Detroit: Become Human is a speculative fiction adventure video game released in 2018 by Quantic Dream, in a world where androids have entered society, replacing low-wage labour and performing home labour. You play as three characters, Connor, an android designed to track down androids who have gone ‘deviant’, Kara, a house android having escaped her abusive owner to safeguard his human daughter, and Markus, an android revolutionary sparking a movement to free androids from slavery.
Major, major spoilers ahead! However, I went into the game having watched a few cut-down playthroughs and so I was aware of several major spoilers and possible endings, and I would actually recommend you partially spoil yourself for some of the gameso you have an idea of your goal and to cushion some of the blow of the stupider twists.
I played the game on a base slim PS4 with a Dualshock 4.
Some Things I Like
Straight up, I don’t think this is a good game but credit where credit is due.
I appreciate that the game shows you a flowchart of things that have happened and things that haven’t happened to make it easier to comb the game. I think it might exist partially to try and wow the player with how many options you have but still, helpful feature.
The game released in 2018 being set in 2038, so five years have passed since the game released and we’re fifteen years away from the date it’s set in. Besides the sapient/sentient robot people it’s a fairly reserved future and technology doesn’t look too unbelievable or fantastical to the point that it breaks immersion. I appreciate the decision to broadly have people living in regular houses still, like, it would be cool if everyone lived in super cool future houses but realistically poor and middle class people will be living in the same houses as they do today, especially when people appear to be dropping 10kUSD on ‘droids.
I appreciate the excruciating detail in each set piece. It adds so much and makes the game world feel more alive than games with more realistic graphics that have come out since. The game’s graphics also don’t verge into “this is prettier than real life” and are very visually pleasing. The game broadly ran at a solid frame rate with exception for a few sections, but none of the segments with frame rate drops impacted gameplay. I suspect those may not be present if you’re playing on a PS4 Pro or a PS5.
I can’t say David Cage doesn’t have a director’s voice with how the game is shot. I feel like a lot of ‘cinematic video game’ discussions are less about using cinematic language in video games and more using the word ‘cinematic’ to mean ‘important, legitimate’ because for some reason people feel weird about their hobby of playing video games and need to pretend it is a ‘real art form’ even though it already is. The game’s shots aren’t boring and it gets points for that.
There is something compelling about the setting that forces my brain to crunch on it, even if you have to chew around the bits like “why don’t we hear about right to repair laws” or “why do people buy androids specifically to abuse them”. I can’t say what exactly it is but there’s an interesting neon-lite Cyberpunk setting here you could play with if you spent some time untangling its Cage-isms.
Connor & Hank
Connor and Hank are The Reason to play this game.
Connor is a purse dog bloodhound of a ‘droid and Hank is a solid ‘grizzled cop this close to turning in his badge’ character. They’re the only two characters with actual meat on their bones.
“My hope some day is that there is, a crossover, somebody who’s actually trained dramatically and trained theatrically and maybe with story writing and story telling and staging and performance will actually be in charge of one of these games, right, and it won’t just be all driven from the tech side, even just the marketing side. It’s like … One of the things I was having a little trouble with David Cage he was saying ‘Okay, this is how we do this’ and I’m like ‘no no, David, that’s how you think we do this, but if you want these performances this is what you’ve gotta do … you’ve gotta give us some breathing room here’, and he says ‘well, we don’t have the time to do that’ and I say ‘but we’ve got to take the time to do that David if you want this to be special, if you just want it to be button pushing then, don’t hire me next time,” – Clancy Brown on The Voices in My Head podcast
“’I like dogs’. I told David Cage on set that was my favourite line in this whole three thousand five thousand, twenty thousand page script. And he was really not happy about it.” – Bryan Dechart talking about the game’s production
Bryan Dechart and Clancy Brown were fighting for their lives to make these characters workable doing improv against Cage’s will, and some of that improv making it into the game, such as Connor winking when telling Hank he is built to adapt to human unpredictability. People shipping their characters is The Reason the game has a fandom.
Connor is still the best playable character in the game and the most developed. If you send him down the path of deviancy and build a positive relationship with Hank, he’ll join Markus’s revolution or lead it himself if Markus is dead. This is the ideal pathway in my mind, otherwise Connor will remain coldly pursuing deviants, and then deactivated and replaced whether he fails or succeeds.
