My first David Cage game, watching a friend play some of Beyond: Two Souls notwithstanding. I’m not sure why this was the one I went for before Indigo Prophecy or Heavy Rain. Timing and convenience, probably? This was still when I had access to Family Video, and whenever I’d have a free weekend, I’d rent a video game or two I wasn’t expecting to buy so I could clear it off my to-do list. I discovered some games I really liked this way (Until Dawn, the quite-underrated Golden Axe: Beast Rider), and I was able to walk away from some complete stinkers without tainting my collection (Shaq Fu 2). I think, based on Cage’s reputation, I felt better renting than buying the game on a gamble.

Well, I didn’t finish the game in that weekend, and I did end up buying it to round out the last two or so hours. So joke’s on me, I guess.

I’ve heard a lot of takes on this game over the years, mostly critical. I think a decent amount of that comes from this being David Cage doing David Cage again, which, fair. But if you’re approaching it in a vacuum, it’s largely a decent experience, especially if you’re going for something casually TV show/adventure game-y. I’m at a point where “oooo your choices matter” is a cool selling point, but as a binary: if it’s a straight visual novel, that’s cool; if choices matter, that’s cool, too. All this extra fluff with cascading menus and little graphical displays to hammer in how much your choices matter is way more extra flair than I need. Look, I know narrative choice is an illusion, since these games either do or do not have the ability to react to what you do as a player. Dressing it up with probability percentages and characteristics going up or down is cute, but it does nothing for me. Though, being able to see a timeline of decisions is nice, and I imagine that’s extremely useful if you’re a player who doubles back a lot to explore alternate paths (I am not, generally).

The other main criticism leveled against the game is how on-the-nose the racial metaphors are, despite Cage’s insistence that the game isn’t about race. I am hardly qualified to comment on this sort of thing, but here goes: I’m willing to believe that Cage really didn’t mean the android’s struggle for acceptance in society to be racially-charged, even as he was using iconography and rhetoric from the American Civil Rights movement as inspiration for his android story. Loath as I am to make assumptions about a guy I hardly know - remember that Cage is French, and while he obviously has a lot of familiarity about American history and popular culture, he is going to have an outsider’s perspective on a lot of it as a matter of course. I think this is fairly natural for a creator making works outside their bailiwick. Some of my favorite works of fiction come from writers or creators challenging themselves and bringing an outside perspective to something, since it’s from there that you really start to get experimental or challenging narrative.

Having said that, “Detroit: Become Human” is not one of my favorite works of fiction, and the game’s use of racial iconography and rhetoric to prop up its story about robots is so blatant that it’s really funny.

Easiest way to analyze it is to run through our major players. The game’s split into following three player characters: Markus, Kara, and Connor. Markus is probably the main character, since his accidentally becoming a political figure means he has the most impact on the world and the rest of the cast. He’s also, at least in a peaceful playthrough, kind of boring. I think the dynamic is interesting, essentially letting Markus’s revolution read as being led by an android equivalent to [the popular perception of] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcom X. I also think some of the moments surrounding him are quite striking, like his horrific crawl through the junkyard with android limbs reaching out for him, the hijacked television conference where he scrubs his face into a factory-default white mask, or the “night of the soul”. But, I think Markus’s story is the only one out of the three where there isn’t some element of a mechanical challenge. There necessarily isn’t, since dude needs to be around to lead the revolution. So there’s very little intrigue besides what you put into the character. For me, I was committed to doing things peacefully, since that’s the type of person I am. But I think if Markus is supposed to invoke MLK in this route, he’s missing a lot of the good reverend’s humor and presence. It’s a nebulous thing that I don’t have the words to really articulate, unfortunately. Bottom line: Markus segments always felt like the game was gonna slow down for a bit.

Kara is a bit more interesting, since she presents an individual story. Markus and Connor are more involved with the politics, but Kara’s experience through all this feels like it’s representative of what all the other “civilian” androids are doing here. In her case, Kara’s a housekeeper who goes rogue when she sees her human abusing his daughter, Alice. Kara’s maternal instincts kick in, and she abducts Alice and flees, headed for the Canadian border (since Canadian laws surrounding androids were more free than American laws). I’d heard a ton about Detroit having shoehorned MLK and Civil Rights references, but nothing about an Underground Railroad analogue. So I was pretty floored at how on-the-nose all that was, down to them seeking asylum with sympathetic abolitionists people and hiding in cellars while slave-catchers government agents tried to bring Kara and Alice back home. I told a friend early on that I fully expected the story to end by ripping off the famous scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where Eliza escapes with her baby across the frozen Ohio River to freedom. I was being facetious. But again, the joke was on me…

