By: Chris Wall
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Every decade for about the last 30 years there has been a genre, or style of video game making, that has revolutionized the gaming industry.
Sprites took the 80s by storm and made room for greater programming, while the 90s introduced 3D gaming which we know games wouldn’t be the quality they are now without it. The early 2000s introduced a lot of new genres, such popular ones as “free roam” (GTA series, assassins creed etc.) and the rise of MMORPGs but 2010 saw something different, it’s first “Interactive drama” with Quantum Dreams: Heavy Rain. Just reading articles about it before it’s release was enough to intrigue me. “Interactive drama” is just another way of saying interactive movie, and that’s exactly what Heavy Rain delivers.
The start of the game is slow, with very dull tasks like you’d find at the beginning of any drama or thriller movie only to be given more intense and difficult endeavor with each passing chapter. Now the style of this game is unlike any other I’ve played, throwing all “old school” rules out the window (you don’t hold a weapon of any sort for your own personal use). You’ll do simple things like open a door or start a TV, which sounds like it could be very boring, but the cinematic experience is really something else. What this game also offers is multiple endings By the choices made throughout the game leaving the options almost endless (I’ve obtained platinum trophy, trust me it’s almost endless).
One con about this game that I noticed is that it’s replay value wasn’t so great. Yeah the game had many different endings and many different stories but the cinematic pleasure that was captured through the first play-through if this game was definitely lost, picking up on minor detail and errors. That wasn’t enough to ruin the game being this is the first interactive drama I’ve played and can remember in recent history, this genre only has room for improvement and MAY be able to finally bring a breath of live to a dying genre of games based off of theatrical movie releases. I mean think about it, it would be a lot more entertaining to interactive with a current video game movie release than to fight through levels that look like scenes from a current blockbuster.