It sounds hackneyed, but it's so subtle and beautifully introduced, it's almost poetic.Īnd the clever thing about the game is that it feels as though your interactions with the lead character actually reflect and heighten the atmosphere. There's a lovely moment, early in the game where grief-stricken architect Ethan Mars takes his withdrawn son Shaun to a playground – the two have drifted painfully apart since the accidental death of Shaun's brother, but here they suddenly bond, and as Ethan embraces his boy, a rainbow becomes visible amid the endless grey skies and battering rain. Whereas Kojima seems happy to skim along the surface of filmic method, Cage and his team have mastered the intricacies of mise-en-scene, timing and subjective camera work to subliminally create and sustain mood. Ultimately perhaps, it's the fact that Quantic Dream's visionary director David Cage is a true student of cinematic theory. I'm not sure if it's the thoughtfully designed locations, the wonderful score or the, at times, intricately convincing human animation, but something drags you in. From the jarringly mundane opening scenes, to the first major tragic event and beyond, there is a lingering sense of fear, isolation and dread that few games before have ever mustered. One factor is certain: the sense of atmosphere it creates is incredible. If it wasn't for the fact that Quantic Dream has been heading in this direction for years via the likes of Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Fahrenheit, I'd call it unprecedented. Those who call it an adventure game are wrong, those who call it little more than a movie with a few branching decision points are wrong. Operating somewhere between the almost total linearity of Dragon's Lair, and the QTE-splattered quasi-interactivity of Shenmue's action scenes, it's a singular amalgam of cinematic and ludic devices.
This is a title that always promised to defy established notions of 'gameplay'. So far, however, the response to Heavy Rain, the grimly atmospheric interactive drama from French developer Quantic Dream, has been much more intriguing. EA's first-person chase game toyed with convention, tackled assumptions about user interfaces, and tested the way most magazines and websites approach the reviewing process, their regimented lists of criteria proving too dogmatic to truly reward it.
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