Detroit: Become Human

Like it or lump it, Quantic Dream only makes one kind of game these days, and Detroit: Become Human is no exception. All your favorites are here: using the right stick for contextual actions, QTE button prompts, dialogue choices floating by your character's head, people sounding like things that are only pretending to be human instead of actually sounding like people, etc. For the first time in their history that at the very least might be intentional as Detroit looks to tell the tale of the near future where personal androids are commonplace. If you've seen films like Blade Runner, or A.I., or even I, Robot you probably have an idea where this is going. The androids start to become sentient and make choices for themselves, they are persecuted - fairly or unfairly - by humans, there is an attempt at a revolution, and so on. With it's well-worn tropes and polarizing writer/director David Cage at the forefront yet again, it's possible you already know right off the bat whether or not this is for you. Nothing about Detroit is going to change your mind, but if you can overlook these things, or have no problem with them to begin with, there's plenty of genuine excitement, intrigue, emotion, and nuance to explore... alright, there's some nuance at best, but my point still stands.

For context and clarity, I'm someone who really liked Heavy Rain, but has never played any of Quantic Dream's other games, though I've seen a chunk of Beyond: Two Souls without ever getting my hands on it personally. Detroit is much more of a spiritual successor to the former than the latter, with it's multiple protagonists and fail states, although now we are diving more substantially into some kind of social commentary. The plight of the androids is compared clumsily and at times randomly to that of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Whether through the cinematic shots of the androids all at the back of a bus, or through the use - via player choice - of the phrase "I have a dream", the thematic mirroring of famous historical African-American civil rights moments is laid on thick and is the weakest part of the game. The word "slave" is an option in dialogue or messaging choices, but it isn't forced on the player and is rarely used, allowing you to elect whether or not to use such a charged word in this scenario.

Set - and this may be a shocker - in Detroit, Michigan in 2038, the game follows three androids over the course of what is really only a matter of days. Kara, a housekeeping android, comes into a new home and begins taking care of a young girl where the two quickly find themselves on the run after a dealing with her owner and the girl's violent, addict father. Next there's Markus, a caretaker android working for a famous artist who encourages Markus to strive to be greater who also find himself on the run and leading the android revolution. Finally, there's Connor, a police android working with an alcoholic, android hating detective investigating the recent rash of android "deviancy", and ultimately tracking down the other two player characters. Multiple playable characters has always been one of my favorite narrative tools in games - hell, multiple protagonists is just generally something I like in all media - and this is a game where it works very well, going so far as to have each character's story have it's own dedicated composer. The principle characters, both the androids and their immediate supporting cast are all surprisingly well acted, even if the other smaller characters tended to fall short as far as performances go. If there's one complaint that could be made about this structure, it's that Kara's story does not often loop back into the other two characters the way that Connor and Markus are often dramatically linked, but I personally found it a welcome change sometimes to have a story thread that was focused on itself and not the "larger story".

As mentioned above the gameplay isn't anything to write home about, but it functions better than it has in previous Quantic Dream joints. The role-playing and dialogue choices are the meat of what you're here for there, but this is broken up with action set-pieces like fights or chase scenes every now and then, as well as investigation sequences when playing as Connor. Not every chapter is a winner, a scene with Kara and her little girl companion Alice in the streets of Detroit trying to find shelter comes to mind as an example of a bit that isn't all that interesting - and too long - but there are significantly more good sections than bad.

Those choices you make shape your journey in some pretty wild ways, up to and including getting your playable characters killed off, which leads right into perhaps the best feature of the whole package: the flowchart. At the end of every chapter, all of your actions are shown in a flowchart so you can follow along your path and see what you did in addition to what could have been. You can also check your choices against the world's to see what the most popular path is. While a lot of this is in service of helping you know what to do in a second playthrough if you wanted to try for a different path, looking at the breakdown of events can be very fun, especially when you notice huge chunks you somehow missed. The possibilities are more fun than you think when you see that you could have started or finished a chapter in very different ways than what you got.

One final weird feature Detroit has some fun with is the main menu itself. On the main screen, you'll find an android who serves as your guide, later revealed by her model appearing in the story as being named Chloe. Though she starts the game as a servile and very openly robotic presence, as you make your way through the story and the deviant android ranks continue to grow, Chloe will start to show signs of questioning who she is, going from smiling and generally appearing the picture of being pleasant to looking lost and confused - even scared - with her own sense of self. After being asked whether or not you want to complete a short survey about your, the player's, own feelings on android's after a few hours, the side-narrative with Chloe reaches it's own conclusion once you have beaten the game that I found frankly fascinating. Maybe it's because I cant think of an example of this happening anywhere else, but I now know that I want to see more meta-narrative stuff in game menus. It made every part of the game feel like it was actually part of a whole package, like nothing was wasted space and it all contributed. Any game can make the menus look like menus, Detroit actually made you engage with it.

For all it's tech and strange yet endearing idiosyncrasies, there are only a few factors in determining your tolerance for Detroit, if not Quantic Dream at large. The gameplay can be a little stilted and the writing and tone can feel unearned at it's worst, but at it's best it's a surprisingly intimate game about three people finding themselves. Comparing the dislike of androids to the countless years of institutionalized racism might be a hot-button issue to walk right into to, but that doesn't mean no one should ever try. And while it may be heavy-handed and somewhat wrote, Detroit tells it's story well over the course of roughly nine-ten hours and got me to really care about it's trio of robots learning to become human.