so, almost a week on, it’s time to come to a conclusion…
n. b. : i started doing this (thinking about a game for a while, then, after a week or so, try to remember what stuck with me) some years ago, and with passing time, i ended up liking this approach more and more, since short-lived impressions fade away quicker than in my youth, and more important points start to surface long after the dust settled… as is the case with detroit:bh.
heavy rain spoilers ahead, obviously…
when all’s said and done in the game, and you return to the menu, creepy menu lady takes center stage once again, and after some rambling, asks for your permission to leave, i. e. sth along the line of getting the player’s permission to go and find her own destiny, and if you accept that request, she thanks the player, and leaves the stage to the left (which is to right from her perspective, subtle message?! j/k j/k).
That, surprisingly, had a somewhat lasting effect on me, tbh. I found creepy menu lady, especially when she was breaking the fourth wall and talking about the characters in the game, somewhat uncanny valley creepy, and more so in the latter stages of the game, where she started to sing a song for a minute or so, and even asked the player to stop continuing the game, because some decisions should not be made, since the consequences may be unwanted… (probably the creepiest bit of the whole game). The absence of uncanny valley/creepy menu lady feels a bit weird for a moment, but i found myself feeling less… disturbed… by the main menu, which - if you consider that it just is a main menu - is a weird feeling to have in a game.
next point, at last - Detroit, the name of the city giving this game its name. i've been circling around this one, since i am talking w/ a distance of roundabout 6000+ ish km/3500ish miles about this one, have never been there and only know about it from what i've learned in school, read about it, what i saw in hollywood movies and what you see, hear and read here and there. So, basically, from a pov of ignorance is bliss-land.
Taking that into account… i think the whole game could have taken place somewhere else, and it wouldn’t have suffered even one bit, nor would it have been better if it was set somewhere else. The feeling i got was that someone seems to have thought that it may be clever to liken the situation of androids to what Detroit has experienced in the past - so to speak, as an epitome of the american war of independence, industrialization, mass production, struggle for a civil rights movement… and all in one, at one point in time. using a revolutionary leader called Marcus must have sounded oh-so-clever when they greenlit this game, but, tbh, aside from the superficial common dots you could see here, this game could be set in any futuresque city on earth, or even in space, and it would not change anything. i don’t want to take away from what the game tries to do here, to experience and influence™ your fate, or rather the fate of your people, is probably the most important part of the game, and a lot of people will start to read, think and gather Information about what happened in Detroit in the past, sth that can only be good if it’s achieved by a game.
However,… well… i guess there’s room for more, and i feel that this more could have been in this game. Maybe it has been cut, maybe it didn’t make it on the spreadsheet or mindmap due to different reasons… we’ll never know, anyway.
so tl;dr: could be Boston or Paris:BH and it’d still work as well/bad as it does.