Heavy Rain, as you may have read yesterday, is shaping up to be a pretty special game. It’s not your typical “gamer’s game”. There are, in the words of the game’s creator David Cage, “no fighting, no zombies, no driving”: it’s a game you play for the sake of the storyline, to share the feelings of the characters as you would in a good movie.

For a massive Heavy Rain overload, hit the jump.

Heavy Rain revolves around four central characters — an FBI profiler, an insomniac photographer, a private investigator and a bereaved father — and how they all become interlinked through the actions of the Origami Killer, a man who enjoys making cranes while murdering children. As you do.

During the course of the game you’ll jump from character to character and play only a portion of the game’s 70-odd total scenes in a single playthrough, with no one scene having just one way to play. You’ll have choices throughout to do right, screw up, carry on ignorant, any sort of scenario you can think of where, in real life, you would have a choice to make and consequences to deal with afterwards. Each resultant consequence has a direct effect on the storyline and might even result in you killing off one of the central characters, even if it’s by accident.

Throughout the presentation earlier today, David Cage showed a really quite unbelievable level of enthusiasm for both his game and the interest of his audience. He bounded about as he demonstrated scenes available to play on the show floor — check out Pillowfort’s article for more on that — and each question was answered with astonishing energy and likeability. His accent was brilliant too, but we can touch on that another time.

Despite the huge amount of effort put into the storytelling and the characterisation, Cage was insistent that he wanted to make Heavy Rain as a game because of the feeling that comes across of playing God, due to the circumstances that can unfold depending on how you play the game. A great example of this? Depending on how calm or frenzied you are, the on-screen control prompts may be clear as day or blurred and indistinct, just like your own thoughts would be if you were under a lot of stress. You could easily make Heavy Rain as a film, but you wouldn’t get the same level of emotional understanding as you would from playing it as a game.

This is a man, evidently, who loved the game he was making and loved that people wanted to play it. Inspired by M Night Shyamalan’s dark, emotive stories, he saw Fahrenheit as a “prototype” of what he wanted from a game and Heavy Rain as the finished, complete product. He went to America and visited impoverished parts of Philadelphia to get the right sense of depravity that he wanted in the game, and spent a year writing the entire storyline and all of its individual branches.

Oddly, he doesn’t want you to play it over and over. Cage admitted he wanted people to play through it once and just think about the uncertainty that making choices can brin — but unlike real life, you can go back and fix what you did wrong, or screw it up just to see what happens.

So many games say they are openly-minded because there’s one or two approaches to how you play it; you can drive aggressively or precisely, or shoot people quietly or blow everything up. But with Heavy Rain, every little thing you do, in every little varied scene, has a consequence and a resulting action that follows, meaning that pretty much no playthrough will resemble anything you’ve seen in the game before. How many games can you really say that about?