Following on 1UP's first hands-on look at Heavy Rain, Joystiq has their own take today.

All told, the game lives up to all the hype thus far, and plays like nothing else out there -- 2010 couldn't come sooner.

Everything we'd seen up until the point we finally got to play Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer wasn't actually Heavy Rain. It was either an early tech demo ("The Casting") or a gameplay proof of concept ("The Taxidermist"). The one thing present in every version: emotionally charged situations. Quantic Dream says it set out to tell a gripping story, so it developed the technology needed to create game characters that players could actually see as real people -- and environments that look as lifelike as they do dreadful.

Before we played an all-to-brief scene from the game's total of around 60, designer David Cage dropped a couple of major details on us. First, players will assume the role of four distinct characters in the game, each with their own scenes and whose paths never intersect as they attempt to answer the game's tagline -- "How far are you prepared to go to save someone you love?" –- and solve the mystery of the titular Origami Killer.

chautemoc via joystiq.com »