Detroit: Become Human is an interactive drama video game released in 2018 (rated M for mature [17+] due to intense violence, blood, partial nudity, strong language, and drug use) in which the player switches among the perspectives of three android protagonists: Kara, Connor, and Markus. The choices we, as players, make during the game, as these three create a branching narrative that explores numerous outcomes and themes of consciousness, freedom, and prejudice through moral dilemmas and quick-time events. The game was made and released by the same development team as Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream, with writer/director David Cage.
The game is a cinematic, choice-driven experience where the player’s choices drastically affect the story, leading to multiple possible endings. Throughout the beginning of the game, we get to meet our three protagonists. Connor, whom we meet first, is a police android tasked with hunting down deviant androids, which are androids that break their designated code. Second, we meet Kara, a domestic android who escapes her life as a home caretaker to protect the girl she looks after, Alice. Last, there’s Markus, an android who takes care of an elder by the name of Carl, before going deviant and becoming a leader in the android liberation movement.
Gameplay involves exploring the environments around the three, interacting with objects to find evidence or clues, especially in Connor’s gameplay, making dialogue choices, and performing quick-time events during action sequences, which you can switch the difficulty and frequency of by switching the difficulty to casual. Throughout the story, many themes are covered over the span of the story, each theme getting more intense as more progress is made. Some of the themes provided in the game are civil rights, prejudice, and the definition of humanity through the android’s struggle to find freedom.
As someone who has beaten the game multiple times and gotten multiple endings, I would personally say that the game keeps players interested. There were multiple times in the story where I felt deeply connected to some of the characters, all of them being relatable to the player in some sense. Markus fights for his rights, for his freedom. Kara fights for the person she cares about the most, the person she would do anything for. Connor, who fights to define himself, whether he is a deviant or not, still chooses to do things that put him on the line to find out his truth. Then, there are the “side” characters, who are not major characters, but they have their importance in some way to either the characters or the story. One of the “side” characters, Hank, is a drunken lieutenant who lost his son and skips most of his cases he is put to look into because of the fact that they mostly involve deviants. To help him warm up to androids, the head of police assigns Connor to be his partner in investigations, with whom he becomes closer as the game progresses.
Markus’s side characters are Simon, North, and Josh. Three other deviant androids accompany him on his journey to freedom for their kind. Even these three can make the player feel as though they have someone to relate to. Simon is the voice of reason, someone who often follows Markus but gives his opinion occasionally, but follows whatever Markus will do, while North is the voice of violence, an android who often chooses violence as the way out of things, and Josh, who often finds peace in violence. Last, there are Kara’s characters, Alice and Luther. Alice is a sweet, innocent girl who, by the near end of the game, gets revealed to be an android just like Kara, but Kara cares nonetheless and cares for her, just as a mother would. While Luther, on the other hand, is a former antagonist who worked for someone who would experiment and take apart androids to make them monsters. He eventually switches his life around and joins Kara and Alice on their journey to flee the country due to the law against deviants.
Detroit: Become Human is perfect for the type of people who feel they need a good emotional story to fill their hearts. In the end, if the player chooses the right path for all three of the androids, they all get their separate happy endings. Kara, Luther, and Alice all flee to Canada, starting a new life over to save themselves from the prejudice against deviants. Connor, in the end, if the deviant path is chosen for him, allowing him to become true to who he is, it shows him and Hank reuniting after the final fight against deviant prejudice(combined end story of all three androids), seeing Hank in a final new and kind light as he and Connor embrace each other, happy to see the other survived the fight against the deviant prejudice, and Markus, whose happy ending is that he and his friends from Jericho(Deviant Sanctuary) finally get to have their freedom, living amongst humans without any worry.
If anyone is interested in playing the game, it is available only on PlayStation 4 and 5(though some PS4 features will be missing from the PS5 version) and Windows.
