Detroit: Become Human (PS4, 2018)
So it's come to this. Four console games in and David Cage, in his neverending quest to impart EMOTIONS upon the player, has finally realised he can make a game about robots. Either that or he watched Blade Runner one night and thought it was a really good idea.
Detroit: Become Human is the story of three people who aren't human. The year is 2038 and Detroit is the android capital of the world. The company CyberLife was founded in the early 2020s and immediately changed everything. Lifelike androids now do all the jobs humans didn't want to do, and there's a bunch of other fancy stuff like autonomous cars and light-up clothing. You play as three androids - Connor, a prototype loaned to the police to investigate cases of 'deviancy' as androids malfunction and think they're people, Kara, a domestic android owned by a junkie who abuses his daughter, and Markus, another prototype belonging to an elderly and paraplegic painter. As the game progresses the androids do... you know, I can't even do this vaguely without spoiling the detail I'm going to go in to later. They do things.
Before that however, I'd like to share a video of a tech demo Quantic Dream did in 2012:
The video shows a lifelike android named Kara being assembled and activated by a voice off-screen testing her and telling her what to do as she's put together. The voice even calls her "baby" at one point, strangely. Once Kara is put together and has skin and a sense of shame she asks what's going to happen to her. After being told she seems disappointed and says "I thought," which results in the voice saying she's defective and the robotic arms that built her start taking her apart. She gets upset and pleads to not be disassembled, also saying "I'm scared." This is enough for the voice to stop and have the assembly finished and have Kara shipped off on a conveyor belt ready to be sold.
While the video is especially impressive considering it was rendered on a PS3 in 2012, it raises a few questions. If you were in charge of quality control on the assembly line for androids that are supposed to look and act like humans, you would want to be fairly discerning. Androids are machines after all, and they're not supposed to think. They are tools created to complete tasks. If an android thinks it is alive and has feelings, this could be bad. The reaction to such an instance would surely be to examine and analyse the (deactivated) android in detail to understand how this malfunction happened. You wouldn't shrug your shoulders and let it carry on as normal because it asked nicely. After all, if there's one defective unit on the production line there's a good chance there could be more.
Surely then, six years later, Quantic Dream could take the game and the universe built based on Kara and refine it, ironing out the obvious discrepancies with reality as exhibited in their original video, couldn't they? Well they could have, but this is a David Cage game.
Gameplay takes the form of the now standard Quantic Dream interactive drama model. You control characters in third person view, moving around an area interacting with things through contextual onscreen button prompts and quick time events until you've done enough of them to progress the scene. The controls are about as good as they're ever going to get, although moving characters around sometimes felt like their legs weren't connected to their bodies or brains properly. After the linear, single-character focus of Beyond: Two Souls there's a return to the multi-character interwoven narratives of Heavy Rain, and I think the game is better for it. The narratives aren't strictly connected to each other, but the influence events have is clearly noticeable across all stories.
The biggest difference between Detroit and previous Quantic Dream games is the sheer volume of different story outcomes. While Heavy Rain had a few different endings and some consequences for doing or not doing things, Detroit has a seemingly endless amount of different paths your story can take. While this is good since there is a proper sense of consequence and importance added to the choices you make, it does have its downsides. You're still at the mercy of interpreting the speech cues to try and gauge a proper reaction to someone in a conversation. It has a little of the problem L.A. Noire had, where the prompt doesn't align with what you'd expect the longer response to be. The higher amount of story branches that result from your actions can make certain moments feel more stressful than they should be as a result.
This is the first Quantic Dream game where a fully fleshed out world is necessary and there are mixed results. Since there are more characters and a wider reaching story there has to be more detail pretty much everywhere. Conversely, the result is actually quite shallow. Early on, Markus is framed for attacking his owner, Carl, and shot by the police. He's then dumped in an android scrapyard and has to scrape his way out. It's a very evocative setpiece and it really demonstrates the fragility and construction of the androids. That's if you just play it and don't think about it. If you did you'd wonder why defective androids aren't disassembled and destroyed, why functional components aren't salvaged, or why a mass-market android industry that's only been running for about ten years has produced dumps on the scale of the one Markus ended up in.
I could genuinely be here for hours listing all the strange discrepancies here. Why does the news say the economy is as great as it's ever been when 30% of the American population is unemployed? Why are the androids made to look life-like when they were initially intended to carry out menial tasks? Androids have a circular LED light on their right temple like the processor light on a computer, but this can be removed with no problems. Wouldn't this just make deviancy easier to conceal, or make it easier for people to use androids for malicious purposes?
