Which currently known-about Xbox One game, if any, will be the game that finally breaks down and washes away years of cynicism about motion control at large? The most obvious candidate seems to be Rare's Kinect Sports Rivals, though I suspect its sunset-hued family friendly branding won't do much to win round those who think of Kinect as a kiddy's peripheral. Ubisoft's Fighter Within is rather more "grown-up", providing you equate "grown-up" entertainment with steroid shots and bloody teeth, but it'll have to perform well indeed to exorcise the spectre of Fighter Uncaged, a shoddy launch offering for the original Kinect.

And then there's D4, the Kinect-only adventure from Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro and Access Games, which is utterly bonkers. Too bonkers for its own good, probably. At one point in a demo level set aboard a passenger jet, lead character David Young thwacks a baseball right into a drug pusher's face with a dummy's leg, hitting him so hard that his false eye pops out. Shortly afterwards, David himself gets shoed in the unmentionables and is obliged to take a seat, in a moment of wince-inducing bathos. That's your takeaway, discerning members of the press: men have fight involving prosthetics on plane, one gets kicked in the balls. Curtain. Any questions? Ah yes - all of them.

When characters are introduced, they'll pose for the camera, and you can pour over them voyeuristically from several angles by craning your neck. It seems a throwaway feature, cooked up for the joy of it, and the same goes for the game's delightfully flamboyant detective view, which you trigger by pressing your fingers to your temples, causing information to spring from the seams of the world around you.

Where other developers steam out "obtrusive" motion control features for fear of giving offence, this one just wants to have fun with the possibilities. It's an approach that could backfire if the implementation grows too fiddly, but from what I've seen, D4's control scheme straddles the line between "realistic" 1:1 recognition and gestures that are more evocative than directly mimetic: you turn David to look at things by sweeping your arms decisively, for instance, rather than actually turning your body. The visuals are the stuff of A Scanner Darkly, marrying plausible proportions to thick shadowing on clothing folds and burnished comicbook skin.

Punctuating the object hunts and the chitchats - some of which involve 24-style splitscreen cinematics - are the action bits, which see you performing a range of gestures and assuming a variety of stances to dance David through what's effectively a branching cutscene. The inputs range from winding up a haymaker through sweeping your hands to duck or dodge around an attack: the more punctual and accurate you are, the higher the grade you're given per move. During the fight with the dealer, David waltzes an air hostess out of the way of a thrown suitcase, then braces himself over the aisle to avoid a speeding food trolley.

It's a pleasant change from the chilly high-end lustre of a Ryse or a Forza. But is it going to sell anyone on Kinect? Again, I suspect the game's premise and stylings may bury it, but ultimately this is the kind of motion sensitive release I'd like to see more of next generation: experimental and eccentric, but not (yet) to the point of being annoying. As polished as their own efforts appear, Rare and Ubisoft should probably take notes.