It might sound like Shelby's bits were the most action-packed and gripping, and indeed they were -- until we finally got to control Madison Page, the girl we spoke about during our behind-closed-doors E3 demo. As was the case during E3, it's clear Madison's sections aren't shying away from being titillating. Waking from a nightmare, she tries a handful of things to calm herself down; doing a little writing (she's a journalist, after all), making some tea or, eventually, taking a shower. Yes, you control stripping her, and yes, she's shown topless in the shower itself. At the risk of defending the game, though, this sequence is done tastefully (and with far less creepiness than the gunpoint striptease we've seen later in the game). The shower is brief, and while there's some interaction, there's no way to... prolong the whole sequence. After toweling off and getting re-dressed, things quickly go from voyeuristic to terrifying.

As she exits the bathroom and heads to the kitchen in her rather impressively decorated loft, Madison notices the fridge is ajar, and closing it while trying to reassure herself that she's just imagining it being closed, she catches shadows zipping by at the corner of the darkened room. What follows was, frankly, one of the most intense QTE sequences we've ever seen. Given the option to go for the phone, the door or perhaps sneak into a corner, we opted first for the phone, which was gone (it was there a few minutes before), then tried to sneak around the corner near the bed when we were cornered by two mask-wearing thugs.

It should be mentioned that the game does a startlingly mature job of creating a sense of helplessness and mounting fear. Madison is hardly a brute, not even a world-weary private detective with a mean right hook. She's a woman, alone, in just her underwear, and there are multiple masked men in her house that have blocked the exit, taken her phone and are quickly trying to catch her to do Lord knows what. Instantly we were saddled with a particularly feeble sense of fight or flight, and the ensuing escape attempt was both lengthy and genuinely fear-inducing. Madison may not be a ninja, but she's certainly no pushover either, and at multiple point she showed the ability to not only wiggle out of tight spots but to injure her attackers. Even still, the game pulls no punches in showing the assault and at times she's dragged across the floor, thrown on a table or bed or cornered in the bathroom where, eventually, she was attacked and suddenly woke from a nightmare just as at the start of the chapter.

Was it a dream? Foreshadowing? Something that will have repercussions later on in the game? Sadly, we don't know, as our time with Heavy Rain came to an abrupt and thrilling end. It left us with plenty of questions -- some, honestly, about whether the game's remaining 3/4ths or so could do as much to bypass our usually critical eye about things like animation or voice acting and instead tap into some very, very powerful emotions. We started out looking at Heavy Rain like a possibly over-ambitious video game and slowly moved far closer to considering it a truly interactive movie. Time (and a few more months) will tell how the game actually turns out, but one thing is absolutely certain: Heavy Rain will go down in history as a title that attempted more than any other thus far, to blur the line between video game and interactive cinema. Let's just hope it takes the best parts of both.