One of the appointments we were looking forward to most at this year's GC was the presentation of Heavy Rain - The Origami Killer by Quantic Dream -- a game which has been talked about a lot since its technical demo The Casting was released. French developer Quantic Dream entered the gaming stage in 1999 with the Adventure/Action mix Nomad Soul (which was starring David Bowie), following up with Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecies, in the US) in 2005. As founder and writer/lead designer David Cage pointed out:

Cage also claimed that most games nowadays are for teens and children, not for adults. "Now, games have grown enough for more complex, more subtle storys." In Heavy Rain, "you do not watch the story, you play, you direct the story. We want you to feel empathy for the characters!"

The demo level, Cage pointed out, is not part of the actual story line, which Quantic Dream will try to keep secret until the release of the game. Still, it demonstrates how each of the roughly 60 locations in the game will work, in general. And also that you can influence the action in many ways, without changing the overall story. Cage calls this "Bending Story" in opposition to "branching story": Like a rubber band, the story bends and twists depending on the player's decisions, but it will keep its basic structure.

The demo (which was played live by one of Cage's colleagues) started with a menu screen which showed an extreme zoom on the face of the female protagonist. The eyes have been motion-captured (however you achieve that) and looked very realistic, from the thin red arteries to the dilating of the iris to the blinking of the eye and the light effects on them. Still, during the actual demo level, we never came so close to the protagonist, who walked rather stiff and artificial. For the demo's sake, the protagonist is a journalist reporting on a murder case -- several young women have gone missing, some have been killed. On her motorcycle, riding through (sic) heavy rain, she's coming to the house of a suspect, who happens to be a taxidermist (he's turning dead animals into stuffed animals). Throughout the demo level, we did not encounter a loading screen, although the locations are very detailed. Apparently, all data is being prefetched or streamed in the background.

In the opening scene of the demo level, our protagonist races through the rain, talking to a man via her helmet's radio.

While navigating in Fahrenheit was counter-intuitive, because the movement keys were relative to the location and not to the character (when the viewpoint changed, many gamers pressed the "wrong" button, walking into walls or back to where they came from), it's now centered on the character, who's head also shows into the direction you're beginning to turn him to. The head is also used to target hotspots you can interact with -- e.g. a sofa, a cupboard, a weapon and so on. The interface shows you on the lower right and left corners what choices there are / what actions you can take right now.

For example, when you walk to the taxidermist's front door, moving the right analog stick to the right lets you knock at the door, moving it to the left means ringing the door bell. There are up to four possible actions per hotspot, corresponding to the four basic directions. Actions requiring strength (like lifting a barrel) are simulated by pumping on one of the buttons. Others use the motion sensors of the PS3's Dualshock controller, making the player feel as if he's playing a Wii game. In order to hide somewhere, you need to keep several buttons pressed down -- less when you're concealed well, more if the location is difficult to hide in. "Look at my colleague", Cage said when said colleague had to keep pressing four button down, "that's not a comfortable position. We want it to be uncomfortable!"

When nobody answered the door, our protagonist walked to the garage door (closed), then to the back of the house where she opened a window and climbed through. She emerged in a realistically rendered house where, as Cage claimed, every door can be opened. Let's switch to the ego perspective in order to make you feel more involved when we recount what we've witnessed.

"We" walked around the living room, sitting on the sofa, stopping ourselves from making a fire in the fireplace or turning on the TV. When we moved by a table, we had to press a button very fast -- catching a falling bottle at the last second. After all, when nosing around in a stranger's house, we better be careful. Then, we entered the garage from the inside of the house, but turning the switch of its remote control, we still couldn't open the garage door, because it got stuck after half a meter. At this moment, we noticed a rather large smear of blood on the garage door.

Quantic Dream's engine manages to simulate emotions in character's faces. Here, our protagonist still feels inquisitive and only a little bit afraid.