We actually know what Hank and Connor think about things. One of the fun scenes is Connor just waiting for Hank to show up to the police station and scanning his desk so both he and the player can learn more about him. From there Connor sits opposite Hank’s desk and makes the weirdest friendly work conversation with him like talking about how he likes dogs and that he likes metal because it is ‘full of energy’, even though he doesn’t really listen to music, all the meanwhile Hank looks slightly bewildered.
One of the better scenes in the game is just when Hank and Connor get to have a moment overlooking a bridge while Hank sits weird on a bench, talking about the photo of Hank’s son he had on the table and his suicidal tendencies. The scene takes a turn when Hank becomes drunk in a single sentence and then holds Connor at gunpoint for no reason, to which Connor can move forward into the gun to press it to his forehead to taunt him, because he’s certain Hank won’t actually shoot him. Regardless – we know very little about what Kara and Markus actually think or like, but we get build-up and pay-off for both Hank and Connor’s character in a few spots. Connor can mention Hank having a dog at the police station and learn his dog’s name is Sumo, then later meets him and is able to pet him. Connor learning about Hank’s son comes in clutch in the climax when he needs to prove that he’s the Connor next to another android of his model.
For all my praise there are still weird issues like finding Hank playing Russian roulette alone in his home, then two scenes later Hank will talk about how he drinks to kill himself a little bit every day, because he is “too afraid to pull the trigger”, even though we literally saw him with a gun on the floor next to his scotch and hearing him shout he wanted to see how long he’d last.
Kara and Markus become deviants the moment they want to disobey an order, but Connor saunters vaguely downwards towards deviancy while being able to repeatedly break orders from Hank and other superiors which aren’t counted as ‘going deviant’. By the time you’re in the police station being taken off the case Connor behaves fully human, referring to himself as a ‘plastic cop’ jokingly, and experiencing fear of death, but he doesn’t go deviant until Markus can talk to him even though he’s already been a deviant. What pushes Connor over the edge is choosing not to shoot Markus, but we’ve already seen him choose to not shoot other deviants when given the chance and his case isn’t to end the revolution, it’s to hunt deviants to prevent the revolution.
Markus & Jericho
Markus’s story is a very very long uninformed discussion about whether or not violence is morally justifiable when fighting for equal rights, legal recognition, and when the government is genociding you.
He is also the sole black playable character, introduced in a chapter titled Shades of Colour walking through a public square to pick up some paints for his owner, being accosted by anti-android protesters and a street preacher on the way. Taking the bus home, he has to stand at the back of the bus in a compartment for androids.
In his next scene, he’s caring for his elderly white master in a lavish house. The implication, intended or otherwise, is that his owner Carl is a slave owner. Despite this, his relationship with Carl is portrayed positively, the game going as far as Markus seeing Carl as a father, and Carl being on worse terms with his son than his android. Obviously there are complications here, in the United States enslaved people who worked in houses were often treated better than enslaved people forced to perform field work, but they were still legally property rather than being correctly recognised as people. Portraying this relationship unambiguously positively muddles the game’s metaphor and becomes very uncomfortable to watch.
Also, for some reason one of the in-game articles reporting Carl’s death that Connor can find says he utilised ‘neo-symbolism’ like the presence of symbolism is an art movement like Impressionism or Surrealism? I don’t know who wrote the articles or if Cage came up with the headlines but whoever wrote them doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
When Markus arrives in Jericho, we are introduced to Josh and North. Josh will repeatedly assert to Markus that the only way to win freedom and equal rights for androids is through dialogue with humans and peaceful protest. North believes trying to talk with humans is completely and utterly useless and that they are fully justified to kill whoever stands in their way of freedom. The game continues to enforce this false dichotomy throughout.
When you have Markus and North break into a CyberLife store, you get ten minutes afterwards to transform the plaza outside in protest with a bar telling you what percentage of your protest is violent, and which percentage is pacifist. The game will count tagging benches and statues as pacifist, but will count breaking windows to free trapped androids as violent. I don’t know where the game draws the line of ‘pacifist’ or ‘violent’, because there are no humans present who you can be violent towards – all of the ‘violence’ is causing property damage, but the ‘pacifist’ actions are also property damage. I don’t believe it’s making a distinction between private property and public property either, because there are options to smoke bomb a mailbox which I believe the game would give ‘violent’ points for.
