It’s taken a while, but PS3 has its first game that looks one step ahead of its rivals. Here’s the drop on Heavy Rain that debuted at the Games Convention in Leipzig.

For ‘grown up’ games read ‘violence and swearing’, or this is what we’ve been asked to accept so far. Sony’s take on adult entertainment, however, involves depth of emotion and complexity of plot to embellish unconventional gameplay. In short, you’ll need to think about what you’re doing in Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain.

This PlayStation 3 exclusive will be released in late 2009, but should be worth the wait as it is being developed by the studio responsible for 2005’s Fahrenheit – a similarly ground-breaking adventure released on PC, and before that Omikron: The Nomad Soul which was an ambitious sci-fi drama for PC and Sega’s Dreamcast.

Quantic Dream’s work is considered special in that it gives you believable worlds that are immersive and challenging as though finding yourself in a novel by Philip K Dick. With Heavy Rain, Quantic is exploring a film-noir angle that asks questions about human nature, and specifically your own. Although we can expect to see a fair bit of action, the promise, according to Sony, is that Heavy Rain: “dares to tackle subject matter and themes rarely touched upon in video games, making it a genuinely mature game for a new world of adult gamers.”

Rather than thinking of the story as a train-track that stops at predictable stations where fights invariably break out (unless they have CCTV), the central character in Heavy Rain is guided by destiny but events unfold according to her decisions.

To be fair, the likes of Grand Theft Auto have been pushing the boundaries of ‘emergent gameplay’ for many years now. The difference in approach for Heavy Rain, however, will be the maturity of its characters and the emphasis on internal struggle as opposed to always reaching for the gun. In other words it is an exploration of the values of life instead of glorifying a hundred ways to kill a man.

Heavy Rain is brewing for PlayStation 3 in 2009 giving us plenty of time to search deep in our souls... man.