The setting, atmosphere, writing, acting and direction that make up the first few hours of Fahrenheit confirm that the adventure genre can still work in the hollow climate of today. Not just work either, but show that videogames can be so much more than those on the outside give credit for.

As the camera sweeps across New York to a beautifully sorrowful soundtrack, the game opens as it intends to continue – by dropping the gamer in the deep-end and letting them figure things out for themselves. You witness the star, Lucas Kane, murder his innocent victim in the opening cutscene, and the remaining six or so hours are spent trying to understand the cause and motive.

What helps to make Fahrenheit work is not only its glorious sense of pacing, but also a rare feeling of real-world significance and the value of human life. The brilliance of this is all down to the believable situations that you find yourself in. For example, although the murder takes place during a non-interactive scene, the player is given precious little time to get cleanly away, hopefully without drawing too much attention to Lucas’s fumbling actions. Rather than shooting himself free, a la Max Payne and ilk, Lucas feels human; scared, confused, angry, numb… his reaction is believable to the point that it is understandable and identifiable. Also, by splitting the screen to allow you to not only see your actions as Lucas, but also the coincidental arrival of a police officer about to stumble upon the dead body, the player can actually see the time they have left, but in a non-artificial, tension-building way.

Fahrenheit is at its absolute best when time is stacked so heavily against you; the consequence of failure usually being nothing less than Game Over. It’s harsh, but it adds such a strong element of importance to your actions that some of the sequences are among the most exciting, tense and nerve-wracking you could ever hope for. Comparisons to Shenmue are logical and fair – Fahrenheit does a good job building up a connection with Lucas, and similarly to Sega’s epic establishing bridges of empathy with Ryo, whenever anything happens the consequence feels all that more greater.

Building upon this, even minor conversations are built around quick thinking and reactions. When asked a question, you have merely seconds to respond with one of the given choices. Rather than ask every question in the conversation tree, the game can end its chat after a preset (but hidden) number of questions. The resulting dialogue is often abrupt, but it rewards the player for staying on their toes and paying attention.

Equally, it contains a number of surprisingly good action sequences too. Though they are not played in the conventional sense – building upon Shenmue’s QTE events – they remain both exciting and challenging. It can be tough keeping up with the on-screen action when so many instructions are flashed up, but somehow it all works to a satisfying degree. When mixed in with cutscenes, quick-fire conversations and clever set-pieces, it all adds up to a particularly exciting blend, previously unmatched in what is essentially an Interactive Movie.

Unfortunately, though Fahrenheit proves that gaming can use violence at an emotional level rather than a primal one, it still shows how far the medium has to go. The writing, though fairly clever and sporadically witty, is incredibly clichéd. The characters, too, are so stereotypical that a few of them can be difficult to identify with. The story, beginning with human survival, romance, loneliness, anger and fear, ultimately descends into familiar videogame scenarios by the end credits, betraying its brilliantly engaging opening hour.

For a game that attempts to deal with some pretty weighty emotions, and sometimes does so with a certain degree of elegance and finesse, it is disappointing (and distracting) that it occasionally insists on crowbarring in dreadful ‘game’-like sequences. Two stealth segments stand out in particular, which attempt to explain and build character, but end up being frustrating and damage the pacing more than anything. Likewise, a shocking revelation one second, a firing range mini-game with gameplay straight out of the '80s the next. Jarring, to say the least.

Fahrenheit is not the game it could have been due to these rather stand-out flaws. This is in no way a failed experiment by its developer, however. It’s brave that they’ve allowed the gamer to play as all of the major characters of the game (mostly in a linear fashion), both as the murderer and the detectives trying to catch him. The cat-and-mouse setup is a masterstroke that on paper really shouldn’t work, but allows for dilemmas and non-linear puzzles that let the player decide if it is in their best interest to pass or not. It is curious for example, that in the opening crime scene you can leave evidence as Lucas that helps the police, giving yourself bigger leads when playing the alternative side. The game isn’t as free-form as it likes to think it is, and the hunter/hunted scenario fizzles out towards the end (like most of the game, incidentally), but you have to hand it to the developer (and writer/director David Cage) for not only attempting such an ambitious idea, but also for coming very close to pulling it off.

Fahrenheit is a bold step in the right direction, and though not perfect, it has enough charm, polish and excitement to make it one of the most interesting titles of the year. It may not live up to the classic potential it opens with, but there can’t be a single gamer in the world that isn’t all-ears for the next game developers Quantic Dream think up.