The biggest problem by far with the androids in Detroit however centres around a prominent NPC. Kara's story sees her in the employ of a destitute drug addict named Todd, whose wife left him and their daughter in a run-down house. Todd is unhappy, and Kara is introduced as he picks her up from a store after she "had an accident" and had her memory wiped. Oh, okay, I think, an actual focus on the domestic consequences of androids on people. Even Kara's turn to deviancy seems to be from an intellectually intriguing perspective, as she changes and goes on the run out of a sense of protectiveness towards Todd's daughter, Alice. The rest of their story is a touching (or as touching as David Cage can get) examination of motherhood, and rather than the human relationship with androids, the android relationship with humans.
David Cage however isn't a good enough writer to set up twists properly, so it turns out that Alice is an android. Android children exist. A collectible magazine tells us that human birth rates are declining because of how convenient the android children are.
Androids are mass-produced. They are models, where multiple units are built looking exactly the same. Kara realises - or eventually admits to herself - that Alice is an android because she sees another one of her. How does this work? Do the android children go to school? Can they turn deviant like the adult models? Do they live in some perpetual Benjamin Button-like existence, never growing up and never realising this? Perhaps more importantly, how in the name of f*** could any company making entirely life-like facsimiles of humans manage to be allowed to make child versions? Androids are supposed to be completely subservient. Obedient. They do anything you tell them to and they're functionally the same as humans. Honestly, this isn't so much the usual plot hole you can turn your mind away from, if you actually think about child androids for too long you start feeling a bit sick.
Speaking of bad writing and world building, let's have a little think about the assorted historical allegories David Cage does an extremely bad job of emulating. I mentioned Blade Runner flippantly earlier on. Robots that think they're human - or don't realise they're robots - is a classic sci-fi trope dating back decades. That's fine. There are original spins to be put on the concept, especially since Detroit also briefly touches on subjects like over-population, climate change, food shortages and artificial intelligence. All of that's fine. Even the angle of androids being recognised as people is potentially interesting, if you step back and consider that humans have created sentient life and eventually try to kill it off when it asks to be treated as such. This doesn't even seem to be about fear about being replaced, just selfishness.
However.
Let's review a couple of things. Androids, when outside and working, wear android uniforms. These uniforms feature a blue armband around the upper arm, and a big blue triangle on the front of the chest. At the end of the game as the androids are starting to rise up, the army gets called in to round the androids up into camps and exterminate them. Exterminate is actually the word that's used.
As Kara tries to escape to a safe place with Alice she ends up near the border with a black woman named Rose. Rose is sympathetic to androids and helps them flee persecution by getting them to Canada, a country which doesn't allow the construction of androids. But, as we've seen, androids can blend in easily by removing their LED. When Kara asks why she helps androids, Rose tells her "my people" were once persecuted, and that she doesn't want to contribute to that.
Now.
Far be it from me to say that David Cage isn't good enough at writing to make a game which makes such blatant allusions to things like the Holocaust or slavery. I'd love to sit here and tell you I could come up with something better. Maybe even given him the benefit of the doubt and say it's down to the multiple options that need to be left open for a game like this. If it was a film or a book with a single pre-determined narrative, it might be easier to be concise and considerate of the themes being explored. All of this is a lie, however. Any delicacy that's needed to have a sincere, thought-provoking comparison between life-like androids and actual historical atrocities is never going to be in a game where normal human interactions, emotions, conversations, are so badly lacking. Come to think of it, while your actions with Markus and the rebellion change the public perception of androids, you never actually see any human reactions first-hand. At most you see them get pissed because their android runs away.
Consider this quote from David Cage from 2017, after a demo of the game was shown at E3:
Despite Political Overtones, David Cage Says Detroit Is Mostly About Androids
Better yet,
There's times where I don't need to even say anything. I suppose, fittingly, there are exactly two available options here. Either David Cage is absolutely sincere in what he says. There is no intended political message here, and if the player sees that, that's up to the player. If this is the case then he is the single dumbest man alive. I suppose that's preferable to the alternative, that he's trying to profit out of winding people up using slavery and the Holocaust as bait.
I may as well talk about the game itself. The three playable characters are all enjoyable to experience, even if their stories aren't always. I'll cover each individually.
