But having played through Detroit twice now, I’ve only just scraped the bottom of the barrel of the many different ways things can play out in the game. At the time, it sounded like the sort of pretentious fluff I had come to expect from Quantic Dream. It’s really something you have to see for yourself to fully appreciate.Ī few months ago when I met one of the writers of the game at an event, he said Detroit was “a story about you, the player”, and that you would “co-write” the game’s story as it plays out. The game uses some clever sleight of hand to hide the seams and make all these dissonant narrative threads coalesce regardless of how hard you pull them in opposite directions. Play him colder or more ambitious and it’s going to be a whole other thing. Play Connor in a sincere way and you’ll experience a sweet, sometimes funny buddy cop story between him and Frank. The growth, development, and conclusion of these characters’ arcs is completely under your control. The beauty of Detroit, however, is that you have near-complete control of how these characters’ journeys play out. All three characters are well-written and acted, and go on some wildly intriguing journeys. Connor is a highly advanced prototype android who is hunting deviants - androids demonstrating human-like emotions - working with a human detective to solve crimes involving androids, trying to find out the cause behind the sudden widespread android deviancy. Marcus works for a rich old artist who actively encourages him to think for himself. Kara is a domestic android taking care of a child while serving her troubled father, dealing with the dilemma of obeying her master or protecting the child from abuse. What makes Detroit worthwhile, however, is the personal stories it tells. Robots escaping abuse, humans hating robots and eventually coming around, at least three scenes of someone pensively staring into the distance or in a mirror, it’s all there. This is in no way a unique take on the subject, and Detroit actually feels like it’s going out of its way to hit every genre trope in can on the way. The central question, however, is whether these androids can gain consciousness and be considered a genuine life-form. For all of the obvious benefits that would accompany such a technological phenomenon, the game also explores the ways in which it would affect human relationships and the rising unemployment caused by it. The story of Detroit occurs twenty years into the future in the year 2038, and attempts to explore the idea of a society trying to adapt to humanoid androids becoming as commonplace as the smartphones of today. While Detroit: Become Human doesn’t do a lot to create a new or interesting story, it tells that story really well. They’re games that use the branching paths to tell more interesting stories while also going a long way in imbuing the narrative with more interesting gameplay. While I’ve always recognized and appreciated their contributions to resurgence of what we now know as narrative-driven adventure games, other developers have created vastly superior and more interesting titles within the genre like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Dontnod’s absolutely groundbreaking game Life is Strange. I haven’t been a fan of Quantic Dream’s games so far. Detroit doesn’t divert even a little bit from the style and mechanics of the developer’s previous work, but it refines them to near-perfection and completely blows up the degree of choice offered beyond anything I’ve seen in a game of this kind. Since then, Quantic Dream have worked to create games that focus on branching narratives and make full use of cutting-edge performance capture and facial animation. Described in one sentence, Detroit: Become Human is the natural culmination of the style that developer Quantic Dream and writer-director David Cage have been cultivating since Fahrenheit in 2005.
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