As the endgame is ramping up, the game reveals in a newsreader cutscene that the US has declared a nationwide curfew and is building extermination camps across the country for all androids to be delivered to where they will be interred and destroyed, with Markus’s gang estimating that the few hundred androids gathered in their hiding place may be the only ones left alive in the country. At this point Josh will still plead with you to continue peaceful demonstrations even though at that point I think if you aren’t taking up guns to start breaking people out of those camps I think you’re doing the wrong thing. Pacifism is good and violence should only be a very, very last resort option, and the second extermination camps come into play you’ve crossed the last resort bar around five hours ago. Sure moral victories are good and cool but it isn’t a moral victory to meekly ask the government to stop exterminating you when the people you’ve sworn to fight for are as you speak being industrially genocided.
All of my complaints aside, I think the scene of Markus causing deviation in androids on-masse so they all march with him and chant for their rights is a very fun scene to watch, albeit it becomes a bit silly when Markus starts being able to remotely cause deviancy in other androids given Connor in a future scene who is basically already a deviant by that point will point a gun at him and Markus has to talk him into deviancy.
Wow, Misogyny
This game is fairly misogynistic in a way I don’t think you see from other games in the late 2010s (I feel like there’s at least been a discussion of “we should probably portray violence against sex workers less”) and I again don’t really want to just point fingers and go “game politically problematic, therefore bad” because there’s media with politics I disagree with and still enjoy. In this case the problem with the misogyny is less that it’s in the game and more that the game expects you to be operating on it?
In the sex club scene, the android sex workers are never questioned despite being witnesses to a crime and having a clear description of the suspect who would be their coworker, instead Connor has to probe their memories. For this scene you’re on a time limit as the club resets all android memories every two hours, and despite this being tampering with every single witness present, the game doesn’t seem to recognise them as valid witnesses, and in fact, you have to go around to random capsules to rent the androids where Connor will probe their memory to see if he can spot the blue-haired android instead of just asking them if they saw her, and which direction she went.
Additionally, the first time Hank and Connor engage in hand-to-hand combat rather than just chasing a deviant down is with two of the sex worker androids dressed in the club’s lingerie and stilettos. Allowing them to escape will reveal that they are in love, which sure is interesting given Cage has been quoted as saying in his workplace “we don’t make games for [f-slur against gay men]s” but for some reason is okay with conventionally attractive femme cis lesbians who we only ever see dressed in lingerie.
A scene shortly before the endgame while playing Connor, Connor will meet with the founder of CyberLife in his future mansion and indoor red swimming pool with three identical blonde lady androids, who keep him company in his asshole swimming pool and answer the door for him. Kamski praises androids as being better than humans, believes them to be living beings, but then forces one of his lady androids to kneel wordlessly and expressionlessly to see if Connor will shoot her at his request.
The named female characters are Chloe on the title screen, North, Amanda, Kara, and Alice. None of the named female characters are human, being androids or AI. Hank’s ex-wife is never named nor does she seem to play much relevance in the story even when Hank talks about the loss of his son, but Hank has a sticker on his desk suggesting he doesn’t like talking to her. Todd’s ex-wife and Alice’s mother is never named and the only details we get on her is that she left Todd due to his abuse and drinking for an accountant.
Kara & Alice
Kara is introduced doing housework for her abusive owner Todd, having to clean up garbage, cook meals, and care for his daughter Alice. Straight up, there is a plot twist in the endgame that Alice is an android. This ruins anything the plot could have so it’s good to know going in or you’ll detonate with confusion and rage when the game unveils it.
Kara’s main objective and desire is to be a motherly figure for Alice and to raise her as her own, raising questions that could be fun and interesting if the game didn’t decide to make Alice a robot child, meaning Alice will never age or mature past being six years old and making Kara’s experience of motherhood inevitably and forever incomplete, as a core facet of parenthood is helping your child as they grow.
In almost every single scene Kara is in she’s being victimised by someone or another. When arriving at a place she’s been told is a safe haven, the mansion’s owner Zlatko resets her and her new objective in the HUD becomes “Serve Zlatko”. When hiding in an abandoned house she has to step on eggshells around a possibly violent deviant android squatting there. The game will treat Kara as dead if Alice dies, except in the endgame, meaning Kara can be reset in Zlatko’s mansion and if you aren’t able to reverse it, the game will admonish you on the title screen for “letting Kara and Alice die”, even though Kara isn’t dead. Alice might be, but Kara isn’t! They are separate people.
If we pretend for a moment that Alice is not a robot child and instead, actually Todd and his ex-wife’s child, it seems to me perfectly reasonable that Kara could make it her mission to get to Alice’s mother’s place where Alice can be safe. Kara taking care of Alice happens because Todd is too lazy and she shouldn’t be obligated to be attached to this child that isn’t hers forever. If you desperately wanted Alice and Kara to have to stick together, it seems reasonable to me that their dynamic could be sisterly rather than mother and daughter. Kara’s memory wipe leaves her with very little knowledge of the world and also makes it more apparent that she too is also a victim of Todd’s abuse, making Kara a teenage/young adult escaping her abusive home with her younger sister.
