My last day on the job. We’d barely caught a break in months, and now the old lady was missing and everyone was acting like there was something to be afraid of. In the City of Angels, no one was smiling. Not anymore. Not Rusty or Bekowsky; good cops, the both of them, like it didn’t all look the same from behind a desk somewhere. Not that rat bastard Connelly, or the crooked Chief of Police. Not Fontaine or Sheldon, Moller or Summers. Two years into the job and this is how I go out: flanking my partner from all the King’s men sent to bring him down. The broad’s out there alone someplace. With him. I think about her smile as we crash through white picket fences that mask a thousand sins. The sirens are blaring; no need to play it quiet. Bullets ding the paintwork like tears on the sidewalk. I’ve got a bullet with his name on it, and maybe it’s already too late to save her, but I’ve gotta know for sure. I ditch my car at the foot of the tunnel. The sirens just another memory, all twisted and broken somewhere along the way. I shine a flashlight into the dark beyond and thumb my badge. I like the feel of it, even now.

You have to feel sorry for Mafia. Here was a game founded on story, born of bootleggers and prohibition. In charting your inexorable rise through the Italian mafia, it borrowed heavily from the history of film while managing to create a little of its own. The maturity of its storytelling laid with rounded characters that seemed to live out their stories quite independent of the player. Look back now, and what you remember isn’t so much springing a truckload of moonshine, as betraying your boss by allowing Frank to escape the omerta. Mafia empowered us to think of our actions not as simple binary choices, but as decisions with real consequences. Sadly, the game’s critical acclaim was met by only modest sales, and it now seems destined to be remembered as a footnote in some future retrospective. Watching L.A. Noire arrive nearly a decade later and sell twice as many copies stings a little, even if it shouldn’t. Like I said – you have to feel sorry for Mafia.

Not that Noire is solely a dedication. If anything, it’s best considered as the natural evolution of the point and click genre; Sam and Max by way of 1940s America, if you will. The obvious reference points are Alan Wake and Heavy Rain, though neither game wholly encapsulates what exactly L.A. Noire does. Principally, it’s a detective story. What little shooting there is comes in service of the plot, and occurs only sporadically. As with Mafia, you are free to explore a large and detailed city at your leisure, yet this isn’t a true sandbox in the way of GTA or Saints Row. What soon becomes apparent is that Noire is really just a skilfully directed plot with occasional gameplay elements, your actions far more methodical than Rockstar fans might be accustomed to. Others will just marvel at a captivating procedural drama that dares to be unique in a marketplace of recycled ideas.

Its methods will seem more natural to fans of TV than just about anyone else. The game takes place in Los Angeles, and follows the career of Detective Cole Phelps. You begin as a wet-behind-the-ears patrolman, advancing up the ranks as you solve your assigned cases. Each one – ranging from hillside DUIs to the real-life Black Daliah murders – is a blank slate onto which you must paint your suspicions. In ‘The Golden Butterfly’, you’re called to investigate the murder of Deidre Moller. Atop a windswept clearing, you push past a gaggle of reporters and stoop over a disfigured body. A sizeable boot print is visible on her chest, while the dark bruising around her neck suggests she was strangled. Having spoken with the coroner, you turn up a residential address across town. The home, like every location in the game, is a crime scene all of its own, which must be scoured for clues, be it a bloodied jacket or even a discarded receipt. In the cramped dining room, Deidre’s daughter sobs as she hears the bad news. You immediately feel like a dick, and you haven’t even started yet. Question 1: “So, when did your father stop beating your mother?” Question 2: “Why are you lying to me, little girl? What have you got to hide?” Bedside manner in the time of cholera.

Each interrogation is navigated using a combination of on-screen prompts and your own accumulated knowledge of the case. At each step, you can either believe the suspect or accuse them of lying, with a third ‘Doubt’ option that typically results in Phelps screaming like a maniac before calmly resuming his previous line of questioning. Any clues you’ve uncovered can also be used as leverage. In the case of Deidre’s husband, Hugo, that means bringing up not only his suspiciously muddied pair of work boots, but the daughter’s testimony that the couple rowed almost constantly. While you leave him to sweat as you corroborate his alibi with the miserly neighbour across the street, he makes a run for it, evidence in hand. It’s only thanks to his tubby frame and your own proud athleticism that you’re able to catch up and make a daring tackle just shy of a busy intersection nearby.

