Upon completion of the “God of War Collection,” I made the not-so-subtle transition from disemboweling mythological creatures to the interactive experience that is “Heavy Rain.” Ironically, “God of War” might have been a great warm-up exercise to this game because the main gameplay elements largely revolve around quicktime events made more popular by the Kratos franchise. “God of War” helped me focus on the quick button pop-ups and memorization of the location of the square, circle, triangle and “X” buttons. But that’s where the comparisons end…

I’ve only played “Heavy Rain” for one night, but I feel that you need to be prepared to play a game like this because it is not your typical ‘run-of-the-mill’ game. The story and gameplay is intriguing. The game starts with one of the characters waking up in his empty house. You walk him to the bathroom to shower, shave and brush his teeth – all with simple button presses or gestures with the controller. You open the fridge and get yourself some orange juice. This is the game. No guns to reload or enemies to eviscerate. It’s just this guy’s story.

I have a wife and kids of my own, so I can empathize with this protagonist. During the intro level, I found it funny that I was playing a game which had me control a character helping his wife bring in the groceries and then going outside to play with the kids, whereas in reality, I was desperately waiting for my real family to fall asleep so that I could enter this virtual world. I’m sure my experience as a father will influence how I play this game. For example, I got a trophy in the game for doing something specific but, as a parent, came natural to me. Given the beginning of the game, I have a certain sense of dread whenever I am out of the line of sight of my virtual son… and I’m sure that’s what the developers of the game had hoped for.

I actually held off on starting this game after reading about the number of glitches. Luckily, the game automatically saves often, so when I experienced a complete audio desync (it actually went mute), I was able to just restart the game and not much progress was lost. I did have the game crash once as well, so I hope that there will be a patch soon. I’m worried enough about my kid in the game without have to worry about these technical issues. Speaking of which, I’m not sure the PS3’s sixaxis controller is ready for all of these quicktime events. I missed several gestures due to the system not reading my movements, but there also may be some user error as well. While they’re not horrible, I was expecting the graphics to be a bit better. They seem a bit light in the number of polygons in the models, especially given how these same faces look in the loading screen. I’m sure that’s what the gaming publications were shown when they talking about the incredible realism of “Heavy Rain.”

Enough of this – I need to go see if the wife has fallen asleep yet so I can get back to this other life.