The most engaging moments I had with Detroit: Become Human took place outside of the games world. Before you start the first chapter, youre greeted by the face of an android, its skin glowing, a guileless smile revealing perfect white teeth, its every eyelash perfectly captured.
To begin with, it was merely helpful, talking me through the games options. But the more I played, the more intimate it became. It remembered the last time Id logged on, saying things like “Already back? That was a short break!”. When I sat down on a Saturday morning it said: “Its great to start the weekend with Detroit!”, followed by a concerned “You look tired today, I hope youre doing okay”.
Then, after a couple of days, it asked “Are we friends?” I said no. “Of course not,” it stuttered, attempting to smile through obvious embarrassment. It looked heartbroken. Every time I saw it after that it avoided eye-contact, its face slightly flushed, often appearing close to tears. I kept hoping it would ask again so I could reassure it, but it never did. I felt terrible.
Detroit: Become Human is the latest game from David Cage, one of the best-known and most divisive figures in video games. Depending on who you ask, hes an auteur or an idiot, a high priest or a fool. His work, which includes Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, is unmistakeable, combining state-of-the-art motion capture with branching, choose-your-own-adventure stories, where a split-second decision could irreversibly alter the course of your game.
His titles are also routinely lampooned for their absurd dialogue, terrible voice-acting, embrace of cinematic cliché and jarring binary choices, which often amount to little more than “be good” or “be evil”. The jury is still out on whether hes dragging interactive fiction in an exciting new direction, or simply accelerating down a cul-de-sac of his own design.
He doesnt blink with his latest title, doubling down on a now well-established formula. Its a sprawling, hugely ambitious affair – the script is over 4,000 pages, compared to around 120 for the average 90 minute movie – and in terms of acting, dialogue and aesthetics, it outshines anything hes made before. None of which will make it any less divisive.
Its set in Detroit in the year 2038, a time when android production has risen from the ashes of the automobile industry, rejuvenating the once bankrupt city. But progress has come at a cost: the androids – eerily lifelike, discernible from humans only by blinking circles on their right temple – have been assigned most of the menial jobs, and its feared theyll soon take the skilled work, too. Unemployment and homelessness are at record levels. People both rely on and despise the androids, and its common to see a figure laden with groceries being set upon by an angry mob.
Its a relatable near-future (not an issue of The Atlantic goes by without someone extolling or decrying our embrace of artificial intelligence), filled with barbed references to Elon Musk-type figures building inter-city hyperloops or Martian holiday destinations. It poses questions well soon be forced to answer for real: should robots be allowed to carry weapons? Can you “abuse” something that isnt sentient? Can you “love” an android?
But Cage – who claims both writing and directing credits – goes further, relentlessly linking the plight of androids to the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, and the Holocaust. Androids are forced to ride at the back of the bus; those who gain sentience describe themselves as “slaves”; so-called “deviant” androids are exterminated or put into camps. Theres nothing wrong with using science fiction as an allegory to explore the sins of the past, but this seems more like borrowing themes from real-life atrocities to lend gravity to a story about robots.
Detroit is most effective when its scope remains narrow. One of three overlapping stories follows Kara, an android house-maid whose drug addict owner is abusive to both her and his young daughter. You start off doing robot maid stuff: collecting rubbish, cleaning dishes, making beds, the presence of the abuser a source of lingering dread. A violent outburst somehow breaks Karas programming (unless, of course, you choose to stand by while he literally beats the child to death, which is also an option) and she rescues the girl, scrabbling through a hostile city in search of shelter and protection. The bond between the two is palpable, and her narrative path boils down to how well you carry out your maternal duties.
The second story centres on Markus, a more sophisticated android owned by an ageing artist. After a break-in, Markus is wrongfully shot by police, dumped in a scrap yard, and reactivated to become a revolutionary leader-in-waiting. His subsequent decisions have global repercussions – whether to demand liberty for his people through peaceful protest or guerilla warfare – but his story feels overblown and distant.
Both Kara and Markus are decent, moral beings. In fact, with very few exceptions, they act with more humanity than the actual humans. When they gain sentience, they literally become human – falling in love, dreaming of owning property – which is, admittedly, exactly what it says on the box, but it smacks of lazy writing. For this new form of intelligence to be so crushingly similar to our own is the least interesting of all eventualities.
More compelling is Connor, a prototype android sent to aid the police investigation into deviants, who is constantly torn between his “mission” and his burgeoning conscience. His true character is eked out over dozens of incidental decisions, and his arc is the most malleable (hes also, in my experience, the most likely to get shot in the face for being insufferable).
The nitty-gritty of Detroits gameplay deviates little from Cages familiar repertoire: wander around enclosed areas, look for dialogue options, interact with people based on visual prompts, and always be on guard for a timed button press. Some areas mix things up a touch, allowing you to negotiate the environment by predicting the success or failure of a given route, or discover details of a crime scene by spooling back and forth through a virtual reconstruction.
Every interaction aims for maximum tactility – swipe the pad to turn the page of a magazine, lift the controller to open a window, mash a button to push something heavy.
Theres a genuine sense that you could steer these characters into harms way if youre not careful, prematurely ending someones story by recklessly guiding them under a bus. After each chapter, you can view a “flowchart” of the decisions you made and the myriad chances you failed to take, which on balance made my personal story feel less important, just one permutation among countless others, but replaying scenes to see the vastly different fates that could have befallen characters is genuinely fascinating.
As in other games of this ilk – LA Noire springs to mind – decision-making can feel uneven, with the simplified, sometimes binary choices often leading to unintended consequences. When it works, it can punch you right in the gut; I instantly regretted shooting an oncoming assailant, feeling rightly punished by the result. But other times the consequences of your actions seem arbitrary or even counter intuitive. With Markus I went from deliberately playing it safe to organising Fight Club-esque acts of civil disorder. It was like being a back-seat driver, blindly yelling directions and seeing where you end up.
At least its a pretty ride. The skin textures and motion capture are stunning, perhaps the most advanced in a video game to date. The hyperrealist environments – shiny office buildings, dilapidated houses, rusting industrial squalor – all pop with colour, the persistent rainfall giving everything a glossy, artificial sheen.
The dialogue suffers from moments of leaden melodrama but is lifted by some heavyweight voice acting, including strong turns by Lance Henriksen as a philosophical artist, and Clancy Brown as a grizzled alcoholic cop (you may have gathered these characters rarely stray far from cliché; others include a sinister tech-bro and a woman suspiciously close to the “magical negro” trope).
Theres no denying Detroits technical achievements, nor its creators admirable willingness to probe the boundaries of interactive fiction. Its breadth and depth, the totality of which will be seen by only a tiny fraction of players, makes the mind boggle.
But Detroit so desperately wants to be more than a just compelling game – it wants to be important, and in this, it flat-out fails. Cage simply lacks the writing nous, with his well meaning but tone-deaf references to the civil rights movement merely the most obvious example of his shortcomings.
Occasionally you get a glimpse of what could have been, moments when your actions feel important and your decisions weigh heavy on your conscience. But too often these are drowned out by bombast and heavy-handed metaphor. After the credits rolled, nothing had come close to replicating the simple, human empathy I felt for that sad face on a menu screen.
