My Gaming Diary: September 2018

Game of the Month: Detroit: Become Human

Detroit: Become Human is the latest interactive fiction game from creator David Cage and his studio, Quantic Dream. It’s their fifth game but only the second one I’ve played, after spending some time earlier this year on their most famous game pre-Detroit, 2010’s Heavy Rain. There was a game in between called Beyond: Two Souls, released in 2013, which I bought but haven’t got around to playing yet, but which was not as well-received or well-remembered as the other two.

Detroit: Become Human is a sci-fi story set in 2038, when incredibly lifelike androids have become common industrial and domestic helpers; but this has greatly widened the gap between rich and poor, with working-class people struggling to find jobs that can’t be done more efficiently and cheaply by androids. What follows is a story of the singularity - Artificial Intelligences gaining consciousness equivalent to that of humans - that is, perhaps uniquely, told exclusively from the perspective of three androids undergoing this transformation: Kara, a housekeeper charged with the care of a young girl; Markus, a carer for an ageing well-known painter; and Connor, a police officer responsible for hunting down ‘deviant’ androids.

Having so recently played Heavy Rain, I definitely found Detroit to be a more polished experience by comparison, and not simply because graphics have come on such a long way in the past eight years. A common criticism levelled against Cage’s characters is that they can be clunky in their dialogue and decisions; but that’s actually a strength in a game about AIs unexpectedly gaining sentience. The androids who make up the majority of the main characters are suddenly thrown into a situation where they have an adult’s strength and intelligence, but the emotional stability of a newborn - making the oddities in their behaviour seem perfectly sensible in context. The acting is also much better: there really are no weak performances in Detroit, but stand-outs for me were Bryan Dechart (heavily tipped for next year’s Best Performer awards for his role as Connor), Jesse Williams (Markus), Clancy Brown (Hank), and Gabrielle Hersh (Chloe).

Beware significant story spoilers from this point on in the review.

The main characters for the most part stayed in their own lanes, with the separate stories only really coming together for the end-game. Predictably, Connor was my favourite - not only was he a clear re-imagining of my favourite Heavy Rain character, FBI Agent Norman “Nah-mun” Jayden, but his story contained the most internal conflict. An android whose purpose is to detain other androids if they become sentient, Connor is the only character to struggle with his torn allegiances, and in fact is the only character who you can choose to have reject his humanity and remain truly robotic to the end. Admittedly this led to a bit of an issue for me (unlike Kara and Markus, Connor never has a breakthrough “moment”, even if you choose to have him embrace his deviancy), but it lent his story a depth of choice that was absent from the other two. Markus’s story was perhaps the most linear, but between Jesse Williams’ compelling performance, and him getting to showcase some of the coolest mechanics in the game, I found it very enjoyable nonetheless.

Kara’s story was the weakest for me, though admittedly this might be biased by the fact that it was a typical arc about a female character wanting to be a mother, which is something that always falls flat for me. There was plenty to like about Kara and her surrogate daughter, Alice, as characters; and she still got to do some cool stuff that, while it all revolved around her maternal urges, showed her to be as brave and independent as Connor and Markus. In short, it was a pretty well-handled example of a set of tropes that don’t do much for me; even though I was disappointed that, as is so often the case in a David Cage game, nearly every female character was established as either a mother, a helpless child, or a sex worker as her defining characteristic.

Because this is an interactive drama, one of the big questions hanging over a playthrough of Detroit is the ending(s) you get, and whether you managed to keep everyone alive. I’ve historically been unusually fortunate in this regard. Well, friends: this did not happen for me in Detroit: Become Human. At the end of my game only three of the determinant characters were alive - Markus, North, and Alice - which left Connor, Kara, Hank, Luther, Josh, Simon, and a couple of minor characters very dead. The defining factor in this bloodbath seems to be how radicalised I became by the end. Up until the final chapters I’d consciously been playing my characters (especially Markus) as determined to assert their equal rights to humanity firmly but peacefully. After the assault on Jericho, though, and the development of deviant androids being rounded up into camps and killed, I’d had enough. (I think some real world frustrations may have bled through here.) While what I really wanted was a third option - going to liberate the camp armed but with violence only as a last resort - I had to choose between another peaceful protest or a full-on assault. Neither choice filled me with confidence, but I was absolutely against another slow-walk-into-the-waiting-guns scene like the ones that come earlier in the game, so I turned the liberation of the camps into a war for lack of a better option. The result was really quite cathartic, but ended with Markus and North making a rather sorry spectacle as they addressed the crowds alone at the end, everyone else having been lost along the way.

