Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain is an interactive story with quick-time events that influence the direction of the story.  Apparently there are a LOT of alternate pathways as well.  From what I read, there were 2000 pages of script, whereas a normal movie movie would have about 120 pages.

The story centers around capturing "The Origami Killer" and you play a variety of roles to that effect, the father, a reporter, a private detective and a private eye - toggling between them as they work in parallel in trying to rescue the latest missing boy.

The story was well told, with twists and turns and a bit of a morbidity (think "Saw").  The interface needed some work though, as camera angles would change -- all the sudden your character that you were moving forward would turn around and go backwards, so you'd switch directions to walk but meanwhile your character had moved back to the frame before, correcting itself and turning around.  You walk with tank like controls, sooo frustrating at times.  

I can't complain about the quicktime events being "hard" as it's really the only gameplay (though I do wish I opted for controller over mouse motion) -- but there are things that you can't really exhibit the negative effect.  As an example, I swam away from a sinking car instead of untying the person in the front seat.   No takebacks, I chose the wrong random mouse movement from the list.

... Heavy Rain was the last of the backlog of games I have used this blog to help work through.   From 180 when I initially started way back when, it dwindled to approximately 80 or so.   This recent go at things had us start at 150.   

Good thing there's a steam sale coming up!