Cage Games

I started playing Detroit: Become Human a couple of months ago and have been dipping in and out. As someone who followed the evolution of game development with envy (and some arrogance) while working in film production, I find Quantic Dream games kind of fascinating. In a way they (could) represent a bit of a dead end, a frustrated artist working in the wrong medium, but to their credit, I keep coming back.

I finished the game and basically loved it, but it led me to reflect on this corner of games.

INT. BEN'S TEENAGE BEDROOM – DAY

FADE IN

My first David Cage game was Indigo Prophecy (known in some parts of the world as Fahrenheit). I knew it was a David Cage game because he pops up in mocap right at the start and says “Hi, my name is David Cage, I’m the writer and director of Indigo Prophecy”.

This was quite new to me. I was still in college, making my first film with some friends, actors and film students. To pick up a game and see someone doing what I was learning to do was quite surreal. I played the game over a few days and mostly loved it. It had some really awesome intersections of cinematic storytelling and narrative gameplay.

And the vibes were great - as a PC gamer in the mid 2000s, we had amazing gamefeel but often the wide gamut of specs (and quality) games would run at made it hard to art direct them for atmosphere. Games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil pulled that off on console much more effectively. But even though parts of this game looked ridiculous, it still swung for the fences.

I don’t remember much about the story, but playing in such a cinematic-feeling world and making diagetic choices felt like playing with a prototype holodeck. However, what left me quite cold about the experience was the action gameplay.

It just sucked, it looked bad, it felt bad, it was super hokey and always felt a little broken. Insta-fail stealth missions that were infuriating, or chase sequences that were actually almost impossible to fail (more on that later).

INT. MARIA'S LIVING ROOM – EVENING

A few years later I was in my mate Maria’s house. She fired up her PS3, handed me the controller and introduced me to Heavy Rain.

Now this was something else. Much richer, more complex. Not supernatural this time, but a Saw-inflected thriller with a hint of sci-fi. Adding an investigation layer to it added a new kind of activity/interaction when just walking around that added a lot. The performances were rendered much better, and it felt serious and grown up in a way that Indigo Prophecy didn’t.

Drip, drip

I didn’t play the game through until a few years later when I picked it up on PS4, and I was absolutely hooked. I couldn’t wait to get back to it every evening, it felt like mainlining a great TV show or returning to a gripping book in the evenings.

What brought me back every time was the vibes and the story.

Storytime

The compelling mystery and the promise that something worth seeing would be just around the corner, thje story kept escalating, and the practice of jumping between chracters (also in Indigo Prophecy) returned here, but to better effect. The detective, the PI and the distraught father all represented different facets of the same mystery, and the feeling of them closing in, along with a game of cat and mouse, was awesome.

Dank Vibes

The atmosphere was amazing though, it was literally always raining. Constantly. Hour after hour. I wonder now if they did this because doing it in live action is so prohibitively expensive, you don’t normally see it in movies and TV, but it made the whole game feel very oppressive in a way that anchored me in the world. Even thinking of the game now, I can hear the incessant drumming and dripping.

But…

…the action gameplay was still kinda not great. More polished than in Indigo Prophecy, and less silly on their face, but quite thin, inconsequential, and could very easily break immersion:

Sometimes it really worked, and other interactions, like chase and fight sequences could quickly fall apart and look and feel silly, which was anethema to the grim, serious tone.

Clueless Robots

In 2018 when Detroit: Become Human came out, the public wasn’t yet venomously anti-AI, but Quantic Dream made an unforced error (similar to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided with “Augmented Lives Matter”) by telling this story about android protagonists racialised as white characters, played by white actors, trying to rise up for their equal recognition and civil rights. This is a very old idea in science-fiction, but it left a lot of people soured on the premise, and honestly I can understand why.

The story begins with androids as property, tech products you buy or use. They can’t vote, they’re not allowed disobey a direct order, they are not allowed own property, they don’t get paid, they have to go in the back of the bus. I think you’re getting it. They absolutely get treated like enslaved people.

I found myself wondering while I was playing it why I felt uncomfortable with that aspect, while loving Andor, which you could argue also uses some of our historic ideas of imperialism and oppression to tell a story of someone being radicalised into revolution. I think the difference, for me, is that Andor is an allegory. I came away from that story with a deeper emotional understanding of that dynamic in history. Detroit: Become Human takes from this pool of suffering and, in my opinion, offers little back.

All of that said, I really did enjoy my time with it. Perhaps we live in a more cynical time where the bar for social conscience has dropped. Whatever the reason, if you look past that part, it’s still an over the top earnest story in a compelling world, with beautiful production design and lots of great performances. They also doubled-down on the detective mechanic (I didn’t play Beyond: Two Souls, so I don’t know what the gameplay was like in that) in a way that’s diagetic and also very cool. I also really enjoyed the cat-and-mouse of playing both cop and robber. Importantly, the quick time events were actually fun this time too, and kept me in the action, which was choreographed with a lot more kineticism.

What’s next

After going deep on this game for a couple of weeks, I’m excited to see what they do in the Star Wars universe with their next game Star Wars: Eclipse. I also want to try playing Detroit: Become Human with Nathalie as a copilot, it feels like a story worth sharing.