riddled child does and finds a clown selling balloons. After pleading, he gets you to buy one for him and once again wanders off, leaving you to pay. After tracking him outside, you find he's crossed the street. He finally notices you yelling at him and walks across the multi-lane street with no regard of oncoming traffic, only to have a likewise clueless motorist speed up. Being the good Dad, you dive out into the road to try and save him, his red balloon floating up into the air.

The game begins with a swift punch to the gut, and it doesn't get any easier.

Without going into too much more detail, I will say the rest of the game is up to how you play it. It's not quite an open-ended sandbox, but it does keep the story open-ended enough that I've gone back and played it multiple times.

In addition to not being a normal video game experience, Heavy Rain also changes everything you know about controlling your character. Walking, running, and however else you move around (depending on the context) is done using R2, while the left stick is used to turn the character. Most actions the character can perform are done using the right thumbstick, while certain situations give you the quick-time event (QTE) mini-game that has become sickeningly ubiquitous. Heavy Rain takes a different approach to QTEs, though. It's no longer "press button X to not die." Now it's "don't make X number of mistakes" to successfully do whatever it is you're doing.

The game's controls work really well for the most part. Turning while moving has some issues when in tight corners and there's the ever-present issue of the game changing the direction you're moving the moment the angle changes. This can be avoided by letting go of the left thumbstick until you need to change your direction. One thing that was refreshing to see was the game took walking up and down stairs out of your hands for the most part. You simply hold down R2, and it'll do the rest for you. Stairs are finally no longer slopes with textures that try to be stair-like.

In a lot of situations, the sixaxis function is used as an alternate control in QTEs and various situations where it'd be appropriate, such as shaking a carton of orange juice. It's never used where extreme precision is needed, and is almost always used in a way where it makes sense to have a quick or forceful jerk or a shake. There are also a handful of situations where the sixaxis is used for turning, such as playing airplane in the garden with Shaun during the prologue. Overall, the sixaxis is a good addition to the rest of the controller.

The game has no static screen elements. Any point where you'll be interacting with an object will pop up near the object when you get near and look in its direction. Likewise, anything having to do with yourself, such as choosing a thought to listen to or an action to perform will rotate around you. These interface items have a minimal look that doesn't distract from the environment.

Graphically, the game is quite gorgeous. Each environment is very detailed and as close to life-like as any video game seen before. While there are very few graphical issues, the ones that are there stick out like a sore thumb. For example, Scott is cooking an egg omelette at one point. As he scrambles the eggs in the pan, the original egg model glitches about an inch above the pan at an angle, and stays there until you're done with the cooking sequence. Issues like this are rare, through.

Almost all of the characters are rendered with incredible detail, and their movement is incredibly realistic, especially in scripted situations where motion capture was used extensively. There's a certain character whose textures don't quite match up with the model, it's merely the exception to the rule. There is a severe problem with the characters when interacting with each other, though. Sometimes the character models seemingly don't align properly with each other, throwing off the animation of both.

The voice acting is, for the most part, good. There are only a handful of characters where I would say their voice acting is excellent. The rest are faking their American accents. While some of the actors such as Pascal Langdale do a surprisingly good job, there are some slip-ups here and there. Children, I think were the worst offenders out of the bunch of letting their thick accents through.

Another issue I had with voice acting has to do with repeatedly saying the same thing, such as shouting for your son in the mall during the prologue. There isn't enough variation. Just a little more please?

The music completes the game. The composition and orchestration are both top-notch. While there is a general theme throughout, each piece helps explore and magnify the emotion going on during the scene. I honestly haven't felt the score of any medium amplify the emotions going through my mind this much since Philip Glass' composition for The Hours.

On the technical side, Heavy Rain required a 226 MB patch the day it launched. This amazed me. I'm not sure if this is how a lot of PS3 games get patched, but the time it took to download, then to install was closer to ten minutes than five.

On top of that, the game has a 4 GB install that took 8 minutes. While I'm new to the PS3, and the silliness that is mandatory installs on a console, 8 minutes was a lot better than the only other game I have that required one, Metal Gear Solid 4. At least the Heavy Rain installer has an interactive tutorial on folding an origami crane with the square of paper that came with the game.

Sadly, Heavy Rain has its own share of bugs, some of which are rather severe. There are numerous bug reports involving being unable to resume saved games. Other bugs include being unable to move while walking in place, and having the character stop in the middle of their action. This particular one I experienced in the prologue. Ethan was drawing up his architectural plans and stopped mid-pen stroke. The game was perfectly fine. I could change camera angles and pause, but could not continue the action.

These bugs, in addition to the imperfections I've previously outlined make it hard for me to give Heavy Rain the perfect score I think it would otherwise deserve. It really is a masterpiece of video game story-telling, otherwise.

Final Score: 9.1