Genre: Adventure
Developer: Quantic Dream
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Heavy Rain's extremely effective and constant use of dramatic and deliberately obscuring camera angles, high contrast lighting, and expressionism is reminiscent of both film-noir cinema techniques as well as previous influential video games, like Resident Evil. Its engine produces the most life-like human faces and forms ever seen in a video game, and these images somehow manage to avoid "uncanny valley" as well.

Normand Corbeil's score is unforgettable; the sombre, bleak, main theme matches perfectly with the game's frequently inky black visuals, and his songs that play during action sequences are notable even during tense play, but also stay out of the way. Voice acting initially seems a bit ordinary, but proves effective over the course of the experience.

Heavy Rain plays a lot like full-motion video games, such as Dragon's Lair or Sewer Shark, in that it involves progressing through scenes by pressing or holding buttons according to on-screen prompts. The stages are well paced, and often almost unbelievably dramatic. The game also occasionally instructs the player to "waggle" the controller in various ways, and these input types, like many Wii titles, are imprecise and frustrating.

Although it sometimes feels like Heavy Rain's story is simply a sewing together of disparate murder mystery cliches, the way it is presented turns the player into as panting, frantic, desperate a figure as the characters in the story. Between the interesting locale, one of the most incredible plot twists ever written into a video game, and the monumental characters, the word "engaging" should serve as only the initial positive adjective when explaining Heavy Rain's drama.