Connor (here's a thought, how are androids named? They have model and serial numbers and actual names are given to them by humans - how does this work if androids become free?) is a prototype loaned to the police to investigate deviants. He teams up with Lieutenant Hank Anderson, which allows David Cage a return to Fahrenheit and its tortured references to every 80s cop film ever made. He just hates androids, man! That's why he drives the only manual car left in the world and tells his Captain he hates androids every chance he gets. As they investigate through the classic point and click looking at clues we saw in Heavy Rain they start to bond, and both men ultimately change each other.
I enjoyed Connor. In spite of all the cliches I enjoyed Anderson, played by Clancy Brown. In my first playthrough I thought the game set me up for failure since I played Connor straight and got a terrible ending, but when I thought about it later it was my fault for not picking up on Connor's burgeoning humanity. I think there will come a point where a Quantic Dream can't have a character and mechanics like this because of how unoriginal it will get, but it's at least appropriate for the game.
Kara I've already discussed some, and she was my favourite. It's interesting that her story occurs in isolation from the rest of the game. The only time events elsewhere can influence her is right at the very end. I'll come to that later, but up until the twist and even beyond that I was actually invested in what happened to her. I wanted her and Alice to survive and escape together. I can't give them any higher praise than that.
Strangely, given his story was the main point of the game, I found Markus to be the least engaging character with the least engaging story and the least engaging chapters. It's eventually explained that androids become deviant after experiencing a significant emotional shock which effectively brakes their programming. This is fine, but why does Markus end up being the one who swans into their hideout like Jesus and starts directing them? Why is he the only one to free androids by touching them? What happens if the android doesn't want to be freed? Some androids hate humans, some don't Markus didn't, and he still cared about Carl later on.
The whole concept of deviancy isn't really explored or explained, and Markus' story suffers as a result. Several deviants that Connor investigates start writing "rA9" everywhere when they can, and there's a suggestion that there's some sort of religious belief they spontaneously create and share. But it's never explained. You meet the man who created androids and who subsequently left his company, and he's just weird enough to make you think he did it deliberately. If this is the case then there's nowhere near enough detail, and Markus as a character and his story end up suffering as a result. His chapters vary between linear braking and entering or pretending to be Martin Luther King, there's not much to draw you in.
As a game which offers choices to the player in terms of how the story progresses, Detroit does something which from what I remember of the others is new for a Quantic Dream game. On more than one occasion you'll be faced with a choice, you'll make the choice, then you'll get offered a big ARE YOU SURE??? choice again. Despite everything I've listed, this might be the worst part about the game. Why offer choices if you're going to undermine them right away? This is one of the worst parts about Markus' story too, since he's always flanked by two androids who are basically a talking moral choice system. By the end of the game I stopped caring and got so annoyed I stopped being invested in the choices at all, which I doubt was the intention.
In fact, the most egregious case of choices being misrepresented was something that played a big part in giving me a rubbish ending. When the army turns up to flush out the android hideout, you're running away from it with Kara and Alice. At the exit you stay down and play dead. The game then offers you the choices "don't move" and "protect Alice." To me, this suggests that staying still won't work. But it does. This isn't so much a choice being presented twice as a choice being completely misleading, and I'm surprised something so glaring was left in and came so near the end.
When I first played Heavy Rain I got a pretty poor ending. This ultimately came down to two reasons. The first was me failing a QTE and missing a piece of evidence. Fine, I failed and that's on me. The other was not realising that I could survive a house fire by hiding in a fridge. That's bullshit, and when I found out that's what I was supposed to do, I was unhappy. Detroit eschews the need for a protracted wait or a game walkthrough to make you disappointed with what you did. The end of every scene sees a full flowchart of all the choices you made, with all the other potential options greyed out until you've chosen them on another playthrough. While it can be argued this adds replay value (if you really really like the game and want to see every possibility) across multiple playthroughs, it undermines the game and the initial experience anyone who plays it blind will take away from it. How can I be satisfied with the choices I made (and I made some pretty bad ones) when I'm constantly being presented with the suggestion of something different? By all means keep the flowchart, but don't show it at the end of each chapter. That's just rubbing it in.
None of this is helped by the classic David Cage problem of plot holes you could drive an oil tanker through. I'll give you a taste of some of the more memorable mistakes I made that I would argue are the game's fault:
- In one chapter, Markus and friends break into a broadcasting tower to transmit a message to the humans. If you chose to be nice and spare a human who ran away at the start, a swat team turns up and one of your friends is injured. If you drag him to the roof while you're escaping you're given the option of killing him to stop the police from probing him and finding out the rest of the androids' plans. However, the police investigation is carried out by Connor, controlled by you, so if you don't go up on the roof, you don't find him. Better yet, the injured android is somehow able to escape from the tower and get back to the android's hideout.
