Don’t be fooled: everything starts off bright and sunny, but within 10 minutes of playing there’s a portent of darkness to come. Clouds roll in and the heavens open.

Heavy Rain is a unique experience to play and watch, a fusion of film and game, an interactive drama trying to both engage its audience and present it with a means of personalised story-telling. It can be, at different times, brill­iantly convincing, highly frustrating and even downright stupid. Fans of Quantic Dreams’s previous game, Fahrenheit, will be familiar with creator David Cage’s work, and this shares similar plotting and mechanics.

During a bleak autumn, rain beats down on the city. A child is taken from his father. Will he be the next victim of the elusive Origami Killer? Taking inspiration from Seven and the Saw films, the game lets you play as four characters: Ethan Mars, a man desperate to save his abducted son; Private Investigator Scott Shelby, on the track of the devious killer; FBI rookie Norman Jayden, who wears sunglasses at night because they highlight clues; and Madison Paige, a lonely woman troubled by disturbing dreams and an unhealthy interest in Ethan. Each scene foll­ows a different character, and you act out their part in the drama.

Due to the blending of game and movie here, there is a major concern that should be addressed early on. Is this just a series of quick-time events played out over cut-scenes we have no control over? Yes, sort of. In any other QT-based game you would fail and restart if you missed a button press. But Heavy Rain is both game and movie. So, your missed button press will send the scene off in a new direction, becoming unique to this playthrough. Yes, it is on rails, but there are many differ­ent tracks to travel down.

This is why Heavy Rain feels more like a “Choose your own adventure” than the black and white “success or failure” we are used to when gaming along a straight path. If a character dies because of a fumbled button press in the heat of a dramatic sequence, then instead of telling you “Game Over. Reload?” the story continues and that death becomes a dramatic plot point. The narrative adapts to the changed circumstances, and the game continues.

Most scenes open with you controlling your character in fixed camera third person. Cleverly, the hints system acts as a way of accessing your character’s inner thoughts. What these ‘inner thoughts’ sometime highlight, though, are small plot inconsistencies – a shame, because the game otherwise holds its complex narrative web together rather well.

Luckily no one carries an umbrella in this unending downpour; otherwise we would never get to see the impressive raindrop effects running over the characters’ skin. The graphics are superb, offering close to photo-realistic people who only suffer when the ‘uncanny valley’ occasionally widens due to poor animation, giving them that dead-eyed look. For most of the game, though, we have excellent motion-captured stunt work and tiny facial muscle movements to bring to life the subtle nuances of character.

Music plays a large part in Heavy Rain and succeeds in weaving a darkly melodic atmosphere of tens­ion throughout. Normand Corbeil’s score keeps you locked into a scene, even when the “acting” might have failed.