Gamer Shelf

What’s the game? A quicktime event-filled murder mystery, by the minds behind Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, in which four characters must track down a serial killer or die trying.

What’s so revolutionary? While it’s easy to dismiss Heavy Rain as just an endless series of timed button-taps, it in fact has the potential to elevate quicktime events to something more than cinematic, pseudo-playable filler. Moments in which you have a split-second to hit a flashing onscreen button are plentiful, sure, but failure doesn’t necessarily mean death; instead, the action will branch in different directions, opening up new avenues of fighting, exploration and/or investigation.

Also, Heavy Rain will often fill its edge-of-your-seat moments with multiple onscreen options, which can be activated with a corresponding button. Pressing one button while handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car that’s being fed into an industrial crusher, for example, will make you try to wriggle free of the cuffs, while another will kick open the glove

compartment in hopes of finding something helpful. And once a character is dead, their role in the story is over, and all the possibilities their involvement would have opened are extinguished. It’s then on to the next hapless protagonist, and hopefully a better fate.When’s it coming? First few months of 2010.