- If you protest peacefully throughout the game you'll reach a stage where Markus and the androids are in a stand-off with police. After barricading themselves in the androids get charged by the police anyway until there's about ten of them left. You're given some options. My choice was Sacrifice, believing pacifism above all else to be what I supposed to do. If you select Kiss, however, Markus kisses his (extremely clumsily written) girlfriend North. The police lower their guns, the President who is watching live says "tell the police to stand down!" and this happens immediately. Having to guess what the game thinks I should be doing is bad enough, when it's David Cage's hilarious expectation of how romantic relationships work, you'd be better with a monkey throwing darts at the screen.
- At the end of Kara's story you make it to border control in Canada. After queuing to show a guy your passports he checks your temperature. If Markus has been peaceful and public opinion is positive, the guy lets you off and you get to slip through quietly and start a new life. Why does this check happen at the extreme end point of the journey? Why aren't people scanned entering the building? Getting off the bus? Getting on the bus? Getting through any of the checkpoints in Detroit she had to sneak through along the way? Why does it come down to one guy, and why doesn't his scanner start beeping immediately?
After recently playing Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls - two PS3 games - on PS4, the jump in graphics and the technical aspects of Detroit is very noticeable. This game looks amazing. The motion capture and detail in characters is fantastic. Faces and particularly eyes look better than ever, and this helps the game be more immersive and the characters more empathetic. The same goes for environments which look richer and fuller, and what I mentioned before about the world being more detailed than before is a direct consequence of this. As ever, nobody reacts when it rains so you can see water running down peoples' faces just to really show off the detail, but at this point I just knowingly roll my eyes. You might say it's like water off a duck's back.
The soundtrack is also a big highlight of the game. Each character has their own theme and subsequent style of music throughout the game and whether ambient or focused, the music is always great. As with previous Quantic Dream games there's a series of behind the scenes videos showing you how the game was made, and being able to watch the composers explain why and how they developed the game's music is really interesting. I think NHL 2003 was the first game with lots of behind the scenes stuff I remember watching and I really enjoyed it. All games should have that. Maybe it'd be nice if studios that don't have the questionable work environment that Quantic Dream has did it, although it's always good to have a laugh seeing someone talking to camera while the word EMOTIONS is on the wall behind them in big black letters.
In addition to the evocative soundtrack, the game's general aesthetic is very striking. In one of those behind the scenes videos the guy responsible for the game's costume design explained that he wanted clothes that looked modern but 'normal,' and this plays a big part in making the world look convincing. I don't know how comparable to present-day Detroit the world is, but it looks like a city that's benefitted from a company that makes androids. You could argue there are issues with the human side that aren't really explored. There are a couple of humans featured earlier on in the game but considering the mass unemployment, and especially considering public opinion of androids is so important to the game's outcome, there's not much in the way of detail. It's a game about the androids so this is understandable, but it's still the humans' world they're trying to claim a place in.
It's also worth pointing out that David Cage's direction has finally managed the properly cinematic. Beyond: Two Souls was full of terrible set-pieces and was presented in widescreen, which just make the game look like a giant cutscene. The aesthetic of Detroit itself is expanded to the game as a whole, and the overall experience benefits greatly as a result. The soundtrack, the acting and the detail in characters' faces ties in with this, but the game is consistently beautiful and striking, and always visually compelling. Scenes like Markus entering Jericho, Markus leading the freedom march, Connor's visits to Amanda, they all stand out. I can't even remember anything from Beyond: Two Souls besides the odd interior shot and Ellen Page crying a lot. Although there are still the overly creepy chapters that don't actually add anything to the story which you always get in a David Cage game (the guy with the pigeons is a particular highlight), the whole game is just much better cinematically than anything they've done before.
If I were to judge Detroit: Become Human alongside the other Quantic Dream games, I don't think it's the best. Maybe it's because Heavy Rain was my first exposure to this type of game, but it's still my favourite. It was the best experience, going in blind to the story. Detroit is better technically and mechanically, but the illogical results of some of the choices mark it down. Plus the whole child androids and terribly written slavery and holocaust parallels are just disgusting.
Maybe if I was completely new to this style of game I'd have enjoyed Detroit more, I'm not sure. The subject matter seems well-suited for the type of games Quantic Dream makes, and while Detroit is unquestionably a vast technical achievement, the same pitfalls of clunky writing and what just seems like poorly thought out story threads hold it back from being genuinely great. I dread to think what David Cage is probably in the middle of writing right now.
.
