Possible spoilers
Choice based gameplay can enhance gaming experience, because everybody loves facing a good dilemma. Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls both had the element of incorporating choices into the game to make the characters go down different paths and this returns in Detroit: Become Human, Quantic Dream’s newest title. The game takes place in the future where technology has advanced and there are now androids that are replacing humans in the workplace.
Detroit improves on Beyond: Two Souls by going back to having multiple playable characters. The setting is more wide reaching than previous Quantic games. Heavy Rain focused on characters who were all linked by a single murder mystery and Beyond: Two Souls was a confusing time hopping stint. In Detroit the stakes feel higher, the game even monitors public opinion of androids based on the choices you make. The game follows three androids: Connor an android designed to help the police in murder cases involving androids, Kara an android designed to care for a family and Markus who is also a carer for an elderly man.
I loved Connor, he is the most “android-y” out of all of them and yet the most endearing. Markus breaks free from life serving humans and becomes the leader of the android rebel group called Jericho. His part of the story is a not at all subtle allegory to the civil rights movement and slavery in America. I feel the video game developers were out of their depth here in trying to provide commentary.
As for Kara, I barely got to spend anytime playing her character as I messed up in one of the early chapters and she never showed up again. That’s what the best thing about this game is, the choices and actions have weight to them and there’s so many possible scenarios and outcomes that can happen. I’m looking forward to going back to play through again and see all the different paths and endings.
A cool feature are the flowcharts which map out all the choices made, and what was missed which is really helpful for replaying. And, as expected, the graphics are amazing. I don’t usually pay much mind to sound related aspects, but I thought the score created great atmosphere in emotional and tense moments of the game.
I will admit, at times the story got a little iffy and premise is not an original concept, it reminded me of a Will Smith film called I, Robot which came out 14 years ago. I still liked playing Detroit a lot and will be replaying to see all the possible scenarios for different choices, particularly picking out Hank’s attire.
At My Desk 