Is it a game? A film?? or is just... Heavy rain?

On my break from shot listing, I stumbled across a new release for the ps3. While have not played it I watched a good few hours of walkthough footage on youtube and I'm immensely impressed.

The game itself is a crime thriller, packaged as a interactive drama type of action button pressing adventure.
Check below for a trailer, and a IGN, which explains the games premise:



IGN.com is a fantastic reviewing platform for entertainment media. It is to games what IMDB is to movies.



What appeals to me greatly in this, is the massive link between film and game... Showing how the industries are becoming more and more alike every day.

Within the gaming industry, there has always lacked in emotion. The pure fact that your viewing a digital representation of the world (something which is not yet to the standard of high end CGI) has blocked most games from connecting with the audience. There has been some exceptions (most notably ico), but most have failed to reach out to most individuals.
Films however, have always lacked interactivity. There have been obviously flawed attempts at bringing this to films within the past... And you also have to consider that one of the ideas behind films, is to show an audience a certain perspective of the world... rather than their own.

So for an interactive film, that shapes itself accordingly to the audiences will, it makes perfect sense to bring these two industries together. This HAS been done before of course, (farenheit in the xbox days) but theres a key difference in that to heavy rain. While both titles use action buttons, as a way to 'directly control' the media, farienheit had little sense of a interactive plot. There were 2-3 certain possible endings, however the ending was the only possible difference. Heavy rain is designed so any failure or success can be played through, meaning that the plot is heavily twisted depending on your actions. Any one of the 4 playable characters can die given the chance, which discards any involvement of them later on in the plot. Even mundane tasks (which are completely rewarding with the controller system) change throughout each play. The ultimate goal is to make it your game, and heavy rain seems to have done a cracking job at it.

With this in mind, and the advances of 'easy to control' gaming (as in project natal and motion capture), I'd assume more and more games to come out with the same intentions as Heavy Rain. The stage is truly set for the next generation of interactive media.