Gil, I think that you’re both right and wrong when you say that the game’s characters “weren’t who you thought they were” in the end. With the exception of the one character (You know the one) Gavin mentioned, who the game blatantly withholds information on, most of the characters felt pretty organic to me. That’s not to say that some weren’t thinner than others, but I really feel like Heavy Rain did a nice job of allowing you to “create” the character in your mind, given that there were only a few outcomes possible for any given decision. At some point I stopped thinking “What would I do?” and started thinking “What would Ethan do?”

This, of course, is where the game fails as well. The aforementioned lied about character technically doesn’t work because you’ve been making decision based on who you thought the character was and not who the character really is. In the end, this made a few of the decisions I made with that character harder to rationalize.

Perhaps I got lucky, but the ending I got for Jayden closed things out quite nicely for such a minor character.

I think it’s definitely the case that Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain point in a particular possible direction for a genre of video games rather than that they serve as the ultimate (and best possible) endpoint of those possibilities. I’d love to give the game a try with the Move, and see if that helps with some of the limitations of the controller you cite. (I’ve said before that Heavy Rain on the move seems like the kind of game that the Wii has been waiting for.)

Still, even on the console controller, I thought the game made good use of the analog functionality to really pay attention to how you perform an action, which is something I don’t get a sense of from a lot of games.

You’re also correct that the characters really aren’t built/written equally. Jayden and Madison are pretty flat. Only Ethan and Scott have any real depth, and how well that works depends entirely on whether or not the player is willing to buy into the game’s big reveal (which I’ll try not to spoil here). I was willing to go with it, but it does mean that the game outright lied to the player on at least one occasion, and that’s a problem.

I’m actually expecting the UPS man to drop off my copy of Indigo Prophecy today, and I’m really looking forward to it. Thanks for commenting. :-)

The title of interactive drama fits quite well. It’s more of a movie that you interact with as opposed to a game that has cut scenes. It was actually quite refreshing to take the game slowly rather than trying to force my way to the end like in most games.

My main gripe with the game though (hope I don’t spoil too much) is that the plot twist didn’t really make sense to me. You play 4 characters in the game and you really get to know them. It seems like at the end it all falls apart. Characters weren’t exactly who you thought they were and your choices through the game didn’t make as much of an impact on the end as you thought they would. I especially didn’t like the choices for Jayden the FBI officer. It always seemed like his choices were between two extremes and at the end it really didn’t matter if you played the good cop or the bad cop. Anyway I still think it’s a game that any PS3 owner should experience. It just shows that not all games have to be shooters or intense RPGs.

I’d have to say that overall I enjoyed this game. It was a good game even though I enjoyed Indigo Prophecy much more. I question if this game was as great as the reviews were.