What does it mean to be alive??
That is the question that you are going to be asking yourself long after you complete this game. I really love games that have you do some critical thinking about life and Detroit Become Human does this perfectly.
One of the best aspects of this game is its ability to make you care for the characters that you are controlling. The game is told through the eyes of several different androids, but they all have the same basic mission, to be free.
In this game, androids have been created to assist humanity. They have a super advanced AI and at some point, they begin to develop the ability to think for themselves and push back against the abuse of their human counterparts.
For part of the game, you play as an android named Connor that is programmed to help the police investigate these rogue androids. During Connor's story, he struggles with the different choices and his own thoughts of being self aware.
His story gives you some pretty interesting insight on what these androids go through from their humans before they reach their tipping point and turn on them. It is a pretty interesting thought as we move into our own future where artificial intelligence is starting to become more prevalent.
Androids in the sex industry are forced to submit to abuse and there is only so much that they can take before they lash out. As I was playing the game, I could see this type of thing actually happening in the future at some point and the game raises some pretty interesting talking points about consciousness and what it means to be alive.
Depending how you play the game, some of the humans in the story begin to take the side of the robots and begin to see them as beings that deserve freedom and life. The game does an amazing job at making you care for these characters and the chance of losing any of them is just one wrong decision away.
I only lost two of the characters throughout this whole journey, and it was a pretty gut wrenching scene when it happened. Kara is an android whose purpose was to care for a little girl named Alice. During her story, Alice's father beats her and Kara saves her from him and they run off together to try and be free.
They encounter so much resistance along the way, but it just brings them closer as a mother/daughter pair, which is all that either of them want in life. When they were trying to escape from an attack, I ended up selecting some incorrect choices and they got shot, but even in their death, they were happy to just be together and free.
I think the "main" character for the game is Markus, who organizes the androids and serves as a leader for them and inspires hope of being free one day. There are a lot of similarities in the game to events we have seen here in the US, like the Civil Rights movement where African Americans were seen as less than human.
There are different ways that you can play this game as well and each has its own ending. I chose to try and be as peaceful as possible with Markus and to make sure that all the demonstrations were peaceful but you can also choose violence, but that won't get the support of the public and could just cause the humans to push back even harder against the androids.
By the end, I had gained the support of the public and they pressured the military to stand down and the androids were finally seen as a free entity.
One thing I was pretty worried about as I played through the game was that I would need to start the game over from the beginning to be able to see the different story lines that you can play based on the decisions you make. But luckily you are able to select the chapter you want to start from and then play through them to see where you can take the story.
And there are MANY different possibilities that the story can take. Each chapter has a flow chart that shows the direction the game has taken. I am looking forward to playing through the chapters and seeing where the story can go.
This game is one of those that actually demonstrates how your actions early in the game can really affect its outcome. I am not even sure how many different endings there can be because there are a ton of decisions in the game that can affect everything.
Like in this scene above where you are in the evidence room of the police station and you can use the evidence you have collected to try and find out where the location of the android hideout is. I didn't have that much evidence collected and I think there was even one android that was missing that could have given me some information. Luckily I was able to rip the head off of a sex robot and show it to the robots girlfriend and trick her into giving me the location.
The game has some very crazy turns in it and the story is just amazing. The gameplay doesn't have the same type of action that a lot of games have, but the fact that at any moment, you can make a "wrong" decision and mess up the whole outcome of the game is pretty intense and keeps you on your toes.
Overall, this is a beautifully executed game and is one of my top gaming experiences. I really love games like this that draw you in and make you want to continue playing them. It is a very entertaining game with an amazing story that will have you looking into yourself. If you have never played this game, I highly recommend it.