20 Most Powerful Gaming Moments Of All Time
3. Heavy Rain (2010) - It Was You All Along
The Moment: Heavy Rain's superb narrative sees us switching between the four primary characters but it mixes things up around halfway through proceedings when we are sent back some 34-years to assume control of a young child recklessly playing on a construction site with his brother, John.
Tragically, John falls and becomes trapped in an open pipe with rising water running through. A subsequent flashback later in the game sees John's brother running to get their father to rescue John from the pipe, as the rising water from the heavy rain is certain to drown the youngster. Their drunken dad refuses to believe the story, condemning his eldest to a slow death by drowning. At this stage we know for near certainty that the younger child is the Origami killer. Then comes the big reveal that John's brother is Scotty, the younger self of private investigator Scott Shelby who we've been playing as this whole time.
How Is It Powerful? Its a strange feeling that we have spent so much time playing as and sympathising with a man who has turned out to be the cause of all this anguish and hurt. Not only will the gamer experience an intense feeling of betrayal but also a consuming internal conflict. Yes, the actions of Scott Shelby the elder are entirely condemnable and decry some form of insanity but it is impossible not to feel sorry for the little boy who just wanted his pa to get up off his arse and save his big bro.
It is a real accomplishment in story telling typical of Heavy Rain as an entire experience that the ground-breaking developers over at Quantic Dream were able to achieve this moral ambiguity in an industry often dominated by the black-and-white nature of its villains.