Detroit: Become Human

After the moderate success of Beyond: Two souls, Quantic Dream brought out their next

installment; Detroit: Become human. They have mended all of their previous shortcomings

with Two Souls and provided a tell-tale of consistent, nerve wracking story that is set in a

not so distant future.

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In the prior years, Quantic Dream has taken drastic risks by bringing a whole new gaming

experience to the players, that allows them to take crucial decisions in the game which

influences the overall outcome of each character linked to the specific person or event.

Moreover, Quantic dream has made sure that this experience should not be limited to avid

gamers, but relatively new players should have an exciting experience without getting lost in

the technicalities. These may include Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Beyond: two souls game

installments.

On the other hand, these games had their fair share of criticisms especially Beyond: two souls, earlier installment, for instance, the plot was not consistent, beyond: two souls have a knack of jumping story sequences from Jodie preteens to the Adult – Jodie with no significant connections to each of the story segments (unconnected storytelling).

Secondly, the dreadful dialogues made it difficult to capture the intense moment whether it be a loss of family or joyous occasion either way it made it difficult to watch or relate. Lastly, no gameplay; usually games allow the players to take complete control of all the movements

which includes fighting and jumping, as this game had a lot of action, but the players were

forced to sit back and watch these as cut scenes - decision making telltale. although, this

had worked with its predecessors’ game Heavy rain and Fahrenheit.

The most interesting parts of Detroit is the branched story telling which the players control.

Essentially when the player interacts with a character or is faced with a situation within the

game they are asked to pick what should happen next from a few choices. These choices

move the game forward.

Each of the game-playthroughs took more than nine hours with juggling between the three

android protagonists; Kara the Housemaid, Connor the Prototype Detective and Markus the

carer model. The trio took their exhibited brilliant performance especially when

encountering a Tug-of-war within themselves to choose the emotional – human aspect or to

follow what they were designed to do. These decisions are left only for the players to figure

out what outcome they deem fit. The plotline was not deviated, unlike the issues

encountered in Beyond: two souls, Detroit tackles the issue and executes an interesting way

to connect the three protagonist together with rearranging various segments to a

comprehensible story.

The major factor that played in tying all this together was the CGI. The team really pushed

the graphics of this game to a whole new level. When the game goes into QTI’s (Quick-time

Events), which is to say when the game moves into cut scenes that are nudged along by

player interactions as pressing appropriate buttons, the game feels like a movie.

The brilliance of the actor’s facial expressions and acting comes through with the brilliant

motion capture and the team’s dedication to push the game forward. Quantic dream took

advantage of the PS4 hardware and made sure the game runs smoothly at 60FPS while still

giving you the best gameplay experience.

I love finding Easter eggs in games; playing Detroit we came across a few magazines which

headline the latest fiction events– for instance, the accident avoidance AI, a piece of

technology in self-driving cars which picks who to crash into, if complete avoidance was not

a choice, based on the victim’s contribution to society. This seems scary, but very close to

what we have today where we are close to AI and self-driving cars being able to make it’s

own decisions.

Who wouldn’t love an option to go back in time and change that one event in our lives. Well

Detroit lets you do that with alternate endings, the replay time of this game exceeds easily

twenty-five hours, as there are so many endings to each outcome with different possible

death of characters or revival of others.

However, past all the bells and whistles, there are flaws. No gameplay sequences, Detroit

struggles to support its various fight scenes limited to button-mashing. Personally, I like a

little button-mash every now and then, but it should never be a replacement to a challenge

filled adventure game where you control the player. This isn’t a negative look at the game,

more a suggestion of personal liking.

Furthermore, segments do-over, certain sequences we had felt that it could have been done

better, however, there was no option to re-do them, therefore, we had to live the outcome

throughout the end of the game.

In my opinion, we are glad to include this game as our top three interactive drama alongside

Heavy rain and Until Dawn, although, the prior two had some chills, so did Detroit especially

its great work in fiction story telltale in which it shows what the world could be in the

upcoming future with our human over-reliance on technology. For those who are

considering purchasing this game, it has a great replay value with all the different

alternative ends.