David Cage, the writer and director of Beyond: Two Souls, a thriller released on Tuesday for the PlayStation 3, starring Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, is among the most divisive figures in video games. That’s partly because of his outlandish pronouncements about the future of the medium, like when he said last month during a lecture to the British Academy of Film and Television that developing an algorithmic Martin Scorsese — artificially intelligent software that imitated Mr. Scorsese’s camera style and recreated it on demand — would be an interesting way to improve video game storytelling.

It’s partly because of Mr. Cage’s backward-looking emphasis on borrowing techniques from cinema to try to tell better stories in video games. And it’s also because Mr. Cage, who is the founder of the French studio Quantic Dream, seems to think that his games are the only ones about something other than killing.

But mostly he’s divisive because his games are a weird mixture of wonderful and awful. More precisely, they’re weird in their wonderfulness and in their awfulness. How you feel about Mr. Cage and his work depends largely on which weirdness you think is dominant.