Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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Detroit: Become Human

WHAT IS IT?: Developer QuanticDream's latest cinematic adventure game (and the only one I've actually played). Set in the relatively near future (2038), the game follows the intertwining stories of three androids in the city of Detroit (Connor, a police android designed to investigate 'deviant' androids who are rebelling against their programming and attaining a sense of selfhood; Kara, a housekeeping android who, through a series of events, finds herself protecting an abused little girl named Alice; and Markus, a domestic care android who eventually finds himself the de facto leader of a revolutionary android rights movement).

Platform: PS4

Level of completion: I attempted to go for the platinum, which requires completing the game, and many individual chapters, numerous times. As it stands, I've gained all but three or so of the trophies and have completed the game's story two or three times, at least. I'll probably go back to it eventually and clean up the remaining trophies with another playthrough or two, but I'm kind of burned out right now.

GAMEPLAY
I mentioned that this was a cinematic adventure game, which naturally means that the level of interactivity here is somewhat limited. Like many other story-heavy games on PS4, you're almost always being directed through a scripted sequence that combines user input with narrative in such a way that the entire game feels like a playable cutscene of sorts. There are locations with some level of exploration and player agency to them (and there are actually collectibles to find in the form of magazines, some of which change depending on choices you make that impact the direction of the story), but, ultimately, you're always being funneled down a narrative route of sorts. Your character can often walk around and examine some objects in their environment. They also frequently engage in Quick Time Event-heavy action sequences or, more rarely, conflicts where the player must quickly choose how to respond to a situation from a list of prompts.

More than any game I've played in recent memory, Detroit: Become Human seems to satisfy that classic TellTale games mantra about your choices mattering. Each chapter features a complex internal flowchart of cause-and-effect that tracks how the player's actions cause events to turn out by the end. More importantly, though, is the way in which events ripple across the narrative of the entire game and inform events that come later on. There seem to be two kinds of consequential choices in this game: decisive ones which immediately impact the narrative (such as choices that lead, fairly quickly, to a character living or dying, for example, which directly impacts how events later in the game will turn out), and ones that effect how other people perceive certain characters or factions. These latter types of choices have little impact on their own but, cumulatively, they lead to narrative-shaking changes. It's similar to, if more complex than, the 'law vs chaos' scale that is employed by several SMT games.

STORY/CHARACTERS
Another strength of the game is the wide variety of characters you'll meet across the various chapters, from mentally unstable vagrant androids to people living in isolation who have quietly either become heroes or complete monsters. The core relationships in this game are between Connor and his cynical police lieutenant partner Hank Anderson, a complex character who struggles with discriminatory feelings toward androids while also finding himself becoming increasingly empathetic toward the "deviant" androids he comes across; Kara and Alice, who quickly find themselves developing an interesting mother/daughter dynamic; and Markus and a variety of other people in the rebel group he stumbles across: the core players in this group swing from hopeful pacifists who want to learn to co-exist with humans to hardened militants who think the only way forward is to respond with violence, and the ending of Markus' story, along with multiple big story events, will change drastically depending on which of these approaches he tends to adopt throughout the game.

So, to reiterate, while I won't go into more depth in the story, expect to investigate mysteries when playing as Connor, struggling to survive and protect Alice when playing as Kara, and deciding how to incite a revolutionary political movement as Markus.

ART/CHARACTER DESIGNS/MUSIC
Not a lot to say in these areas. Detroit: Become Human does a good job of cultivating a hyper-realistic art-style that (mostly) avoids the uncanny valley (except where it intends to: this IS a game about androids, after all) using a combination of high-poly models, effective lighting (some of the rainy environments in this game are especially gorgeous), and clearly motion captured faces. It's obviously not quite 1:1 with real life, but, for the aging PS4, it's a really impressive effort.

