(First off, Heavy Rain is rated M for Mature, so there are quite a few inappropriate themes, dialog and situations for children, so parents - this is strictly a game for adults, not for children!)

Last week, Sony Computer Entertainment and Quantic Dream released Heavy Rain, a cinematic game where your goal is to catch a serial killer known as the Origami Killer by playing four different characters. The killer's M.O. is to kidnap a child during the rainy season. After a few days, the body of the child shows up somewhere, drowned. Your overarching goal is to catch the Origami Killer, but the process of getting there is so much more than that. While many reviews have already praised the game for the cinematic experience presented, what they've failed to mention is that Heavy Rain is one of the most casual hardcore experiences we've ever seen.

That might seem like an oxymoron, but it's absolutely true. Heavy Rain's gameplay is based around quick-time events (or QTEs) where the player must follow button prompts to achieve a certain outcome. For example, during a fight, the player must follow the button press commands that appear on the screen to defeat your opponent and come away unscathed. Miss a few presses, your character gets bruised. Miss all of them and your character walks away with more than a few bruises. This simple mechanic is used for everything from fistfighting and gunplay to opening doors and fumbling for wallets. It's very easy to pick up with three different difficulty levels - one for players who are incredibly unfamiliar with the PS3 controller, one for those who are somewhat familiar, and one for those that play games on a regular basis.

Part of what makes Heavy Rain so appealing to the casual crowd is the ability to play a movie. Games like Uncharted 2 make you feel like you're playing a movie, but require an amount of gaming skill that many casual players lack. Heavy Rain's QTE system allows any player to jump into the experience and feel like they're the ones in control. It's the simplicity of the system that allow players to really get into the experience of the story that Quantic Dream has to tell, and man is it a trip.

The player takes control of four characters during the story: Ethan Mars, and architecht and father of two, whose son has been kidnapped by the Origami Killer; Scott Shelby, a private detective who is looking into the case of the Origami Killer on behalf of the families of the victims; Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler assigned to catch the Origami Killer; and Madison Paige, an insomniac photographer. Each of these characters have their own backstory, their own strengths and weaknesses and their own choices to make. Their fate is in your hands - and it's possible that a few of them won't survive their experience.

Character development aside, Sony and Quantic Dream have created an experience where the player always feels and urgency when playing. Whether it's due to the amazing musical score or the limited time to complete button presses in QTEs while attempting to dodge traffic, the game makes the player feel an urgency not found in many other experiences. As a result, you'll rarely be lying down on the couch while you play. Heavy Rain takes a cue from the movie industry and keeps the player on their toes for as long as possible while emphasizing that your ability to pass or fail the QTEs will drastically affect the story. Even drinking orange juice from the in-game carton seems important after that!

At the core of the game, you feel connected to these characters in ways that you won't in other gaming experiences. It's this connection that drives you to either want to keep them alive or kill them as soon as possible depending on your choices. The game as a whole feels like a revamped and more creative Choose Your Own Adventure novel with every button press being a choice you can make and a page you can turn to. Like many games that boast this amount of choice, Heavy Rain does have a fair number of endings, but you'll have to play through the game multiple times to see them all. Fortunately, the QTE system allows players to quickly go through these events and see the results of passing or failing rather quickly, though some of the choices will carry all the way through until the end of the game.

Heavy Rain is one of the few games that is elegant and creative in its simplicity of play. It takes one of the most casual mechanics I've seen, button prompts, and manages to turn it into a thrilling hunt for a psychotic killer from four different perspectives that all manage to come together at the end - all while keeping the simplistic gameplay but adopting a much more mature tone normally reserved for hardcore first person shooters or role-playing games. Episodic content to be released through PlayStation Network increases the lifespan of the game significantly and will hopefully reveal a bit more about the characters that players have felt such a connection with. The fact that this game can make drinking orange juice and using an inhaler incredibly interesting is one of its greatest strengths and the experience resonates with the player even after it's over.