Review by: Brandon "Good Father" Cackowski-Schnell

I can't review this game in the "right" way. I'm going to apologize for that up front. This is hard game to compare to a predetermined set of checkboxes and then come up with a letter grade. It is beyond that. This game has so many flaws, so many ways it comes back and devours itself, so many ways it stands in the way of its own ambitions, but was so engrossing and so impactful and so emotionally wrenching that I loved it when I shouldn't have. When I should have been railing against these inconsistencies—I couldn't. When I should have despised the raw emotional manipulation I could only commend it. It is a hard game to love, but I loved it nonetheless.

Heavy Rain is not a game that can be summed up with a simple letter grade so please, take the grade you see above this and ignore it. That's right, throw it out of the window. It may as well be a picture of a bird, or the word "spaghetti". It just doesn't matter. The simple fact is that Heavy Rain has significant problems, both as a game and as a piece of "interactive entertainment" but in it you can see the beginnings of so many things that can, in the right hands, push both video games and interactive entertainment forward that you can't dismiss the game outright because of its flaws.

Simply put, the game is at odds with itself. It tries to be interactive entertainment, whatever that means; a movie of sorts that allows the viewer to make choices as to what happens and have some measure of control over the characters. However – it is sold as a game, in stores that sell games to people who can only play it on a gaming machine. As a result we get the usual trappings of games but used to poor effect.

The early levels, where the delightfully mundane tasks of parenting are used to teach you the controls, work for their purpose. Midway through the game, using the same controls to make an omelet seems like filler, filler it needs because it's a game and games have to be X number of hours long, even if the story suffers for it. The game offers you choices, both big and small, as well as knuckle-bitingly intense action scenes where it seems like failure will lead to the most horrific of endings, but replaying most of these scenes and doing nothing shows that not as many of your choices actually matter. To the same point, if a bevy of trophies are offered for accomplishing or not accomplishing the various goals, how important are the choices in the first place? You can simply reload and erase past mistakes as easily as fixing a spelling error. In short, experiencing the game as a game quickly exposes the man behind the curtain and how small and feeble he truly is.