The music is... pretty good. It doesn't stand out for the most part. It's not something I'd listen to on its own, but it does a good job of heightening the emotions of whatever is happening in a given scene. I particularly like the panicked sound of this track:

Other observations:

• Some games get off to a slow start. This one doesn't, and essentially puts all its cards on the table at the beginning with a high-stakes hostage negotiation that does a really good job of introducing the player to the core gameplay systems. Very cool.
• Scenes in this game, while incredibly streamlined and directed, are dense with a ton of detail, including interactive objects that reveal lore and worldbuilding in the background, be it through readable news tablets that flesh out current (circa 2038) political events, polling data that reveals interesting things about the public's feelings on androids more broadly, the ways in which androids are changing different entertainment fields and areas of scholarly expertise, etc., signs on the wall or in stores, news interviews on the TV, etc. It does a fantastic job of building the illusion that you're taking a peek at what a future America might look like, as opposed to just playing through a science-fiction story about androids.
• I feel like Kara's storyline was worked into the game because the developers started with the character and felt like they needed to integrate her. Her storyline doesn't really mesh well with the Markus/Connor storylines, however, so every time one of her chapters pops up you know the game is going to start spinning its wheels narratively for a little while. This would have been more understandable if the storyline had interesting themes/ideas that enriched the broader social focus of the other storylines, but I never really felt like they added much to the game on their own terms. You had the REAL game with the other two characters, and then you had this little side story about Kara and a little girl that just kept popping back up.
• For all of the complex issues that feed into the setting and would make for fascinating subject matter to explore across the scope of the narrative, I feel like the writers really drop the ball here. The game is entirely uninterested in the possible cognitive, moral, and experiential differences between human life and android life or the extended implications of sentient A.I. becoming a thing, and instead uses human control over androids as a somewhat tepid metaphor for racism and bigotry more universally. I mean... IT WORKS, but it feels like the game's writers took the safer, but less interesting route when it came to constructing this narrative. In-game scenarios are also frequently VERY morally black and white (Markus' storyline is a bit of an exception to this, thankfully, and there are a few points where you'll be asked to make life-or-death decisions in his route). If Detroit succeeds as an interconnected, choice-driven adventure story, then it mostly fails as thought-provoking literature.
• Similarly, its depiction of political oppression and activism is fundamentally very lazy. Why do all 'awakened' androids seem to automatically join your side (people advocating against their own rights isn't exactly a recent historical phenomenon)? How is this massive civil rights movement kickstarted so rapidly? All it takes is a couple of non-violent demonstrations for the government to go full Third Reich on androids, and, similarly, a kiss or a song are enough to largely defuse government violence. The game's heart is in the right place, but it streamlines actual social conflict to the point where story beats feel vaguely cartoonish.
• This game desperately needs a function to fast-forward though many of the looooooong talky sections that you have to sit through over and over if you're going for all the trophies. This game certainly doesn't respect the player's time and, in many respects, feels like it was designed with only one complete playthrough in mind, despite the wealth of choices available to the player. Japanese visual novels deal with this by allowing the player to quickly skip through previously read dialogue, and this game would benefit dramatically from something similar.
• At several points in the game, it will ask the player to shake their controller around to simulate an in-game action. Can't say I'm a fan of this. Waggle controls weren't particularly engaging in various Nintendo Wii games a decade ago, and they make even less sense here.

CONCLUSION
Despite some narrative missteps, inconsistent pacing, surface-level treatment of complex social and technological issues, and missing QoL features for trophy hunters/completionists, the game stands tall as one of the best adventure games I've played in recent memory. The complex web of decision-making that happens across the various chapters can lead to radically different outcomes by the end, making this one of the few adventure games I've played where the player's decisions ACTUALLY do matter to the outcome of the story. The dire narrative stakes, thematic presentation, and gorgeous, ultra-realistic visual style make this feel like an interactive movie in the best way possible. I was fully invested in the fates of these characters from beginning to end, and frankly never expected I'd end up enjoying it so much.

8/10