i'm counting watching a lets play as having played this, both because the nature of the gameplay leads me to believe having the controller in my hands would not be a meaningfully different experience, and also because i will be dead and buried before i give a single red cent to david cage

this game is generally complete dogshit with the occasional moment of mediocrity. when it is not beating you over the head with its cartoonishly insensitive racism metaphor, the moment to moment dialogue and impressive graphics can often be competent enough to trick you into thinking something compelling is happening on screen. it is important to remember that this is a lie, which is thankfully easy to do by simply thinking about any aspect of the narrative for more than 2 seconds. connor's storyline is the best of the three in the sense that underneath the layers of bullshit is a very nearly average story about a robot detective; underneath kara and markus's bullshit is just more bullshit. do not get me STARTED on how stupid that goddamn alice plot twist is i'll never stop.

detroit: become human's vision of the future commits the crime of not only being completely nonsensical, but also boring. it is uninterested in exploring artificial intelligence from either a technical or philosophical angle; it simply expects you to accept that androids, once 'deviant', function literally exactly the same as humans (other than having some cool sci-fi wizard powers). society is bizarrely unchanged by their creation; one would expect their seemingly ubiquitous presence to have a huge cultural impact that just....isn't there. there's more self driving cars and a couple of things are holograms now, i guess.

this could perhaps be forgivable if the game used this extremely lame backdrop to say literally anything interesting. david cage's beautiful groundbreaking video game experience, of course, does not do this. it seems to be under the impression that regurgitating imagery from chattel slavery, the american civil rights movement, and the holocaust is all you need to do to tell a story about the nature of oppression or the human condition. the most charitable reading of this is that the folks at quantic dream have a child's understanding of the world, and perhaps should be doing something else with their time rather than creating very expensive, deeply stupid video games.

tldr; the hypnotically caucasian whole foods market of video games.

i feel better about ragging on this one because the game is fully finished. but all the same problems i have with errant kingdom still stand. it's just on top of that, it does not do anything interesting with its premise. i get that it's a dating sim, that's where the focus is, the supernatural politics and worldbuilding is kind of background, but it REALLY half asses it. do wish someone was there to witness when i heard the vampire speak for the first time and screamed FENRIS DRAGONAGE???? at my laptop