Kara’s story is largely compelling because of the historical accounts it’s based on, with the added twist here being Alice. The kid’s a non-factor in all this who just kinda goes along with Kara taking her, so we’re never sure as a player how it’s all really impacting Alice. At least until we get towards the end, when we learn that Alice is in fact another android (a child model, to replace the abusive guy’s human child). I mostly think this twist devalues Kara’s story overall, since it’s no longer about an android’s relationship with humans and that moral ambiguity of Kara seeking asylum on behalf of a human. If it’s just robots looking for safety, there’s no question - book it to the Canadian border, and never look back at that abusive guy. I suspect the twist was made to justify that one bad ending chapter, where Kara and Alice end up recycled; probably no one wanted to see a small child die horribly in a processing plant. For the record, I didn’t get that, instead having Alice die pointlessly on the Toronto shore. Kind of a limp ending to the story, though that’s probably supposed to be the takeaway for that failure state, so meh.

Connor has the best story. I say this with complete bias, as the guy shares my name. Not only that, I’m specifically named after Connor MacLeod, and I’m convinced that having a character named Connor play off a character performed by Clancy Brown is some sort of convoluted Highlander reference. But I really do think that his story is the most interesting, being a buddy cop story featuring a bright-eyed rookie playing against a down-on-his-luck veteran detective at the end of his rope, and also about a cog in a machine coming to terms with his place in a society that devalues what he is. That hostage negotiation sequence is a great attention-grabbing opening, and playing someone in a position to oppose the android revolution leads to a great dynamic where Connor spends much of it chasing after Markus, particularly as your playthrough resolves itself and Connor’s allegiances are decided. And darn it, Connor’s just a sweet little guy.

My issues with Connor’s story are largely a matter of conveyance. In part, it’s the one segment of the game that should not be a gimme, since Connor’s storyline revolves around solving mysteries, and Hank’s well-being plus Connor’s fate should very much be on the line. At the same time, I bungled the ending twice, first by being a big dummy and getting Connor killed on the elevator (which I actually reset, redoing the better part of an hour’s worth of progress), then by being a dummy and letting Hank get killed. Still annoyed about that last one. I spent the whole game trying to save Hank and establish that Connor and Hank care for each other. Dude storms the android facility to try and save me, getting taken hostage by another Connor unit. Hank’s all “no Connor save yourself don’t worry about me”, I figure “he means attempt to de-escalate, I’ll pick an option that facilitates this”, and I somehow pick the option that makes Connor go “nah it’s okay you can kill that guy, he don’t mean nothing to me”. Boom, Hank dies in my arms, deciding that, nah, actually, he was right to hate robots in the first place after all. MISSION OVER.

Me being a dummy aside, I do think that there’s confusion around what “stats” are being adjusted when you’re making decisions with Connor. This is what I meant before about there being too much extra fluff to how choices are presented. The game tries to qualify player decisions by showing which personality traits change as a result. This is where Markus’s pacifism vs violence comes in, for example. In Connor’s case, one of his main personality modifiers is his deviancy, and the more he encounters situations that cause internal conflict with his programming, the more he becomes a Deviant. Only, the way this is represented in-game is through an increasingly glitched UI indicator. Everything else you can kinda tell if you the player want this, but it’s hard to tell if blue garblemess is good or red garblemess is preferable. Consequently, I spent a ton of time playing Connor’s storyline having a good time but anxious if what I was doing was actually contributing to an ending I liked. Turned out it was, me being a double dummy notwithstanding, but the game kinda sucked at communicating that.

I’m given to understand that your first David Cage game ends up being your favorite, just because you’re not wise to his tricks or narrative idiosyncrasies. Time will tell if that ends up being the case; I’m sure I’ll get to Heavy Rain or Beyond: Two Souls at some point or another. But I do think there’s something to this game, even if it’s not all the way there or even if it’s clumsily done. I’ll say that when they announced a manga spin-off focusing on a different set of characters, I was actually pretty excited. This world is interesting! I think there’s a lot that can be done with this setup, beyond what we see in-game. I don’t even think the game itself is that bad, just incredibly dorky in how it communicates some of its ideas. It’s certainly worth going through since it makes for such a fun conversation piece, whether you like the ideas it advances or have to grumble over, “the game really went there???” Great thing to talk about around the proverbial watercooler.

Also, the President of the United States in 2038 is apparently gonna be Blogspot Hillary Clinton. It is a weird future we look at, but I don’t doubt that we’re gonna be there some ol’ day.