1. More Emotion - A More Compelling Narrative
Since Heavy Rain gave us so much control over the characters we were playing, we ended up developing a growing attachment to them, and felt their pain in moments of peril. There's one scene where I have to either cut my finger off with a pair of scissors (or a knife, you could actually choose which) or risk never finding out where my (protagonist's) kidnapped son is. The decision I made was such a huge one in the overall outcome of the game that I could really feel the drama. It made me care about the protagonist. Are there that many games on the market today where you can say that you have genuinely cared about the protagonist's outcome? I would opine that there aren't. Heavy Rain put you in the middle of a situation and
made you care, something which a lot of comparatively-vapid video games fail to achieve at present.