Detroit: Become Human

Literally as frustrating as it is surprising. Being measurably worse than Heavy Rain pacing wise but slightly better in terms of dialogue, Detroit has a lot of little points going for it and a couple of great scenes and arcs with active thematic resonance, but the misplacement of real world protest iconography in a story that's too much of a silly sci-fi story is a shadow it can't escape. It will be the game's critical legacy, and as much as I enjoyed it, nothing else would be as fair.

And the game's pacing problems really are too big. None of the three stories really have anything to do with each other and the game overall lacks a pulse due to the A-plot's watery progression. Still better than Beyond, though!

"Detroit: Become Human" is a deeply flawed and ultimately disappointing game. The story is poorly written and riddled with cliches, with characters that are one-dimensional and uninteresting. The game's decision-making mechanics are shallow and fail to deliver on the promise of meaningful choices that affect the outcome of the story. The visuals are impressive but do little to compensate for the lack of substance in the gameplay and narrative. Overall, "Detroit: Become Human" is a waste of time and money for anyone looking for a truly engaging and thought-provoking gaming experience.

(written june 15, 2018)

Self-proclaimed auteur David Cage is known for his egotistically performative attitude on “games as art,” but he still lets his games speak their own stories rather than a meta-parroting of his design ideologies. Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, however flawed they may be, will live on as independent stories, “challenging” the medium by how they’re told and not what’s told. This is not the case for Detroit: Become Human.

Detroit: Become Human is not just pretentious; it’s pretentiousness in it’s purest form. The pretentiousness bleeds out from the game and into a clumsy, half-baked attempt at a meta-narrative (which obliviously turned into biting satire of itself). It is one of very few games I would genuinely call offensive and tasteless. I have no idea where to begin with what I hate about Detroit: Become Human, so let’s kick it off with a positive.

Detroit: Become Human has very good graphics. Its aesthetic style, however, is as visually bland as that sentence. Cage is hyper-focused on literally predicting the future to the point where it’s boring; it just looks like Apple stores started popping up around local neighborhoods. There’s no grittiness to the future, there’s only a clean everyman future applied to the grittiness of the modern world. It’s hard to call this game “cyberpunk,” it seems content with just being “cyber.”

Okay, now for an actual positive note: I have never seen a narrative-choice game branch out so far before. Choices do actually matter, fail-states are one-and-done and change handfuls of facets up to the end of the game. Decisions rarely have fleeting impact, where things change then slowly revert back to a one-size-fits-all conclusion; Detroit: Become Human is a game-changer (no pun intended) when it comes to narrative design. Although, it would be way better if the narrative was actually written well.

[SPOILERS START HERE]

Here’s where offensive and tasteless come in. Detroit: Become Human has only one message: slavery is bad. Maybe it says more, but I can’t decipher anything else as clear-cut as that, because the game shoves gluttonous amounts of political imagery down the player’s throat so hard, you can’t help but gag.

One character, Markus, is the leader of an android resistance group. In one scene, the player can choose to march peacefully, which I did. It (very blatantly) evokes the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery. There’s lots of civil rights imagery that doesn’t come across well, going as far as the “fist-in-the-air” of black power movements being one of four symbols the player can choose to adopt as the new symbol for “android resistance” and graffiti over city walls.

Then I hear the phrase “android camps,” and any good faith I had in this game leaves me like a wet fart. Yes, David Cage decided to co-opt, not just imagery or evocation, but an entire setting and scene based on the Holocaust. Naturally, I’m appalled! You can’t solve the Holocaust through peaceful protest! So, as Markus, I throw away the peaceful approach and ordered my resistance team to turn to violent measures.

It was then that my brain processed these separate moments into a coherent story, and I realized that Detroit: Become Human just combined the American civil rights movement, the Holocaust, and robots into one scene.

If this is David Cage’s idea of serious storytelling, I think I’d rupture something if he made a comedy game.

[SPOILERS END HERE]

What makes Detroit: Become Human so unenjoyable is not just the cowardice of its non-challenging setting, nor the writing that’s so on-the-nose it picks its own boogers; the worst part is when, for a fleeting moment, I enjoy it. Those moments when I grip my controller tighter, hoping, wanting to heed Cage’s siren call of a briefly compelling scene, are the most unbearable. The story, ears plugged with wax, refuses to face that glimpse of beauty and rows into more toxic waters.

It is never in my interest to recommend substituting the personal experience of playing a game with YouTube videos, but Detroit: Become Human has so little to offer to the player, and what it does offer feels like the game taunting them for expecting better. Watch two playthroughs to ooh-n-aah at the branching paths. This is a game better off being witnessed than involved in; it makes the fremdschämen much easier to bear.

Every good game has 2 out of 3 things: Good writing, good graphics, good gameplay.

This game had good graphics and good writing. Gameplay can sugumanuts

"Detroit: Become Human" is the most balanced and at the same least interesting Quantic Dream game so far. It doesn't have major plot holes, the gameplay is not excessively passive, the characters are not too annoying, yet there is nothing worth remembering. The game doesn't add anything new to the dead-old artificial intelligence theme and just sticks to the usual genre clichés.

I enjoyed Connor's "cases" and storyline the most, while the other two characters' paths and roles felt too forced at times. I liked how our actions influence the interaction with the other characters, and that the game is explicitly letting you know the way your relationships with them are evolving.

The flowchart at the end of each chapter shows you the number of variations the same chapter could have. While I found it interesting at first, I realized that it impacts negatively on your gameplay as instead of reacting to the events naturally, you just end up walking around to find possible triggers for new paths.