Heavy Rain (PS3)

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Heavy Rain is here and it looks amazing

Cutting through hype can be a difficult thing. It's easy to get caught up in wave upon wave of excitement and anticipation as publishers drip feed us game hacks tidbits of information in the run up to release. Announce a new character, announce a new game mode, announce anything new, just to keep us interested. Or, in the case of Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, described by writer/director David Cage as a narrative experience during a behind closed doors demo at Leipzig Games Convention, announce just what the bloody hell it's all about in the first place.

Cage begins the 40-minute presentation with a history lesson. He recounts 1999's Omikron: The Nomad Soul, the studio's first title, and 2005's Fahrenheit, "a game where we tried to use for the first time the idea that a story could be played". He then talks about 'The Casting', a prototype that attempted to recreate natural emotions in a virtual performance. So impressive was the demo that Sony asked Quantic Dream if they could use it in their E3 2006 booth the year of the PS3's release. "It was quite a boring demo when you think about it," Cage explains. "It was a woman talking to a camera sitting in a kitchen for five minutes." But the interest and excitement surrounding the video convinced Cage and co that Heavy Rain could not only work, but, crucially, could prove a commercial success, too.

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Cage says a few key philosophies underpin what Heavy Rain is all about. The first is that it is a story driven game. "The story is not told in cut scenes like in most games," he says. "It's told through player's actions. You don't watch the story, you actually play it. Your decisions affect the way the story is told. At the same time you're not only the actor, but also the writer and the director of the experience."

It's emotionally driven - "Our characters are not just a bunch of dead pixels on screen. They are real living and breathing characters." The story and subject matter are adult - "We won't tell you a story about the knight who needs to save the princess from the dragon. We'll tell you a story about real people, in real life, having real problems." And last, but not least, the game will be accessible to a broad audience - "We believe that the challenge should move from the controller to the player's mind." Cage talks about "bending stories", using a rubber band analogy. "The player can stretch and deform the story based on his or her actions. But whatever you do the backbone of the story is always there. It allows us to maintain the consistency of the story whatever happens."

Is there a better looking game than Heavy Rain?

So far, so good. But it's all talk. This is Morpheus explaining to Neo that you cannot be told what The Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself. Well, we're about to see it for ourselves. Cage's Quantic Dream colleague boots the game up and we're in.

"We believe we have the best looking menu of the show," says Cage with a Cheshire cat smile. He's right. The widescreen television we're staring at is filled with an extreme close-up of a woman's face, focused squarely on her eyes. Boring, you might say. But it's not. In fact it's quite the opposite. It's one of the most compelling, entrancing things we've ever seen pumped out of a games console. Her eyes are so detailed they look real. We can see the whites of her eyes, reflections, depressions, everything as it should be. They dart from side to side, as if in REM sleep except with her eyelids open, motion captured, Cage explains, not animated. The skin on her face is astonishingly detailed, with pours, marks, shadows and freckles visible with crystal clear clarity. It's stunning stuff, all in real-time 3D, and not CG. If this is just the menu screen, we ask ourselves, then what's the actual game going to be like? We're about to find out.

The demo begins with the woman, a journalist, riding a motorbike on an unknown US freeway, heading towards the address of a taxidermist, Leyland White, a man suspected in the investigation of a spate of female murders. It is, as you'd expect, pouring with rain. She arrives at the house. An ominous, Resident Evil-style string melody plays over the sound of the rain beating down on the ground. She gets off, takes off her helmet and we see the rain cascading down the skin of her face. It's hugely impressive.

She begins walking around outside the house and we start to get an idea of Heavy Rain's interface. R2, no matter where the camera is, will always make your character move forward. The right analogue stick allows you to move wherever you want in combination with this. With the left analogue stick you can control the head and shoulders of the character, so you can look on the left and start walking on the right, for example. "This is what you do in normal life," explains Cage. "We believe the benefit of this system is so huge, but also that you get used so quickly to it that people after a couple of minutes will forget about it and just go where they want to go."

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