Heavy Rain Preview

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The consequences of these gameplay mechanics - whatever they turn out to be - will bend rubberband arcs within each scene in a manner that amplifies Fahrenheit's most noteworthy achievement. "There are scenes that you will get or you will miss based on what you've done," Cage tells us after his presentation. "There will be part of the scenes that you will see or not see, and there will be specific actions in the scenes, so it's really an open end. There is no way you can see everything in one play-through, because there are many scenes you can only see if you play a certain way."

Famously, Cage has even conquered death in Heavy Rain, having revealed earlier in development that the termination of a central character will not end the game. It's a problem he confesses that he couldn't solve in Fahrenheit, in which one character was essential to the unfolding story and others - though playable - were ultimately periphery. "What do I do?" he says, almost forlornly. "The game stops, what happens? I had to give you a game-over... With Heavy Rain, we took a big risk, and said, okay, this is a huge challenge but let's try to ensure that whatever happens we don't need game-over. There will be different ways of dealing with that."

Given the author, we suspect this means the death of playable characters will be essential to progress. Having elected to make another game of "choice and consequences", Cage is eager to assert that we will have to make difficult, contextual decisions more poignant and complex than the binary moralism of most adventures. Even so, a visual timeline of the game's story, which lurks uninspected by most of assembled press along the back wall of the production floor, is a straight line from left to right, and Cage confirms that while your path through the game will probably deviate from the guy standing behind you at the checkout, there's a coherent "linear backbone to the story".

Cage describes punishment and failure within games as an "old idea" and says that he finds modern games with their ramping difficulty off-putting.

Beyond the broad strokes, our visit also contemplates the finest details - the emotional firmament of each scene, dictated not only by characters and your actions toward them, but also their surroundings. Incidentals like a mother kicking a door closed with her heel as she struggles with groceries have been motion-captured, while a prostitute's apartment reveals photographs pinned to the side of the bathroom mirror and a stereo positioned within earshot of the shower because that, we're told, is where its owner prefers to listen to it. Despite the Havok sticker on the posters, it's no surprise to learn that Cage also guides the physics within each location, insisting that your material impact on any given scene must make sense within context. "You cannot when you visit the prostitute, for example, just take a pillow and throw it on her and make a mess," he explains.

At the end of his initial presentation, Cage guides us through a number of the game's locations - its "sets" - taking in the prostitute's home, an antique shop full of dusty typewriters (each of which has individually modelled keys), a train station showered through giant windows by the light of dusk, and a grim crime scene in the night, at which a detective - potentially one of the core cast - stands at the police line, while cops in overcoats pick through the scraps of grass around a tarpaulin-suited body, under the sweeping lights of the traffic crossing a bridge overhead. Heavy rain falls. We ask Cage about his decision to set both his recent games on the US East Coast. "With these two games I tried to create dark thrillers," he says. "You don't choose the place where the story takes place just because it's cool; it has to support your story, and I think that's the case."

Trophies will be included, but Cage hasn't decided how. "It's not exactly what we're trying to achieve with Heavy Rain, but I think we're going to make it work," he says.

It's another response that he delivers without much contemplation. That, evidently, came long ago, as did the decision to jettison anything approaching the outlandish conclusion to Fahrenheit. "When the game was released, you guys wrote that the most interesting part was probably the first two-thirds where we were just following normal people in normal life, and we were just with them. Working on Heavy Rain, we just decided [the ending] is not a mistake we should do again. We can tell a real story about real people in real life, and we can make it as interesting as anything else." Cage may be polarisingly self-assured, but it's the first time since we arrived in France that we've decided he's wrong. This is more interesting than anything else.