You’re going to hate Heavy Rain for the first hour you play it. That’s because this video game is different from anything you’ve ever played before, and it takes some getting used to. By the time you’ve finished the game—it’ll take about 10 hours the first time—your opinion may not have changed. Or maybe you’ll love it.

Heavy Rain (Sony; PS3; rated mature) tells the story of four people whose lives are affected by the actions of a serial killer. You’ll play each of the four characters at different points in the game, all from a third-person perspective. Written and directed by Quantic Dream’s David Cage, Heavy Rain attempts to immerse players in the story, in the characters, and in a city being terrorized, where time is measured not just in hours and minutes, but by the volume of rain that has fallen.

In that first hour, you’ll be in the shoes of architect Ethan Mars. There’s nothing dangerous or exciting about his life at first. You can make him pee, take a shower, draw, and play with his kids. Pretty banal stuff. In that first hour, you’ll also be learning how to use the controller. The developers at Quantic Dream have thrown out the standard control schemes in favour of something more attuned to the game they’ve created.

You hold down the right trigger to move and control the direction of movement with the left thumbstick. You move the right thumbstick in specific directions to interact with the environment and push the buttons when prompted in order to perform more actions. It takes some getting used to, but you learned how to use the controller to play a first-person shooter, and you’ll learn how to use the controller for Heavy Rain too.

After the hourlong prologue, you’ll get the chance to play Scott Shelby, a retired cop and private investigator; Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler; and Madison Paige, a journalist. Sony has been billing Heavy Rain as akin to film noir, but because your perspective shifts so dramatically with every protagonist, it’s more like playing a novel. You have a great deal of control over the actions and speech of the characters you play, and your decisions have consequences for those characters and the story you reveal.

In a conversation, dialogue choices swirl about your character’s head and you tap the button that corresponds to your choice. In some conversations the cloud of choices moves fast and is jumbled, making it difficult to see which button goes with which choice. It’s an effective setup for scenarios in which characters are under pressure to say the right thing quickly enough.

Although Heavy Rain boldly tries to change the way we think about video games, its delivery falls short in several respects.

The animation suffers from some glitches. There isn’t enough life in the eyes of the characters, nor is there enough definition in their mouths and teeth. When they talk, it looks like they’ve been drinking motor oil.

Creating a new control scheme is admirable, but the problem with these controls is that they require too much attention. Having to watch for the cues to press buttons at the appropriate time simply pulls players out of the immersive experience. Say what you will about the typical first-person-shooter control scheme, but for most gamers, using it has become like driving a car—automatic. Shooter players can go through an entire game without once having to think about what their hands and fingers are doing. The same can’t be said of Heavy Rain, even with practice.

Cage has plotted a complex thriller in Heavy Rain, but his character development is a bit clichéd. He really did a number on Madison, the sole female protagonist. The investigative journalist is strong and independent—she rides a motorcycle!—but Cage diminishes her role by having her act as nursemaid to one man, stripper for another, and object of violence for still other men. If Cage was trying to challenge the stereotypical portrayal of women in video games, he failed to do so here.

While its attempt to do something new in the realm of interactive entertainment is deeply flawed—you’ll be doing a lot of standing around and watching, which isn’t very interactive—Heavy Rain is still an important game. It weaves a complicated story by having players perceive the plot from different points of view, and has players perform actions with a game controller we may not have thought possible. When was the last time you had to perform CPR in a game?

Heavy Rain will polarize gamers and critics, but whether you hate it or love it, Quantic Dream and Sony deserve praise for trying to challenge our expectations of what a video game is.