Being the investigative female journalist we are in this demo, we didn't call the police (which would have been possible, as Cage told us), and also didn't grab the chainsaw lying around in the garage, but moved to the second story of the house. Creaking floor boards, a sense of foreboding, a bedroom. A bathroom, with a naked, bloodied body lying in the tub. And finally, a room full of women. Dead women. Stuffed women. We begin to take pictures of the dead women, who sit or lie in not exactly natural poses. At this moment, we hear a car approaching: The taxidermist is coming back.

Heavy Rain changes to a split screen now, like Fahrenheit did so many times. In the left third of the screen, we can see the fat, heavy man park the car and enter his house -- we're glad we didn't touch anything and also didn't break the bottle. Had we done so, the taxidermist would be alerted now. But he's not, slowly coming up to the second floor. What shall we do? Hide! But remember, the floor boards are creaking. Slowly, slowly. Hiding behind the bedroom door. The fat man goes into the room with the stuffed girls, saying hello to them. Then back to the living room, to watch a TV show. While dramatic music is playing, we sneak down, right past the murderer's back. As he can see the front door from his sofa, we go into the garage. Pressing the switch, jumping through the partially opened garage door, kickstarting our motorcycle's engines all recquire the right movements with the controller or pressing of buttons. A slight sense of panic, because the murderer has finally noticed there's something wrong. With the demented taxidermist not even close, we escape.

This woman no longer feels courageous. She's frightened. She wants to get out. Because someone nearby not only likes stuffing deer.

Rewind. Loading a saved game, David Cage leads us to the same scene again. This time, instead of hiding, we try to sneak down and out of the house while the killer's in the stuffed girls room. But we forget about the creaking floor boards, and the taxidermist unsheathes a knife, coming after us. We back away, into the bedroom, and a fight ensues. Fahrenheit had you press four buttons (most of the time, two buttons at once) with good timing in order to get through the action scenes. Now, the actions or movements you need to take are highly contextualized. The effect is that the fighting looks real, but this also means that you constantly need to watch the two lower corners of the screen to learn what you need to do next -- and in a split second.

We manage to get away from the killer, run down, but we miss a button press, causing us to fall down, losing time. Now, he's after us, again. There's a small catch-me-if-you-can around the kitchen table, before he kicks the table into us. He's nearly on top of us now, lifting the knife, but once more we escape, backing into a restroom. Again, we need to do a lot of shuffling of the Sixaxis controller, or button hitting. We get wounded, but somehow manage to get into the garage. The fat taxidermist is in hot pursuit, but instead of grabbing the chainsaw to the right, we press the garage opener on the left. We manage to get through, while our pursuer struggles to push his body mass through the opening. This time, we have a hard time starting the motorcycle, but we manage with mere seconds to spare.

You don't want to be found by the inhabitant of the home you break into. Even more so when that inhabitant has the habit of killing women and turning them into stuffed mannequins.

As David Cage points out, we could have killed the taxidermist with the chainsaw. We could have found a pistol in a cupboard, and killed him with this. We could have called the police which would have arrived with blazing lights. Then he claims something we would like to see in the game to believe it: "You could have been killed in this scene! Then, this character would have been gone from the game, but the story would have continued".

Again, Cage promised 60 scenes in the finished game, each sporting the same level of detail, the same amount of possible actions as the demo level. Alas, the demo level was not about human interaction, which could be the main strength of the game. But the suspense in the first try and the fighting in the second felt very movie-like, very intense. This demonstration gave us a first glimpse at Heavy Rain. But we can't possibly tell you yet whether it will be a truly great game -- or just a good looking action adventure with an adult theme.

Hope you enjoyed this sneak preview. There's no supernatural weird stuff this time, Quantic Dream promises. No sitting below a strange fantasy tree in one of the endings. That doesn't mean that you won't meet a bunch of people you'd rather not meet in real life. Emotional misfits. Psychologically challenged characters. And the Origami Killer. "We want to surprise the player in every scene. He will always wonder what comes next.", David Cage concludes. Think about the thriller "Seven" -- that seems to be the direction Heavy Rain is heading.