The question nags me: why did Cage choose to make a game off the Kara demo and not The Dark Sorcerer, which was the best stuff he ever wrote. C’mon Cage, where’s gaming’s answer to Birdman?
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right??
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Because you use Old Men when you need to show graphics, not when you want a marketable videogame protag
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i’ve been following this stream of the game and i’m having a good time seeing this guy’s reactions
any way many people already posted screenshots and commented but i guess it’s worth repeating: . . . what a mess. which sucks even more because from what i’ve seen the robot-cop parts seem to be actually kind of endearing camp with crazy high production values
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Unexpectedly got my first “1% of worldwide players” decision, whooot.
Have already encountered the first two instances of being trapped into finishing a predetermined path, on the first occasion i just followed through with it, the second… gave me an interesting result… to say the least.
At one point i was surprised that i haven’t been given a choice, but i suppose this has been predetermined by the outcome of the first “mission”, i.e. the demo, and the character reacted accordingly.
another month gone, another few days where i had the time to continue playing this game.
Well, one title that this game has deserved right from the get-go is
the creepiest main menu of 2018, if not 201x - even more so, since background lady (A200 iirc?) started looking distressed after today’s session - and i wouldn’t have noticed that if i werent’t going to the kitchen to grab sth to drink. Coming back, i wanted to switch off the PS4 and saw her pretending to be distressed, just to snap out of it to tell me one of the looping quotes from MLK. That moment alone was so awkward that it cranks up the uncanny valley feeling of this game to 50, jesus…
Well, at least so far it was good to see that this game gives you chances to fxxk up your playthrough properly, sth that was half the fun of heavy rain.
I feel that the game is drawing to a close now, lets see how long it’ll last from here on…
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jesus christ this game…
and, by far: what the hell, spoiler tag doesn’t want to work…
i have to admit that i didn’t expect the game to touch on as many points as it does, and tbh, i don’t think it does them all justice. Bht then it’s a Cage game, and a gamein the first place, so OK, can live with that.
still, i am a bit disconcerted by the choices offered in the game, i. e. sometimes i feel mislead by the very short description for what a button press does, and what it does make the character say or do. That aside, my natural tendency to avoid conflict if not absolutely necessary has netted me some… interesting results, to say the least.
Looking forward to where this goes in the end!
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I fixed it for you! For some reason the spoiler tag sometimes wants to be on its own lines, I think? Anyway, thanks for writing up your experiences.
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oh, OK, i’ll remember that for next time.
Well, for the first time, i continued to play this game the next day, and of course creepy menu lady would subtly change her commentary… tbh, this is starting to be some kind of meta game, to find out how she reacts to certain events in the game.
Well, i have a hunch now what made her so distressed, there has been a (pretty bland, tbh) choice you had to make between sparing the life of an Android or killing it/him/her, and i guess that might’ve been a reason.
I am still on the fence about how the game handles offering choices by using a single word that can be (and in my case has been already) misunderstood, and how the game interprets it… otoh, it is interesting to see small decisions (which, to be fair, aren’t that far reaching) have some effect some 10ish hours down the road… e. g. it was surprise to meet a character again that i almost forgot about, which influenced the story progression.
so:
a day ago, i finished the first run of this game. i wanted to think about the whole experience (since it isn’t that much gaming, after all…) for a while before judging it, so here goes nothing:
beware: endgame spoilers ahead.
i ended up on the Android revolution path, with the following parameters:
- hank’s dead,
- kara/alice survived the deathcamp,
- luther died,
- connor died once, was resurrected, changed sides and became sentient. Connor version 3 executed the plan after version 2 died.
- Marcus has a partnership with his love interest
- POTUS acknowledged the androids as an intelligent life form next to the human race
Considering my track record in heavy rain, this is quite a good ending!
so much for the specific bits… next up is the inevitable comparison with the other few sci-fi games i’ve played that mention or even share different takes of similar topics which are also addressed in Detroit:
Remember Me and Deus Ex:HR/MD.
RM focussed on the shared social network idea where memories aren’t a private thing any more, and shines some light on the battle of rebels vs. the giant big brother.
DX:HR/MR focussed on the idea that humans can improve themselves by using augmentation/body parts that perform better than common organs can.
in each of these games, a giant corporation has basically brought forth the revolution that changed society in a big way, and each game seems to be keen on making sure that the player does not, by accident, oversee the negative sides of and to the dominating conglomerate.
personally, i think that Deus Ex:HR managed it best to also outline the positive aspects that such technology might bring, but that impression may be influenced by the faux advertisements made by SQEX that paint a very positive picture of augmented limbs/organs.
RM interestingly offered a technique similar to detroit where you can play/rewind time in a fixed timebox, and influence the outcome if you manage to find important clues.
Gameplay wise though, RM has been part bemu, part Action RPG, and for now, i think it managed to offer the more enjoyable gameplay, albeit with a way more simple plotline…
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What’s a bemu?
ah, sorry… slang term i used for beat’em up…
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black/ethnic/minority/unicorn
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.
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To keep us from burning through our Netflix reruns too quickly, Julie and I picked up a couple more games the other day, and just as prophesied, a used copy of Detroit was among them. My only comment so far is that there’s one particular line-read at the end of the TV-station investigation that is a really… novel choice. I kinda wish I had more than one friend on PS4 who’s played this.
I finished as well.
We had a good laugh about Creepy Menu Lady’s overblown consternation in the latter parts. Julie described it as something like the look you get on your face when you’re on a plane, but you just remembered that you forgot to turn in your overdue rent, plus your iron’s still on, and the window’s open, so a breeze is likely to blow it over, where it might land on your unpaid bills, catching them on fire, and your apartment isn’t up to fire code, plus all your cats and your neighbor’s baby you forgot to feed are trapped in the self-locking cabinet under your sink, etc. In the end Marcus brought about a peaceful recognition of android rights thanks to the androids liberated from VersaLife, and Kara was able to get Alice to Canada, though Luther didn’t make it.
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