Your victory proves short-lived. Back at the morgue, it becomes apparent that Hugo isn’t necessarily your man. When Deidre’s car is found abandoned in a school parking lot, the subsequent investigation turns up a school janitor even more shifty than the husband, and with good reason: his trunk is loaded not only with a bloody rope, but a distinctive green jumpsuit and a splattered tire iron. You don’t actually know any of that yet, but when he too starts running, you figure you’re probably onto something. A gentleman’s brawl soon develops that ends with a swift one-two to what is now your second arrest of the day. And so, the moment of truth: do you charge the wife-beater in Interview Room #1, or the yokel with a tire iron in #2? With due attention paid to a notebook stuffed full of minutiae and bold leaps of logic, you settle on pinning it to the husband, and duly congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Ahem. Thanks to you, a killer is once again free to walk the streets of America, and you’re back on patrol until you can set aside your prejudices long enough to recognise the providence of opportunity, motive and intent. Nice work, Mark Fuhrman.

Tying all this together is an overarching plot that marries events from the war with a more contemporary roster of serial killers and drug smugglers. A number of key suspects emerge along the way, their faces captured by Depth Analysis’ new MotionScan technology. Team Bondi like to claim that the resulting realism allows players to detect the subtle shifts in emotion that distinguish the nervous from the guilty as sin. Well, I’d sure like to play that game someday, because these vacant, faintly botoxed avatars are little more than a spit-shined Max Payne. More bothersome still is that the interrogations themselves are so hit-and-miss. ‘Correct’ answers aren’t always forthcoming, even when you pursue perfectly reasonable – and relevant – lines of questioning. Consequently, conversations often boil down to multiple choice guesswork that punishes you for diverging even slightly from the script. Whether or not you actually fail an interview, the logic can seem remarkably similar to that of an old LucasArts adventure, in which you were expected to combine wood shavings and cologne to build an inflatable life-raft.

Intrinsic to the procedural drama is the notion of formula, with characters solving basically identical murders in basically identical ways. The faces change but the archetypes remain the same, and L.A. Noire thusly suffers from fatigue that only worsens as the game drags on. At one case a week, it might be tolerable, but any kind of extended session quickly becomes a grind of fishing for the dry cleaning receipts that every other corpse seems to have on their person. Rarely is there any actual detective work going on; rather a process of following breadcrumbs to their intended destination. You can’t go wrong, so why try harder? I don’t imagine there’s much appetite for a return to the vagaries of Melee Island, but there surely must be a more powerful motivator than just bringing up the next item in your logbook. That such clues unfailingly lead to you breaking the case is evidence less of your mentalist prowess than it is the game’s unwillingness to lose.

Case in point: during one mission, you chase a crook onto some fairly treacherous high-rise scaffolding. Now, conceptually, tailing a suspect is no more prone to losing its thrill than a hair-raising car chase, yet while I wasn’t expecting Prince of Persia in a fedora, it would have been nice to be more involved than simply holding the run key and steering around objects – even the jumps take care of themselves. And where is the game’s moral ambiguity? Why not do the one thing Grand Theft Auto won’t, and more fully evoke Bad Lieutenant by allowing the player to frisk suspects for money and favours? Apropos, what of a Mass Effect system that could have virtuous players being less capable of intimidating suspects than those who waded deeper into the morass? At every turn, L.A. Noire just feels like one wasted opportunity after another.

It can be all too easy to make this sound like a bad game, when actually it’s the proximity to greatness that really infuriates. The characters are uniformly well-drawn, with due attention paid to developing their individual traits. The weathered and unrefined Rusty Galloway has echoes of Colm Meaney, while Captain Donnelly is an amalgamation of every Mick cop cinema has taught you to hate. Team Bondi’s achievement is not in technology that captures performances from a dozen different angles, but in thoughtful casting that emphasises talent over marketability. Their craft is manifest in details such as an authentic soundtrack of Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie, or a script that peppers dialogue with references to the Red Scare, and an assortment of racial slurs that have yet to meet the Little Rock Nine. Be it talking to witnesses or enjoying silky jazz in the back of your Grandfather’s black Studebaker, this is never less than the product of artists who saw gaming as the medium for a timeless story.

The pleasures of L.A. Noire are gentle ones, and even in light of Heavy Rain, the game’s originality is unquestionable. Of its failings, many are easy to forgive in light of what the developers have tried to accomplish. This isn’t a funny game, but you’ll smile when the weight of a double homicide is lifted by the “circumstantial evidence” that is a box of unopened washing powder. It might not be the best driving game, and yet I drove for every occasion Grand Theft Auto had me running for the nearest taxi. You certainly wouldn’t mistake it for a proper shooter, but I’ll be damned if raiding Howard Hughes aircraft hanger, guns blazing, wasn’t a post-war thrill all the same.

L.A. Noire might only be the second best 1940s third-person Italian-American adventure game on the PC, but it nonetheless bares all the hallmarks of being amongst the first tentative steps towards something truly profound.