There are those games that serve as little more than a slight diversion on a lazy weekend.  Where, once completed, leaves you with the feeling of an unsuccessful night on the town.  Sure you got your drink on, had a little fun, and feel great for just having left the house.  Then there are those games that, when all is said and done, stay with you and become talking points for conversations with friends.

Then there is Heavy Rain.

To call this a game is to miss the point entirely.  Nor would it be correct to dismiss it as just a six to eight hour quick-time event.  Heavy Rain is an experience that defies classification and flies in the face of all you think you know about gaming.  This is heady stuff and not for the faint of heart or those with a traditionally itchy trigger finger.

When a series of horrific child murders spreads its shadow over a small unnamed city, four strangers find their lives irreversibly altered.  Their fates inextricably entwined.  Ethan Mars is a sullen divorced father, coming to grips with the death of his eldest son.  Scott Shelby makes his way as a private investigator, doing his best to help the families of the victims of who the media have dubbed "The Origami Killer."  Norman Jayden is a Federal agent who is beyond driven to not only find the killer, but to calm a beast that resides in himself as well.  Madison Paige, a journalist, struggles with crippling insomnia and terrifying nightmares.

As their paths leads them to their respective fates, the narrative forms around the choices made with respect to their given situation.  Forget Mass Effect's nuanced morality scheme and dialogue wheel.  As impressive as that game is in regards to how the player's choices affect the world around them, it doesn't carry the same level of weight that Quantic Dream has given to their story.  There are genuine consequences to every little choice made.  This isn't about picking something that's shaded in red or blue and working to fill a set morality scale.  David Cage and company have found the nerve to respect their audience by freeing them from an arcane penalty/reward system and giving them the opportunity to react and respond as though these things were actually happening to them.  The ultimate reward is by going with your gut and living with the outcome.

A few caveats must be forwarded to those interested in this title, however.  First and foremost, THIS IS NOT A GAME.  Not in the traditional sense, at least.  This is, as the very first trophy you will earn will tell you, an interactive drama.  There are no hordes of enemies to defeat, item management to be hassled with and not one experience point to be had.  Heavy Rain is a cerebral exercise that is solely intended to tell a story and allow you to truly be a part of it.   For anyone even remotely interested, but hasn't quite got the right idea of what this title actually is, download the demo first.  Give the demo a spin, try approaching the scenarios in a different way each time, and see just how everything works before deciding to drop your money.  There will be many people crying foul on this one because whatever they are expecting, this will not be it.

Second, the control scheme is bound to tick more than a few people off.  For an adequate equation to the control scheme in Heavy Rain, it would behoove one's self to think about Killer7.  Movement is accomplished by holding down the R2 button, and using the left stick to direct.  In 2010, one would think we could move beyond the Resident Evil-style of tank controls, but that would be a mistake.  Control would've been just as easily accomplished by being mapped entirely to the left stick, and it boggles the mind that, while advancing the art of narrative to such a stellar level, Quantic Dream would take such a step back in their control scheme.  Exacerbating the issue is the highest difficulty setting.  With all contextual movement mapped to the right stick and face buttons, there are moments where the requested actions require more button presses than one has fingers.  With three years of development, one would think that they could've solved this a while back.

Much has also been made of the mocap and facial mapping technologies involved with the development of Heavy Rain.  Yes, these are the most emotive artificial characters this side of Avatar, and many characters can break your heart with the subtlest lift of an eye.  However, there are occasional lip-synch issues and sound drops that tend to remove one from the immediate situation or, in the rarest of times, turn on the subtitles from the pause menu.  This could just be a personal experience, but it was common enough to be noted.

For the performances, all of the actors seem to be completely game for what is being asked of them.  Overall, the voice actors are compelling and Quantic Dream has done a fantastic job matching the emotions of the characters to the performance of the actors.  Trouble arises when accents start to slip.  When one has a game set in what can only be assumed to be the northeastern American seaboard, would it not make more sense to populate your cast with, I don't know, Americans?  Only the characters of Scott Shelby and police detective Carter Blake seem capable of being completely consistent, since, one can assume from the casting videos in the bonus section, they are Americans.  Can I please just get everyone to say "Origami" in the same way twice?  Ironically, one of the cast standouts is Leon Ockenden, a British actor who portrays Norman Jayden.  Ockenden affects the most consistent accent amongst the predominantly European cast.

This is all complete nit-pickery, however.  Heavy Rain is a slow burning, emotionally scarring, psychologically damaging tour-de-force from a developer that truly understands what it means to push the envelope and offer gamers something new, something fresh and ultimately, something excruciatingly haunting.

It may only be February, but the ghosts of Heavy Rain will haunt me for months to come.