Detroit: Become Human

An astonishing and important achievement. Thrilling, captivating, and at times devastating. Despite a few poor design choices this a must-play title for fans of narrative-driven and choices-matter games.

The theme is familiar: androids developing consciousness and bio-humans struggling with the consequences. We've seen it in Blade Runner and countless other sci-fi spins. Detroit doesn't add anything particularly new to the tropes—it's even framed as a detective story—but its execution makes it especially visceral and satisfying. Well, with some caveats. There are plot holes and some annoyingly heavy handed symbolism. But the writing and acting are so good as to make these mistakes forgivable.

The graphics are, simply put, next-level. Aiming for photorealism makes sense in this thematic context, and boy did the team pull it off. On current hardware you need very staged scenes to make these techniques perform well, but that limitation fits well with the employed storytelling devices. The whole package feels cohesive, and is surely a preview of how gaming will continue to be used as a narrative medium.

Whereas the narrative itself isn't very deep or revelatory, the gameplay brings it into sharp focus. By forcing you to make choices, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, you are by necessity involved in the progress of the story and the characters. This kind of engagement is impossible in books and cinema. Here it adds urgency and raises the stakes—sometimes they are very high, as in "keep living" vs. "give up"—making the total experience something more than just a combination of story and mechanics.

As for the mechanics, they are in service of a make-your-own-choices visual novel, with many (forgiving) quick-time events to keep things exciting. The structure is actually so linear that it can be represented by a simple graph of events (more on that later). This is not a game about wandering around and exploring the world, but rather about small, intimate moments that underscore the immediacy of the decisions you will have to make. Often, though, it feels unnecessarily cramped. You'll spend quite a lot of game time walking around small areas and just scanning and rescanning for marked clues. It's a poor substitute for authentic detective work and feels more like a chore. And quite a few scenes offer no real choice at all. So, keep your expectations in check: you'll be observing as much as you'll be participating.

Considering this odd gameplay loop, it's unsurprising that the devs decided to create a custom game engine: Detroit just does so much so differently from a typical adventure game. The price of innovation, though, is technical problems. Many people report being unable to run it for long without it crashing, sometimes crashing very hard indeed. I myself had to wait months until I got a new CPU, new GPU, and then tried again, and even then it worked well only after a bit of tweaking. So, try before you buy, and if it doesn't work for you then make sure to get a refund.

So, what's bad about Detroit? I mentioned that every scene is essentially a decision graph. Well, the incredibly awful design decision is to show you this graph after every scene you play. It also shows you what you've missed, though some of it may be blurred out if it was locked away from you due to previous decisions. And it even shows you global stats for these decisions that it collects from players, like yourself, over the Internet.

These analytics are interesting, perhaps, but they utterly break immersion and are just an incredibly "gamey" intervention in a game that otherwise successfully keeps you engaged with its story. Instead of making you live with the consequences of your decisions, this graph display seems intent to make you regret missing out, encouraging you to replay the scene until you get the "best" result. It would have been better if they hid it in the menus somewhere, as a tool to help completionists, or maybe they could have shown it to you only after you've finished the whole game. Instead it's forced on you again and again after every scene. I hate this feature very much. There are also "points" awarded for your decisions, which you can use to purchase extra content in the main menu. This system is just so monumentally awful that I prefer to pretend it doesn't exist.

Another issue is that your choices are sometimes presented quite poorly. What you see might be a decision between four words, but actually the character might use those words in ways that you do not intend. That doesn't make you feel like you're really in control. Also, some of the choices are entirely arbitrary. For example, choosing to go left or right will trigger completely different scenarios. Sure, that's how life works, but then what is the point of even giving you a choice? I guess this is a way to allow for replayability, but I'm also sure that many people—like me—will not replay the game after finishing it. So we end up just randomly missing out on stuff. I admit, a few times I quit a scene in the middle and replayed it because I didn't like how things turned out. I consider this an abject design failure.

And yet, all things considered, this game really hit me where it counts. It's an experiment in storytelling. Sometimes the experiment fails, but more often than not it succeeds. Detroit may get under your skin. It got under mine.