Post Script

How Detroit’s most notorious scene highlights the best and worst of Cage’s storytelling

Having done the rounds at preview events, Detroit’s Stormy Night sequence has already attracted plenty of critical attention. Its depiction of domestic violence is hardly the first we’ve seen in a videogame, but the disquieting notion that there could be a ‘right’ way to escape abuse understandably came under close scrutiny. Though the judgement perhaps seemed a little premature given that we didn’t have the context of the full story, the finished game hardly ameliorates the issue: indeed, the unspoken suggestion that each scenario is essentially a puzzle of sorts with several potential ‘solutions’ is made more explicit by those narrative flowcharts.

In fact, the entire sequence summarises the strengths and weaknesses of Quantic Dream’s most ambitious game to date, somehow contriving to be a dramatic peak and one of its most troubling scenes all at once. It is David Cage in excelsis, magnifying not only his sometimes laudable creative ambition but also his most worrying peccadilloes.

You could intercut Kara’s early scenes with shots from Ethan Mars’ home in Heavy Rain, and beyond the superior textures and the presence of an android au pair it would be hard to notice the joins. Her arrival back at the home of Todd and his daughter Alice is seen in a previous chapter, where ominous clouds serve as a melodramatic harbinger of bad times. Already we’re aware that Todd broke his previous Kara unit in a fit of rage, while Alice’s withdrawn personality is revealed as she sits silently in the background as Kara follows Todd’s orders to tidy up the place. Rudimentary inputs give us some involvement in tidying up, while we remotely interface with a Roomba-like vacuum cleaner. It’s simple stuff, but it works, establishing an uneasy but relatively benign atmosphere – at least until Kara finds a baggie of drugs. Todd appears almost instantly, gripping her around the throat and threatening her, before we’re given the relief of returning to Markus and Connor’s stories ahead of the second, pivotal scene where a storm arrives in every sense.

One meltdown later, Todd is prowling around, threatening to come upstairs and teach his daughter a lesson. As Kara dutifully awaiting her next orders, Todd warns her not to move – “or I’ll bust you worse than last time.” At which point, a single twitch of the analogue stick is enough for the android to commit to deviancy. There’s a close-up of Kara’s face, her eyes wide in shock at the revelation that she may not have to obey – though first she must break through the barrier of her programming. It’s represented as a tangible obstruction, a wireframe wall that requires some physical exertion on the player’s part to smash through. Then she stares at her hands, seemingly awestruck. It may echo an earlier scene involving Markus, but the sense of injustice – and the presence of an imminent threat – makes this moment a scalp-prickling delight, the desires of player and protagonist in total alignment.

Then comes the not-insignificant matter of achieving your objective: protect Alice. Consult the flowchart, and you’ll note that almost every other choice seems to splinter into two, then four, then eight. Several of these end up at similar points, but there are over 60 boxes on Stormy Night’s flowchart, and you’ll miss most of them on a single playthrough. If you reach Alice before Todd, you can lock her door and escape through the window as he breaks in. If you found a gun in the previous chapter, you can threaten him with it. You can attempt to reason with Todd (bad idea) or hide in another room before bolting for the front door or the garden. The game has already established the stakes, and so the entire sequence is charged with a tension you don’t often find in games where failure simply means restarting from the last checkpoint.

It is, in many respects, an effectively nasty piece of drama: dark, intense and truly nerve-wracking. And one optional branch prompts one of the game’s best exchanges. Brandishing a tall lamp, Kara stands in front of Alice, breathing heavily. “I won’t let you hurt her,” she says with a surge of newfound defiance. “You won’t let me?” sneers Todd, his tone at once mocking yet faintly incredulous. It’s one of few moments where Cage’s script says just enough, a rare exception in a game that prefers to (over) tell rather than show. Todd’s constant muttering to himself can be attributed to his drug use, but it regularly seems as though it’s exposition he’s been snorting. As if Todd’s reminder to Kara of prior abuse – a fact we learn in the first scene – wasn’t enough, Alice warns her to “run, or he’s going to break you like last time”. Then again, perhaps that’s preferable to the alternative: having connected with Alice in an earlier scene, we unlock her music box to find three sequential crayon drawings depicting Todd smashing Kara to pieces – one of the most unintentionally funny attempts at environmental storytelling we’ve ever seen.

More worrying is that Todd is the latest in an increasing line of Cage’s grubby, angry men who like to abuse young, attractive women and/or children – and even if you kill him, there’s an ill-advised survival-horror episode to come involving another. Villains and the violence they perpetrate – and how we as players experience that violence – is something with which the medium’s storytellers will have to wrestle in future. For now, Cage and Quantic Dream will surely have some uncomfortable questions to consider.

The entire sequence is charged with a tension you don’t often find in games