While playing L.A. Noire over the weekend, I was struck by how the game has more in common with Heavy Rain than I expected. Both games are structured in such a way that failing, more or less, is hard to do. Instead of having the player start over from the last save, the game adjusts the narrative and the game continues.

Although this "no-fail scenario" is an interesting approach, neither of these games handles it well.

Challenge plays an essential role in video games. At their heart, games are about overcoming a challenge to achieve a goal. If you remove challenge from a game, you remove the main reason we play games in the first place.

Granted, L.A. Noire and Heavy Rain aren't completely challenge-free by any stretch. (And yes, the player can die in them.) But when you look at these games from a wider perspective, you'll notice that they avoid any sense of real failure for the player. For example, in Heavy Rain, you can put your controller on the coffee table during the entire highway-driving sequence, and you know what? You'll still reach your destination. It doesn't matter which buttons you hit or how well you hit them. In L.A. Noire, you can go 0 for 4 on questioning a suspect because no matter what you do, the narrative will ultimately lead you to solving the case. It's predetermined by the narrative.

Achieving a less-than-perfect score on a case in L.A. Noire may have bruised my ego a bit, but I didn't feel any guilt or consequence. The game didn't, for lack of a better word, "punish" me for not getting a better score. As a result, I'm not compelled to go back and try the case again and hunt for more evidence or take another stab at interrogating a suspect. If earning a perfect score doesn't produce a better game-changing result, what's the point of trying? If I can't fail in the long run, where's the challenge?

Games need to let players fail. We should be given the opportunity to figure things out, not have the story figure it out for us. We need significant consequences for bad decisions. L.A. Noire would have been a better game if, at some point, a case would become unsolvable if you missed enough clues or if you didn't get enough leads from suspects. We need the opportunity to learn from mistakes, just like in real life.

Even though L.A. Noire gives players a rich experience through its story, environment and presentation, it doesn't give players the chance to make meaningful choices that have real consequences for the player. Perhaps the point of the game is that it's one that is best experienced, not played.