Kara, meanwhile, ended up dying at the Canadian border control distracting the guards so that Alice could get through, in a moment that I’d be more annoyed about if I hadn’t felt it was a thematically appropriate way for her to go. I do, however, remain convinced that I accidentally funnelled myself onto a bad track early in that scene by interacting with the environmental cues in the wrong order, which is a peeve of mine in this sort of game - if I’m about to trigger a new scene and lock myself out of this one then give me some sort of warning, please!

Connor’s final scene gave me one of my biggest moments of instant regret ever in a video game. It wasn’t so much that Connor died - again, heroically waking up an army of deviants to turn the tide of battle is a pretty badass way to go - but the fact that I sacrificed Hank to do it really sucked. Connor and Hank seemed to be having a pragmatic moment of “do what you have to do” camaraderie, but when after all that Hank died blaming Connor for failing him anyway, I felt shitty (even though this kind of hot-and-cold behaviour is just so typical of that relationship).

With both Connor and Markus, I get the sneaking suspicion that taking the less logical track in terms of protecting the androids (e.g. going to the camp unarmed, saving Hank instead of waking the army) would have worked out better through some Deus Ex Machina business in the long run, despite the rest of the game leaving me decidedly shy of relying on outside forces to save the day. Obviously this is all just fuel for a really fun second play-through; but all the same, this kind of bait-and-switch outcome on decisions in gaming is widely derided for a reason.

Detroit: Become Human is the best David Cage game, in that it’s the most David Cage game but in a (mostly) good way. There is an irresistibly cute cop; the female characters are kind of flat (but bearably so in this case); the game-play is fun if you like QTEs and huge decision trees (I do); and the story is ambitious and cool while you’re in it, but ends in a way that’s not quite as satisfying as the build-up. It’s good to see the studio that blazed the trail for interactive fiction come back onto the scene after struggling for so long to follow up on Heavy Rain: it’s a more than worthy successor to its genre-defining sibling, is a visual treat, is well-acted and thought-provoking. No game that gives the player this much choice will ever have a story that hangs together perfectly, but Detroit goes out of its way to push replayability, which may be the key to solving that particular issue. In the end, if like me you like interactive fiction, stories about AIs gaining sentience, and a bunch of very lovable good guys, this game will hit all your requirements. And then it will leave you in a moral crisis, like the one I’ve been having since I, a lifelong pacifist with a strong belief in personal loyalty, became a militant revolutionary who sacrificed so many friends for the greater good. The day they replace me with a better AI can’t come soon enough.

What I did on my holidays

My birthday was in September, and so my family and I spent a few days at Center Parcs Sherwood Forest to celebrate. What we didn’t know when we booked was that our village of choice had introduced a new attraction just three weeks before we arrived: a VR booth! Even though I was attempting to take a mini-break from gaming for the week (though I did sneak in a bit of Relic Run and joined my Dad for a HO game called Deadtime Stories), I of course could not resist the urge to try VR for the first time.

The booth was designed by a company called A.I. Solve and ran two games, called Alien Invasion and Mayan Adventure. Plot-wise, they do exactly what they say on the tin; my personal favourite was Alien Invasion, since you get a greater variety of puzzles to solve and the possibility of a good ending. Mayan Adventure felt more like a demo, perhaps because of the booth’s enforced five-minute run time, and as far as I could tell was unwinnable story-wise (though still really fun). I’m still dubious of VR as a household gaming peripheral: the booth I was playing in was the size of a small bedroom, whereas the gaming space in my living room has maybe one square metre of floor space in front of it. But as a cutting-edge take on an arcade machine, I was sold.

