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How Heavy Rain strives to be the "best movie you've ever seen"

• By Patrick Shaw
• December 11, 2008 15:34 PM PST
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Click here for more HD screens of Heavy Rain on PS3.

GamePro: You've classified Heavy Rain as not being a survival-horror game and yet in the demo shown to journalists there is a woman attempting to escape a taxidermist serial killer who turns women into stuffed trophies. How is this so?
David Cage: Heavy Rain has absolutely nothing to do with the survival horror genre. The theme of the game is very, very different and quite unusual in games. It's entirely based on emotions. It's absolutely not relying on the current mechanics of survival horror titles. It's not about weapons, it's not about zombies, and it's not about surviving. It's just about making decisions in difficult situations.

GamePro: Was there anything you learned in the development process of your previous game Indigo Prophecy that you wanted to and did include in Heavy Rain?
David Cage: When you finish a game, there are always many things that you regret, that you would do differently, or that you didn't have time to try. At the end of Indigo Prophecy, we were split between the fact that we felt we tried something new and that there was a lot of interest amongst players, press, and the world, for what we had done.

We really got the feeling that we discovered something interesting by telling the story through players' actions instead of telling it through cutscenes. At the same time, there were many things we were not happy with, so we took some time after Indigo Prophecy just to read the press, read what players had to say on the forums -- really getting as much feedback as we could. Also, we had a big post-mortem in the team to talk about what we liked and we didn't like.

Basically, what we tried to do is reinforce what worked well in Indigo Prophecy into Heavy Rain, and just try new ideas, to push the envelope pretty much in all departments of the game. The most obvious department is the graphics -- we invested a lot of time and energy into developing a new graphics pipeline, and we think the result is much more effective than it was on Indigo Prophecy.

We rethought the interface of the game, the gameplay, and about how it works. We developed the idea of banding stories together to make consequences of players' actions even more tangible, even more significant. We also worked on getting rid of "Game Over" situations, which was some kind of frustration for me in Indigo Prophecy.

In a certain way, it's a failure for the designer when all you can propose is a "Game Over." It's like saying, "You know what? You died, so go back, play it again, and try to do a better job." This is the message sent to the player, and with Heavy Rain, we just try to handle the situation just as another bit of information in the script. The script has to carry on, taking this information on board.

GamePro: We know you can't reveal too much about the story, but can you tell us the general premise of Heavy Rain?
David Cage: Heavy Rain is will probably evoke themes rarely used in a game before. All the ideas behind the gameplay is based on the fact that the player will tell the story through his actions directly. They will be at the same time the actor, but also the director, even the writer of the experience.

We hope that many gamers playing Heavy Rain will see different stories, or different versions of the story. This is in a nutshell what we're working on. We don't to reveal at the moment anything about the storyline of Heavy Rain, because we feel like it's the key component of the experience. We just don't want to spoil anything about it at the moment. But the story's written and it's in production. We really feel it will spoil the pleasure of the players if we tell you too much.

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