Hands-On – Detroit: Become Human

Detroit: Become Human is the brainchild of David Cage and French studio Quantic Dream, names you may recognize from other PlayStation-exclusive titles like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. The game very much follows in the footsteps of those older titles insofar as it’s less of a traditional game and more of an interactive story; you won’t be ducking behind cover and manipulating alien AI, but instead interfacing with the game world in much more subtle ways.

In this demo, android Connor must rescue a young girl from a hostage situation created by a “deviant” android that has more or less gone rogue. Connor enters a posh apartment where the hostage crisis is unfolding, and the player is tasked with collecting information about the crisis: why it happened, how it took place, and what to do in order to save the girl. You do this by guiding Connor around the apartment and zeroing in on every last remaining detail in the place; each overturned book and tablet on the floor could contain vital information, and it’s up to you to track everything down.

This forms the crux of Detroit‘s gameplay. Using Connor’s abilities as an android, you can digitally scan and manipulate your surroundings to piece together activity that occurred in the past. Scan the scene of a murder, and you can scrub through the last few seconds of the dead person’s life. Analyze a dead body, and you can get precise information on exactly how they were injured. This is critical to your mission, of course, but less-obvious items around the house can matter just as much. Studying a pot with food residue tells Connor that the victimized family was making dinner. Scanning through messages and papers will tell Connor the rogue android’s name and how long it has been in service.

Why does any of this matter? As you scour the apartment and collect information, your probability of saving the girl increases. You can attempt to rescue the hostage at any time, but the more clues and intel you find, the better your odds are of succeeding. Once you commit to saving the girl, the game enters a surprisingly tense and gripping hostage negotiation sequence, wherein Connor attempts to talk the rogue android out of doing the unthinkable. This sequence prompts you with several meaningful dialogue trees that help you steer the conversation, which can produce many different outcomes based on different factors: how much intel you gathered, how aggressive Connor was, whether Connor got close enough to the android, etc. Once the situation is resolved, the mission is over, and the game presents you with a massive, sprawling choice tree; this tree shows the path you took through the mission and all of the additional forks in the road that you missed.

This final sequence is able to create so much tension thanks to its exceptional presentation and motion capture. We did not catch a glimpse of the console running the game, but it was likely a PS4 Pro, because the level of graphical detail was striking. The game does benefit from restrained camera angles and lots of interior spaces, but even the more expansive exterior shots are awash with fidelity. The motion capture and facial animation of everyone, including the NPCs and background characters; lends real credibility to the world, and during emotional, dialogue-heavy sequences, this really helps to pull the player in. This is a relief to see, as realistic games that lean almost exclusively on their presentation and storytelling, any issues with character animation threaten to pull the player out of the experience. So far, this game seems to be skirting that problem.

Like Quantic Dream’s other titles, Detroit: Become Human is a different kind of interactive experience. Players looking for non-stop action or challenging enemy mechanics should look elsewhere; to be fair, though, most who have followed Quantic Dream’s recent output know what they’ll be getting into here. For those who have enjoyed the studio’s past work, prepare for another healthy dose of it, and pay close attention to that excellent facial animation.

Detroit: Become Human launches worldwide for PlayStation 4 on May 25th.