I spent much of last weekend scared out of my wits

This post is a little departure from my usual TV-related stuff, but I figure if it still involves me staring at a giant brightly colored screen for several hours in a row, it’s probably close enough. I spent a fair chunk of last week playing through the new video game Heavy Rain, and it kinda blew my mind.

The game comes from an almost unknown European company called Quantic Dream, and the general premise is the story of the Origami Killer, a serial murderer who kidnaps and drowns young boys. You play as several characters in the story, switching back and forth between them at various points in the narrative and occasionally watching the different character arcs overlap. The primary character is a guy named Ethan Mars, who suffers a traumatic loss at the beginning of the game and then goes even further off the rails when the Origami Killer kidnaps his son. You also play as Scott Shelby, a private detective investigating the crimes; Madison Paige, a journalist; and Norman Jayden, an FBI agent with a drug problem. There are a lot of familiar tropes involved with laying out the story, but those tropes come largely from television and movies rather than video games. You interrogate witnesses, gather evidence, piece together clues, and experience some disorienting moments with alcohol, drugs, or even panic attacks that threaten your ability to uncover the killer’s identity. Even the visual style takes some hefty cues from television, specifically the multi-screen perspectives from 24. I should probably also mention that unlike Grand Theft Auto’s highly stylized Liberty City or the post-apocalyptic Washington DC in Fallout 3, Heavy Rain takes place in a modern American city that looks much closer to the real world. The year is 2011, which does give them the leeway to make some pretty sweet augmented reality glasses for the FBI agent, but other than that, it’s a purposefully realistic setting.

Heavy Rain has two primary innovations – one on the level of storytelling, and the other in respect to the gamer interface. Unlike almost any other game I’ve played, there are no do-overs in Heavy Rain. When you interact with other characters, you make choices and then live with the impact of those decisions. When you fight, or try to escape from danger, or solve a puzzle, maybe you do it successfully and move on. If not, then you die and the story goes on without that character. You don’t get to go back and play the scene over again, you don’t have any particular weapons or skills so there’s no use in waiting to buy a bigger gun or level up. Obviously, this has some significant impact on how the game ends. Based on how well you navigate the game and the decisions you make along the way, you can end with all or none of the major characters surviving to the final scene, and unsurprisingly, this gives the impact of playing through the scary fight scenes an emotional range from teeth-rattling nervousness all the way up through OMGOMGOMGOMG. I’m not going to pretend to be more badass here than I actually am: I freaked out. Often. I had to turn the game off and wait until someone else came home before I could keep playing.

Games with alternate endings and choose-your-own-adventure formats have been around for a while, and although Heavy Rain takes the concept to an impressively persuasive place, the idea of it isn’t all that surprising. The thing I’m still thinking about this game, nearly a week later, is the way you move a character through the story. In some sense, you spend the whole game just trying to follow directions well. As you fight with a bad guy, you respond to the prompts and press X, and then O, and then toggle the joystick up, and if you do it correctly and quickly enough, you don’t die. It’s like if your childhood Bop-It game had life-or-death implications. (“Bop it! Twist it! Pull it! AHHHH! DUN DUN NA NA NA.”) At the same time, many of those fight scenes give you a few different options at once, and you have to pick one and do it quickly. If you say the right thing, remember the correct detail, spend a little more time rifling through somebody’s apartment so that you find the pertinent clue, or pick the right person to call, your chances of survival might be a lot better. (Watch a little of a scene from early in the game over here. I’m not going to embed it because there’s a lot of, um, swearing.)

I can appreciate why this style of game play could be really aggravating, and the frustration of missing one button that causes a failure that you have no chance to fix. More than the gameplay format, though, I was totally entranced by the minutiae of every character’s actions. After a love scene, you stand up and leave the room, but first you move the joystick in a slow rolling motion to carefully pull your arm out from underneath the other character’s body. When you’re playing as Madison Paige and you need to make yourself look sexy to create a diversion, you have to repeatedly jerk the controller to left so that she can rip off the demure hem of her skirt. As Norman Jayden investigates a crime scene and needs to go clambering up a slippery hillside, you press and hold an awkward combination of buttons for each new foothold, and if you release them before Norman’s fully hoisted himself up, he goes tumbling back downwards. Maybe my description of them makes it seem boring. It’s mesmerizing.

There are problems. The voice acting is seriously hit or miss, and some of the face capture work is clearly down in the Uncanny Valley. My friend’s PS3, which I had to borrow to play this game because it’s only available on one system, froze at least once as it tried to load a new character, and I once got stuck trying to run up the stairs. Honestly, though, these clear flaws make the game’s innovations even more striking, because it’s just startling how involved you feel even when your character’s accent sounds like Tony Blair doing a Tony Soprano impression.

If more video games were like this one… I would be playing a lot more video games.