If videogames are to attract an even wider audience, they need to evolve, making gameplay easier and more natural even as storylines become more engaging. Heavy Rain is a big, awkward lurch in the right direction.

An intense, serial-killer mystery in the style of movies like Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, this PlayStation 3 game boldly merges hard-core production values with casual game design.

The Mature-rated Heavy Rain packs all the trimmings of a game designed for niche hobbyists, from hyper-realistic characters to occasionally gruesome violence. But the gameplay underneath proves as simple as the wrapping is extravagant, making the game an "interactive drama" of interleaved plot points and branching paths that's simple enough for anyone to play and enjoy.

Lifelong gamers might recoil at the notion, but this gameplay evolution must happen. We're well into the era of games-for-everyone, where if dinner isn't on the table it's because mom is too busy playing FarmVille. But what if she's in the mood to trade in cartoon cows for adult drama? There's practically nothing to serve this expanding audience. That's why games like Heavy Rain are going to be a big part of gaming's future.

Heavy Rain, which will be released Tuesday in North America, is not perfect. But it's a successful experiment. And when it's good, it's good in ways that traditional games rarely touch.

(Spoiler alert: Minor Heavy Rain spoilers follow.)

Heavy Rain puts you in control of four characters following the trail of the Origami Killer, whose young victims are always found clutching a tiny piece of papercraft. A private eye and an FBI agent are trying to crack the case, a reporter is chasing a scoop and a father is playing the killer's sick games in hopes of saving his son.

There's little need to memorize the game's controls, since every possible action you can take is telegraphed by small button prompts that appear onscreen. If you can open a door, a small arrow will appear, letting you know to press the joystick in the given direction. Same deal if you can pick up something off a counter, talk to a witness or sneak up behind someone and bash them over the head – if you can do it, there's a visual prompt on the screen telling you that you can.

But the prompts don't tell you if you should take any given action. That's part of the challenge: Heavy Rain's story can take all sorts of twists and turns based largely on your choices. Although characters can die, you can't ever get a Game Over – you'll keep playing until the end of the story.

Heavy Rain's challenges aren't simply cerebral. Many action scenes play out with Quick Time Events, in which you press the buttons shown within a brief window. Other, slower scenes force you to hold a series of buttons on the controller simultaneously, playing Twister with your fingers as your character attempts to do some sort of complex physical action, like picking a lock or sneaking through barbed wire.

In short, Heavy Rain's gameplay is entirely based on responding to button prompts, like an elaborate game of Simon says. But it's often done in such a way that you feel closely connected with the character's onscreen actions. The button-holding segments described above are easy to fail if your fingers slip, so there's a real sense of precariousness about each situation.

For all of its fast-paced, high-drama action sequences, Heavy Rain truly sets itself apart by turning mundane real life into a videogame. You might cradle a baby to sleep by rocking the joystick very slowly, or dab antiseptic on someone's cuts by gently depressing a button.

One early scene sees a character home alone with his son, in charge of getting him to do his homework, eat his dinner and go to bed. Gamers anxious to get to the action might disagree, but I found this to be one of the most entertaining parts of the game: It felt like stepping into someone else's life.

Like everything else in Heavy Rain, the scene was brief enough that by the time the novelty had faded, it was over and something else was happening. It's the Dan Brown school of storytelling, a fast-paced, Da Vinci Code-style narrative in which each chapter takes just a few minutes, leaving you on a mini-cliffhanger and switching perspective for the next segment. Once the intrigue picks up and the chase is on, you don't want to stop playing. If it were a film, Heavy Rain's story wouldn't exactly win an Oscar. But having control of events, and a personal connection to the characters, makes it seem that much more interesting. I was hooked.

Control is the tightrope that Heavy Rain walks. On the one hand, I found myself intoxicated by the control I had over the story. On the other, this gameplay is defined by what the player cannot do. You don't choose who to play as, where to go next, what rooms to enter, who to interrogate. The plot just moves itself along, placing you in a linear series of brief encounters. This keeps the game casual: It eliminates nearly all of the possibility that someone will get bored, stuck or frustrated.

So what's wrong? A lot of little things that add up. Walking around is awkward; you end up turning in little circles a lot. Although the characters' faces look as realistic as we can expect from modern games, the environments can be oddly sterile and artificial, as if these people are living in PlayStation Home. And although you can go back and replay previous chapters to tweak the storyline, I found the interface for this feature confusing.

After all the maneuvering, the story falls apart a little bit near the end. The big whodunit reveal is awesome – it manages to be both totally unexpected and entirely consistent with the story. But the final sequences aren't as pleasing. Since the game can take so many different twists and turns depending on how you play, there have to be many, many different endings. Heavy Rain's solution is to split up the ending into a slew of brief, disconnected vignettes. It doesn't feel like a proper denouement – more like watching a YouTube playlist.

Heavy Rain isn't going to find a brand-new audience all by itself. For one thing, only hard-core gamers own a PlayStation 3 in the first place. This game is on the wrong platform, with the wrong input device – a controller designed in 1994. But years from now, we'll start seeing game designers citing Heavy Rain as an inspiration. More-polished games in this style will come along, the controls will be refined, the audience will follow.

For now, this game is like a window opened just a crack, a tiny aperture that occasionally allows vivid glimpses of the future of videogames. When Heavy Rain works its magic, it is powerful stuff; rarely have I felt so attached to game characters or so invested in a story. For those small moments, anyone who cares about videogames must play Heavy Rain.

WIRED Engrossing story, clever casual controls, beautiful motion-captured faces.

TIRED Occasionally artificial environments, clunky walking, fractured ending.

$60, Sony

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