Five Questions Heavy Rain Must Answer

Death, The Origami Killer, Virtual Reality and freedom to shape your gameplay experience.

Warning: The following feature contains several spoilers about events and details that crop up during the first few hours of Heavy Rain. If you're not keen on the idea of ruining any potential surprises, you may do better to read our most recent, spoiler-free, preview instead.

How much freedom do we really have?

Alright, so we know that Heavy Rain is a game about choice. As the four protagonists push on with their respective hunts for The Origami Killer, it'll be down to us to determine their choice of action. You may suspect that the man you're talking to is holding back a vital piece of information - so what do you do? Do you reason with him, threaten him with police action, or fire a bullet into the wall right next to his head? All of these approaches will affect your story in different ways; what's less clear is how significant these deviations are.

For example, let's look at the first scene featuring Scott Shelby - the shabby yet likeable private detective. Shelby starts the game at a run-down motel where he attempts to interview a call girl - a melancholy figure who lost her son to The Origami Killer. Depending on your line of questioning, she may give you a few details about her child's disappearance, or she might angrily throw you out. Either way, you'll eventually leave - only to watch as a dodgy-looking chap forces his way into her room. At this point you can either intervene and come to her rescue, or go home.

There are several variables to be found in this scene. For a start, there's the information that can be gained from the prostitute; piss her off, or fail to ask the right questions, and you may not get anything out of her. Then there's the call girl herself. If you rescue her from the nasty client, she'll thank you - and I'm guessing this might open up some form of assistance in the future. Finally, there's Shelby: if you end up fighting the client, you could end up getting hurt. If Shelby takes a hit from the rampant pervert, he'll have a plaster on his hooter in all subsequent scenes.

So far, we only know for sure that it's this last variable that leaves a lasting mark on the game - and even that appears to be an aesthetic difference (although, admittedly it's an impressive one). Does it matter if you botch the interview, or whether you save the damsel in distress? At the time of writing, it's hard to say. You can see how they could, but until we get to play the game beyond the first couple of hours, we won't know for sure. What we do already know is that Heavy Rain forces certain events upon the player. By now most of us have seen or read about Norman Jayden's life-or-death battle in Mad Jack's scrapyard - the scene that was demoed at E3 this year. On the basis of that code, it seems that regardless of however you choose to approach the yard's thug-like owner, you'll always end up scrabbling around in the dirt - and one of you will always end up dead.

While it would be unreasonable to expect Quantic Dream to let the player take the game in any direction they choose, Heavy Rain will need more than just a handful of branching points if our expectations are to be met. At present I'm delighted with the volume of minor potential differences within a single scene, but the overall trajectory seems far more linear than what I'd initially hoped for. Still, I've only seen the first two hours of the game, and you'd expect the big forks in the road to arrive towards the middle. How much freedom does the player really have? Only time will tell.