![]() ![]() If you can’t do that, you’re likely not going to enjoy much of what’s on offer, aside the incredible motion capture, astonishing visuals, and to be fair, terrific acting.ĭetroit, like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls before it, is a narrative driven modernisation of a point and click adventure. What I’m saying here is that not only do you have to suspend your disbelief to enjoy Quantic Dream’s latest, but you really have to give yourself to it, be open to accepting what it is, and what the limitations of the story arc are. Well, we do, here’s a clue: racism is bad, people are good but can also be really shit, and life is complicated, but would be so much easier on the whole if we were all just a bit nicer to each other, but then, as I say, life’s complicated. I don’t like picking on writing like this, for obvious reasons, and I don’t think Cage is necessarily bad, it almost feels more like arrogance that the audience won’t get the story. The writing in this game is so heavy handed it’s like the ideas are smashing you over the head with a sledgehammer. It’s supposed to be a dramatic moment, but it’s so steeped in cliche as to feel ridiculous. There’s even a choice that results in a scene that feels lifted directly from the movie Titanic. But that’s the thing, a subtle nod or allusion to another thing is fine, not just completely copying a scene that people stopped doing years ago because it’s so cliche ridden and just doesn’t wash nowadays. It’s absolutely fine to reference movies or other games, or anything, really, that you like in your own writing. While we’re at it, I want to talk about subtlety. Truly great writing turns cliche on its head, and as you are led by your friend through the darkness, while your companion mentions they have a bad feeling about it, I feel like I’m supposed to be expecting the badness to occur, only for the writer to shock me by eschewing the cliche and treating me like I’m intelligent, but it rarely does, and that lack of respect for the player’s intelligence is a big stumbling block throughout Detroit. The thing is, Cage happens upon this comparison because, while his ideas have heart, the execution of the story is too on the nose to really deliver in an impactful way.Īnd I don’t want to harp on about that particular scene in Detroit, but it’s worth saying that some of the problem is that it’s so easy to telegraph – it’s so obvious. It’s possible David Cage’s story is attempting to pay homage to the Boosh, and it’s possible that the show’s writers, Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt were trying to say something about race and slavery in 2004 that Cage still feels is relevant in 2018 (and in truth, let’s be honest, nowhere near enough has changed in that respect), but I doubt it. I tell you this not just because I like the show, but because that scene, almost frame for frame, is replayed in Detroit: Become Human, swapping animals for androids, but without any of the fun, and arguably is even more pointless than that throwaway episode of a comedy show. The thirty minutes of that episode culminate in Howard and Vince setting the “freaks” free, and they come to their aid by swarming and, presumably killing, their captor. There’s a scene in the first series of The Mighty Boosh that involves animals at the zoo being kidnapped and experimented on.
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