Mystery thriller Heavy Rain has exceeded one million in sales, according to Quantic Dream co-CEO David Cage. The game became a sure-hit sensation due to its effective and emotional storytelling that well mimics contemporary television drama, with twists, turns, and gut wrenching moral decisions.
“Heavy Rain is not a videogame anymore in my mind because it breaks with most of the traditional paradigms, but it’s fully interactive,” Cage said ahead of the title’s release, also noting: “If the format becomes successful we will probably have to find a different name for this type of experience.”
Last month he also suggested that Heavy Rain’s commercial success had sent “a strong message to the game industry”, proving that publishers should take more risks with experimental projects.
The first comment, however, hits us as both silly and wrong. Heavy Rain is not “fully interactive” and it is still a video game because we haven’t redefined video game. It does present a new format which involves the player in a much more tactile manner within the story line and presents a new approach to the Simon Says action-event paradigm that requires a lot more reflex and direct interaction to drive the narrative.
For us Heavy Rain ran not on its interactivity—as this actually is an annoyance in many games when it doesn’t work well with the control scheme—but the dramatic presentation and emotionally enveloping nature of the story as presented through the media of the video game. If anything, Heavy Rain leverages its work as a video game to create an excellent performance media; it doesn’t diverge from it or leave video games behind, it’s simply a better presentation of an already emerging paradigm.
Heavy Rain’s control and interactive scheme simply feels like a more mature approach to Indigo Prophecy’s somewhat broken action-event system.
We do look forward to more games like this.
Link, via EDGE Online.
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