Detroit: Become Human
David Cage’s android thriller just can’t shy away from controversy
PS4
To be abundantly clear, David Cage can make a game about whatever on Earth he wants. Yet bravery is no shield from critique, and daring no guarantor of quality. The fuss around the latest showing of Detroit:
Become Human was not born of its subject matter, a demo in which a drug-addled father beats his terrified young daughter – though whichever marketing bod deemed it at all appropriate for a livestream that went out shortly after the end of the school day may have a few regrets. Detroit’s is not a problem of tone. Rather, it is one of execution.
To put it bluntly, it was just bad. The father, Todd, sits on a sofa, huffing at a pipe, scratching madly at his arms, muttering darkly about his lot. Moments later, over dinner – just the thing after a whopping dose of amphetamine – he carries on with his miserablist schtick, complaining about the wife who left him because of his drug use. He leans towards Alice, his daughter. “Not the life you dreamed of, eh?” he slurs, his delivery wooden in the extreme, his accent impossible to place. It is at this point, shortly before he upends the dinner table and gives Alice a crushing backhander, that we realise this fellow looks familiar. Soon after, unbuckling his belt, he delivers the killing blow. “Alice,” he calls up the stairs, “Daddy’s very mad.” Suddenly, it hits us. Todd is a dead ringer for Tommy Wiseau, writer, director and star of The Room, by common consensus the worst film ever made. Draw your own conclusions from that.
So yes, look, it’s not very good – and, possibly worse, it fails to provide or explore the notional USP of David Cage’s work. What difficult decision does this pose to the player? Todd heads upstairs, telling Kara, the family android, not to move. As Kara, we’re given a choice: do we obey the order and stand still? Or do we disobey, head upstairs and stop him? We are not exactly torn. It would take one heck of a committed roleplayer to stand there and listen while a strung-out mess of a father goes to town on his five-year-old daughter. Upstairs waits Cage’s stock-in-trade sequence of a woman fighting off a dangerous man, all desperate stick flicks and awkward combinations of button presses, before Kara and Alice somehow escape – Todd might be screaming at you from an upstairs window, or lying on the floor with a bullet in his chest – and ride to safety on a bus that arrives at the perfect time. Fade to black, and roll controversy.
It’s hard to understand exactly what purpose it all serves. Yes, Cage is entitled to explore difficult themes – but only if those themes serve a higher purpose in the game’s story or design. This does neither, and it’s an odd fit for a game whose creator spent most of E3 insisting that the obvious racial connotations of his tale of an android underclass rising up were simply a coincidence. You cannot have it both ways.
Which is a shame, because another sit down with the sequence first shown on Sony’s E3 stage in 2016 – where Connor, an android negotiator, talks a hostage-taking deviant down from a literal ledge – is engaging stuff. While it’s tempting to roll the eyes at Sony trotting out an old demo again, it’s a smart fit for the game, an opportunity to see what happens when different choices are made. We do our research indoors, each discovery raising our percentage chance of completion. But once we step outside, where an android has gone rogue and has a gun pointed to a young girl’s head, we decide to play it differently to see just how wrongly things can go. We play it heartless, senseless and dumb. At E3, we’d raised our probability of success to 100 per cent, the girl saved, the deviant android pumped full of SWAT-team lead. Here, we push it down to 13 per cent; we save the girl, but only by killing Connor, sending him tumbling off the rooftop. In the context of the day, it’s fitting, a series of ill-advised decisions leading, inevitably, to self-sabotage. Perhaps Cage, and Sony’s marketing team, could do with heeding the game’s own advice.
Worst of all, it fails to provide or explore the notional USP of David Cage’s work