I’m not a gamer. Never have been, and never will be. I’ve never owned an X-Box, PS3, or a Wii. My appalling hand-eye coordination is legendary among my friends, who sometimes take delight in pushing a console at me and gleefully watching the resulting carnage.

But one of the things about university is finding out new and exciting things, and my friends here in sunny Wales have decided that my education is vastly remiss.

It began with the films. My Gamer Housemate decided that she was going to show me as many films based on video games as she could, in the hope that the storylines would entice me: enter all of the Resident Evil films (yes, even the new CGI one), as well as Doom, Silent Hill, and even Final Fantasy: Advent Children. I can tell you with certainty that I have never been more at sea in a film than I was with that last one, and what had begun as polite pleas to make it stop ended with my rocking quietly in a corner.

So that track was abandoned, and I was left alone for a while. Then I made the mistake of getting into a play, and – to cut a long story short – it was decided that all of the cast would have a mates’ night in, and watch a play-through of Heavy Rain, a game that everyone I knew had been raving about since it came out.

I had assumed it would be along the lines of a first-person shooter, and would therefore be as dull as ditchwater as a result. I’d like to be able to tell you that it changed my opinion of games, but in fact a vast deal of it WAS dull as ditchwater - albeit for different reasons.

My friend Ben had been calling Heavy Rain an “interactive film” for weeks, in an attempt to convert me to the idea, and I was startled to see that his description is actually closer to the truth than you might expect. In the first half-hour or so, you control a man as he goes about his morning business. He gets up, showers, does some work, and plays with his kids.

It’s all much too sugary-sweet, presumably as a contrast to the tone of the rest of the game, and it’s much too long, but it does allow the designers to show off. This is one beautiful work of CGI technology. Apparently it’s motion capture, which at times lends everything a startling lifelike quality. After a while (let us say, an hour or so) the real plot starts, and you can actually start enjoying things.

A mysterious villain known as the Origami Killer (due to his habit of leaving little origami birds around the place) is on the loose. He kidnaps young boys, and their bodies are invariably found a few days later, with no trace of how they got there. He kills in the autumn, when the rain is heaviest (see: title of game), so that his tracks get washed away. But who is he? And why does he do it?

During the game, you control four characters:

-A Bloke (so bland that I had to look up his name: Ethan) who suffers a variety of misfortunes before his son is kidnapped.

-A Woman (Madison?) who is a journalist researching the kidnapping, and who aids our Bloke as he tries to find his son. She spends an inordinate amount of time in her underwear, contrary to all the physical activity she has to do.

-Scotty, a private detective trying to work out who the killer is. Scotty is actually great fun, as referenced by the fact that his is the only name I can remember. He hails back to the era of film noir, and it was really great to see an overweight, less-than-perfect character in a game.

-An FBI Agent (I believe he’s called Jake), who gets to play with what seems to be a really neat filing system in cyberspace. He puts these glasses and gloves on, and essentially hooks into the Internet. Only drawback – it’s addictive, and it hurts. Hmm.

During the story, you must help your characters work out different clues, and try not to get them killed. Because the really interesting thing about this game is that your characters CAN die – no second chances here. It added a real air of suspense to the whole thing. The kidnapper likes to leave tasks for the fathers of the victims, to prove how much they will do for their sons, and believe me: things could get pretty hairy at times. My dear friend Ben looked positively shell-shocked after one in particular, which all of us watched with the squeamish expressions of the uninitiated.

It was, however, much too long. There was only so much time I could spend watching our Agent wander around getting things wrong, or our Bloke feed his ungrateful child (If I’m totally honest with you, I was grateful when the little brat got kidnapped – it meant less tedious scenes of domestic boredom). Maybe if you’re playing it, it’s more interesting. If you’re watching it, you feel disconnected in the way you do when you’re watching any video game.

But when it was good, it was GOOD. The action scenes were thrilling, and by the end those of us who didn’t know it all had to stop and privately write down our guesses as to who the kidnapper was – and only one person got it right, which impresses me. It was all a little too far-fetched, but everything seems to be nowadays, so why not? It suffered from the normal clichés (so what, we have people to save? Let’s shag!), but they were largely forgivable. I won’t tell you which ending I saw, but it is interesting to note that they are apparently all very different – except that the identity of the kidnapper never changes, which is a little disappointing. It would be much more fun if the actions you took during the game determined who the killer was.

So: good video game? Yes, if you can cope with long stretches of inaction interspersed with sudden bursts of having to look everywhere at once. Interactive movie? It’s pretty, it has a plot, and it has characters you root for, but…there was just something missing. It’s still very much a game.

‘Heavy Rain’ is both a game and a film, at it’s a bit of a shame that it inadvertently ends up as neither. As a film it’s far too long, far to keen on showing off, and the voice acting and dialogue approached painful at times. As a game, it has to be boring – the gameplay looked crushingly dull for 80% of the time, when you went to the toilet, looked after your son, or had meaningless chats with receptionists. But the good bits did make up for it, and it was so gorgeous to watch that I can almost forgive all its faults.