First and foremost, I feel like I just blew up a lot of shit. At the end, you have to fight Misery, The Doctor, The Doctor after the red crystal takes over his body, and then the Core after the Doctor, um Red Crystal Doctor, um, a bunch of red bubbles possess the Core AND Misery AND Sue.

Basically, you just shoot a lot.

And, weirdly, it didn’t feel like the toughest fight of the game. I had a much harder time with the Dragon Sisters on my second trip through the Egg Corridor (after the big collapse). Of course, that’s not a complaint. I am, in all honesty, ready to be done. I’m happy with the game, and the experience as a whole, but I’m ready to move on to something else, too.

I don’t have a lot new to say about the narrative — I think it’s a compliment to Cave Story that most of the narrative value is embedded throughout the game rather than coming in one big burst at the end. Destroying and escaping from the floating island felt like a culmination rather than a revelation, although there are a few good additional bits if you watch the credits. Sue, for example, gets turned back to a human, but it doesn’t stick.

The most powerful moment for me was actually the quick flash to Curly Brace, still inactive and locked in the core.

In fact, saving Curly Brace is the one thing that could drag me through the game a second time, although I think there’s a good argument to be made for not going back to save her. While it’s almost assumed that a good game is one that’s designed for replay value — BioWare is famous for this, and actually puts messages on loading screens encouraging the player to start a second playthrough and make different choices — Heavy Rain director David Cage has stated in interviews that he hopes that players make a single trip through his game.

These competing desires are expressions of different theories of game narrative experience, both, interestingly, hinging on design architectures which attempt to make player choices matter. BioWare is, in effect, saying “we put a lot in this game, and you owe it to yourself to see the various outcomes your choices can lead to. See how characters react differently, find all the easter eggs, do everything.” The evidence, in this case, that choices matter comes from experiencing different outcomes, and the implied argument is that if a player is only going to play a game once, then they may as well go buy a game with a more linear, game-directed storyline. (Like maybe Final Fantasy XIII. To which I say, “Touché, BioWare. Touché.”)

Heavy Rain, while seeming to be similarly focused on crating meaningful player choices, actually takes an entirely different approach as to what it means for a choice to matter. Instead of encouraging the player to go back and find out what could have happened differently, the game instead focuses on creating a more seamless experience.¹ In fact, without a second playthrough (or some digging online), it’s not entirely clear at the end of the game what exactly could or should have gone differently, and one of the things I admire about the game is the way that players who reach wildly different endings can leave the game with the impression that they achieved the “best” ending.

All of which is to say, while part of me wants to save Curly Brace, her loss was the most affecting narrative moment in Cave Story for me, and I’m not totally sure I want to defeat that.

So what do you say, Daniel and Kevin? Will you be playing again? Or was the first trip enough (or more than enough)?

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1. I use the phrase “more seamless” rather than “seamless” intentionally. There’s a whole column (at least) in Heavy Rain‘s seams and joins, but I’m supposed to be talking about Cave Story, so I’ll leave it there for now.

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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

Since I’m not sure that I played 10 new games during 2010—I definitely didn’t play 10 games that came out during 2010—I have the luxury of not having to decide whether Heavy Rain or Red Dead Redemption was a better game. It’s probably safe to say that I expect to play Red Dead Redemption more often in the future. I still have a boatload of trophies to get; I could spend hours playing poker, especially with the downloadable addition that lets me play with real people; I’ve barely touched the Undead Nightmare expansion.

But for all that, Heavy Rain is the game that I want more new games to be like.

Heavy Rain is not a perfect game, even in the places where it is strong. As video games go, the story is incredible, engrossing, but not (in absolute terms) revelatory. It’s a pretty good detective novel and not For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is the first game I’ve played that takes advantage of the possibilities of narrative quietude. The opening chapters are often described as “slow” in reviews—my own wife used the words “boring as hell”—but they serve to give the player the beginnings of an emotional investment in the main character, Ethan Mars, and his relationships with his family. The sunny tone directly contrasts with the darkness and rain that consume the rest of the game.

Even more than that, the game asks you to care about the mundane, day-to-day life of the main character—that is to say, his happiness and not just his desires. Heavy Rain asks the player to do very un-game-like tasks: Get dressed. Set the table. Play with your kids. The game defers narrative progress for what feels like a substantial period of time, not just for a tutorial (although the opening chapters are undeniably that), but to ask you to live Ethan’s life for a little while. The game asks you to trust that the things that you do will matter later, and they do. Not quite in the way promised on the box (“Your smallest decisions can change everything“—a promise I’m not sure the game lives up to), but because when you’re rushing to find your son before he drowns in slowly rising rainwater, you’re not just trying to save a collection of pixels. You’re working to save the boy you played with in your backyard during better times.

And you do some dark things to get there.

Most reviewers have rightly praised Heavy Rain‘s “no game-over” mechanic, where the game simply continues to progress regardless of “bad” or “wrong” choices, up to and including those which lead to the deaths of one or more of the four playable characters. Of course, this mechanic isn’t exactly an innovation. Maniac Mansion used it back in 1987.

Dragon's Lair blew your mind 30 years ago. Don't deny it.

In another context, I’d love to argue about how interactive Heavy Rain‘s overarching storyline really is or isn’t. I’d happily complain about the one moment where the game betrays its narrative structure—a character does something that you’re not aware of, and the game, in effect, lies to you about it. I’d really enjoy hearing from people what sort of replay value people found from the game, especially in light of the discovery (which kind of surprised me) that the game’s principle designer really thinks that players should only play it once. But here what I really want to say is that Heavy Rain is a game that needs to be imitated, and well.

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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.