Become Human

After a long time we finally got a new game by Quantic Dream and directed by David Cage who also worked on Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. As with the other games it seems that you either love the game or you utterly hate it.

Since I already loved Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls I was pleasantly surprised to hear that there was a new game from David Cage (Who a lot of people apparently also dislike because of his writing). One of the very few negative things that I can say ahead of time is the fact that all of the mentioned games are Playstation exclusives with Detroit: Become Human being restricted to the PS4. Since I do not own this console and do not plan on getting it I had to experience this new game the same way I had experience all previous ones: By watching a playthrough.

So even though I did not get to play the game myself I still really enjoyed it. I love the setting the game plays in and the background it bases on.

In Detroit: Become Human, you get to experience Detroit in 2038 in which a company called CyberLife sells Androids that look exactly like real humans. They're sold as servants and used as workers for dangerous and tedious jobs. They were initially created by Elijah Kamski who created the first Android to pass the Turing Test.

The idea of the game was just part of a tech demo for the Playstation 3:

The demo received a lot of feedback which resulted in David Cage wanting to turn it into a full game. And after a lot of time and 30 Million Dollars in budget here we are. Since I do not want to spoil anything I'll just explain the basic story. You play as three different characters:

Kara, Markus and Connor. They're all different types of Androids with different stories. Kara takes care of Alice, whose father has lost his job and lets out his anger on his daughter. Markus on the other hand serves an old artist who is in a wheelchair and therefore needs Markus to help him with getting through the day. And lastly there's Connor, whose job it is to help investigation against Androids who somehow broke out of their program and started to misbehave.

Throughout the story more and more Androids start to become aware of their situations and stop being blind servants, one could say they become human. The game puts you in multitude of difficult situations and puts you under pressure to make hard decisions. A lot of the time people criticise that your choices don't matter and that this is a 60$ movie, but from what I've seen I can assure you that your choices do in fact matter and you better make the right one or you'll regret it (It's very hard to get everything right on your first run).

After every chapter you get a visualization of your choices and the paths you didn't take or couldn't since you didn't discover them. You'll also see how the rest of the players decided. This way you instantly see which decisions had which impact and you'll also get a motivation to play the game again to see all the other outcomes and I'll tell you that each chapter has a lot of them. By playing different paths you also earn points which you can spend on bonus material such as the soundtrack, wallpapers, concept art and the character gallery.

So is it a good game? Well as with the other games by David Cage people seem very split. I for one love these types of games so I'd obviously recommend it, but only if you have a Playstation 4 and you should take a peek at a playthrough or the trailer before you get it since 60$ isn't exactly cheap.
No matter how you decide I personally really enjoyed the games take on a future with self aware machines and the ethical problems they bring with them. I can't wait to see what other projects David Cage has planned for the future, even though they probably won't make me buy a Playstation.