(Spoiler Warning: I'd recommend you play through Heavy Rain before reading this article since I spoil quite a bit of its story in here.)

Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain is a game with lofty ambitions. “Games are immature,” it sneers, “but here's how we can grow up.” While it's certainly a noble ambition to try and move an artistic medium forward, any casual observer would be forgiven for thinking the developers at Quantic Dream are going about it in the wrong way.

Instead of pushing video games into their own unique space, with the specific benefits and disadvantages of the medium in mind, they've instead employed the world of cinema as a crutch -- and taken a huge step back in the process.

Let's start with the obvious: Is the story told by Heavy Rain a good one? On the whole, yes. The voice acting, though a little patchy in spots, is pretty good, and aside from a twist in the the final scene, the overall story makes sense and flows well. Then again, the quality of the story here isn't what's being examined; Heavy Rain could have told a story as gripping as HBO's The Wire and still fail fundamentally as a game. In other words, a game needs to justify its existence as a game. Otherwise it might as well just be a movie.

Heavy Rain's primary addition to the cinematic formula is choice, and ostensibly it seems to do a pretty good job of it. You can choose to let your clichéd loose-cannon sidekick beat the snot out of a witness or intervene at the risk of losing his help. You can shoot another witness or let him live. Within scenes, you can choose between many different options, each of which produces a specific outcome.

The problem is that the options can't be endless. One scene early on in Heavy Rain asked me if I was willing to drive the wrong way down a highway to save the character Ethan's son. Putting innocent people's lives in danger for the sake of a poorly acted son at the request of a serial killer who had given me no guarantee that I'd actually get what I wanted wasn't something I was willing to do, so I searched for the "drive away" option. It wasn't present.

Providing choice is all well and good, but it's also important to remember that that lack of choice is going to become that much more jarring when we finally reach it. I'd uncovered the smoke and mirrors.

Of course, if I found myself in Ethan's position in real life, I would have likely acted differently. The problem therefore is that my motivations don't match up with my character's. Heavy Rain introduces Ethan to us when his son is ten. That means we've missed out on ten years of experiences that would drive Ethan to want to save his son. To us, they're just characters a game we started an hour ago.

Relying upon events that have occurred outside of a movie's runtime works in films because the audience isn't an active participant. We may not share Luke Skywalker's wish to explore the galaxy in Star Wars because we haven't shared his boring rural existence, but we're not asked to be the ones making his decisions. A game works differently; we need to share the hopes and dreams of our protagonists or else we can't effectively empathize with them. We need to want the same things to reach a satisfying conclusion.

A game cannot keep the audience in the dark in the same way a film can. This is made abundantly clear when we reach Heavy Rain's climax and it transpires that one of the characters was the killer all along. We've been playing as this person for a good few hours, and while in a movie this revelation would be shocking, in a game it's just confusing. We've made choices on behalf of a character whose motivations we didn't know.

In the end, Heavy Rain never really justifies its status as a game. Quantic Dream's desire to tackle a more mature subject matter is certainly a sincere one, but the game doesn't deliver on this in a way which makes it seem proud to be a game. It's a movie with some rudimentary choices thrown in. And ironically for a game based on choice, the rigidly scripted paths mean we end up making far fewer choices than we would in a standard Halo firefight.

If video games want to move forward, then they need to do it on their own terms. They need to do things that simply aren't possible in other mediums, to provide an experience people are truly happier playing through rather than watching or reading. The simple truth is, without the emotional presence provided by real actors, video games are never going to be able to match the visual storytelling of cinema. Our princess is in another castle.