But their relationship has to be specifically mother and daughter, and Kara has to find meaning and fulfilment in motherhood. If Connor is an android copbot who when becoming deviant joins the revolution to liberate androids from slavery, and Markus was a slave carer bot who when becoming deviant leads the revolution to liberate androids from slavery, Kara is a nanny bot who goes deviant and finds fulfilment in motherhood.
Man, That’s A Bad Metaphor
Yeah there’s a lot of discussion about how racial metaphors in fiction often fail because the race being victimized has done something ‘wrong’ in the past to justify/explain where the racism came from and this one feels exceptionally garbled.
I don’t really want to hash out every single reason as to why this metaphor is bad when you can just play the game and watch it become increasingly awkward, but tl;dr the androids are only sapient and sapient if they encounter a bug in their programming rather than being straight-up people, and always having been people, making it awkward to try and make it a 1:1 metaphor for slavery and segregation of African-American people.
The thing is there are a lot of things you could play with here in terms of “speculative future where androids are people”. The androids of Jericho struggle to get medical supplies like Thirium (android blue blood) and replacement parts as they can only use CyberLife parts, which makes me wonder if there’s something stopping people from creating unbranded replacement parts for cheap and selling them on Aliexpress for $2.99.
Are there android right to repair laws? Blue blood is serialised which suggests to me it could be like an Apple situation where individual parts have DRM built in and are serialized so you can’t swap parts in and out without the device refusing to take it. What happens with the androids when they become obsolete? Can they even become obsolete or is capitalism just convincing people that their androids are obsolete? There’s a lot you can play with here that isn’t a hamfisted poor taste racial metaphor that still functions as speculative fiction!
Gameplay
Walking around in this game feels like you’re trudging through mud in a cramped environment, even if the environment is wide open. Even in scenes where your character is running your character will get close to a piece of collision and come to a dead stop, then take a second to start running again after you’ve pushed the stick.
In scenes where your character is walking at a regular speed the overzealous collision is less of a problem but then you might have trouble finding an objective and wander around an environment for minutes on end at the speed of a glacier and it becomes quickly headache inducing because there isn’t a run button.
Every scene will have QTEs for your character to perform actions and so you aren’t just doing nothing while holding your controller. I can’t say if I like or dislike it because on one hand, I would be bored with the game’s very long and very frequent cutscenes where you don’t do anything, but the fact it makes you actually do things with the controller forces you to pay attention instead of looking at your phone. On the other hand, it can interrupts the pacing of the scene by making you constantly pause to do something with the controller.
That said, a lot of the QTEs in the action scenes are very very fun, weirdly. There aren’t that many of them until basically the end of the game though where you have to hope you didn’t miss something or mess up somewhere and have the game put in a bad ending state.
Hell Mechanics
This game wants you to play it several times and it will make sure you do it by slipping in lots and lots of trial and error segments with very little puzzle logic or no puzzle logic, several of which you can lose characters if you fail, then making you do it on a timer.
My closest comparison are 90s point and clicks where the game will lock you in an unwinnable state for random things you could never guess. I won’t spoil it but there is one optional silly cutscene you can easily miss from early in the game that will determine whether one character lives or dies in the endgame regardless of your other actions. It’s just a “ha ha, replay the game!” mechanic. These continue right up until the endgame where it will start throwing things at you at the last minute of the fucking game to give you a bad end.
Fortunately, the game does allow you to rewind to chapters from the main menu so if you fail one of the trial and error puzzles you can go back, but it isn’t exactly a quick save scum – you’re going to have to play the same twenty minute level again. On the Public Enemy chapter I replayed the chapter like five times to try and get the ‘best’ outcome because I didn’t want to reach the endgame and die because I missed something and then have to either start again or go back to the tower.
Should You Play This Game?
Probably not!
If I were to recommend the game to anyone it would be to someone who’s familiar with Cage-isms and can tolerate them, or could get really into a M/M ship from trash media, or if they’ve seen clips of Connor and think they could tolerate 2/3rds of the game being painful to enjoy a cute boy with bite who isn’t an anime character.
The game is $69.95NZD on the PlayStation Store so I’d recommend looking for a physical pre-owned copy if you’re desperate to play.