Towards the end of the month I took another small break: I went to EGX for the first time! Unfortunately, due to a combination of me feeling horrendously ill that weekend and the show’s organisation being a little less, well, organised than might be desired, I missed out on quite a bit of what I wanted to do. But there was a lot of great stuff there: highlights include getting my first portfolio review (favourable!), playing the Man of Medan demo a couple of times (I can’t wait!), and seeing all three OutsideXbox/Outside Xtra live events (I love those guys!).

The Sims Corner

I want so badly to get back into The Sims. With that in mind, I made a new save in The Sims 4 base game (all I own currently from the latest gen) and re-introduced myself to the only characters who I know I’ll always want to play as: the Goth family. My plan is to build on the game just a little every month, hopefully acquiring a few of the Expansions and Game Packs that I’ve missed out on, adding new characters along the way to populate and complicate my world, and generally just getting that nice mix of nostalgia and new stuff. The Sims is still my go-to franchise when I’m feeling poorly or stressed, and even though my gaming horizons have expanded significantly over the past couple of years, I find myself wanting to stay connected to my gamer roots.

Gifts, Games, and Spider-Man: LEGO Marvel Superheroes

The new Spider-Man game on PS4 came out this month, and it looks freaking amazing. But my birthday reminded me that I have quite a few games I’ve been given as gifts over the past couple of years that I really want to get back to. With both these things in mind, it’s not really surprising that I spent quite a few hours in September playing LEGO Marvel Superheroes - both the 2013 original and the recent sequel. (I should note that I do have a copy of LEGO Marvel Avengers too but have kind of skipped finishing it for now because I’m so behind in the franchise.)

The third LEGO Marvel installment was released late last year, and was an anniversary gift from my partner back in February. While I’ve played the original game twice in story mode, and am now just cleaning up side-missions and trophy hunting, to my shame I hadn’t gotten further than installing the new one until now. It contains very little that’s entirely new, but has made a few much appreciated improvements - foremost to me, a flying mechanic that finally feels intuitive. You start off playing as the Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a terrifically strong start - even if the events of Infinity War have cast a tragic sheen over the comic relief you’d usually expect from both the Guardians and a LEGO game. Gamora and Rocket in particular are very satisfying to play as, and a lot of work has clearly gone in to making every character feel unique - especially impressive considering the roster, which includes a few dozen main characters and variants, and a small army of freeplay unlockables.

Like The Sims, the LEGO games are pure comfort food for my soul, so I expect to be cuddling up with this title a lot more over the coming winter months.

I Love Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. Did I Just Kill Telltale?)

Speaking of new games out in September, in the month that everyone got talking about Life is Strange 2, I finally finished Life is Strange! (Bae over Bay - love you Chloe!) I also finally got myself a deluxe copy of Before the Storm, and so between that and wanting to revisit The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit one more time, I can’t imagine I’ll be getting around to LiS2 until the full season is completed. I don’t mind this at all, since I only got into the franchise earlier this year and I’m happily catching up at my own pace; however, I can envision that avoiding spoilers is going to become more of a problem the longer I leave it.

September also graced us with the penultimate episode of The Council, the only episodic game to date that I’ve bought while it was still in production. I barely scratched the surface of Episode 4 by the end of September, but suffice to say even though it’s a little-known title with poor chances of getting a second season, I’m starting to suspect it might be my game of the year.

You know what else I did this month? I finally finished The Wolf Among Us! It took me nearly two years (for various reasons, most of them out of my control), but on September 19th I finished the final episode and tweeted about how happy I was that I waited, since Season 2 will finally be coming out in 2019. Then, on September 21st, Telltale - the giant of the interactive fiction gaming studios - folded. A lot of great people lost their jobs under terribly unfair conditions, TWAU2 was cancelled, and I was once again left to wonder whether I killed something just by loving it from afar.