Hmm. You know, I find it very difficult to choose between Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, personally. They're both pretty masterfully-told stories! But I saw an interview shortly after the release of the latter wherein David Cage described feeling like Beyond was sort of a logical evolution from the place in game design that Heavy Rain had represented...
...and that's caused me to lean a little toward Beyond because it's made me see it as the more sincere and heartfelt project. I think that's what Cage wanted to be considered his master work. The design choices in Detroit: Become Human, seen in that context, strike me as a reversion back toward his older style in response to the negative reaction that Beyond got.
Don't get me wrong: Detroit has many strong points. The strongest of them, IMO, is the first half of the game, which focuses on developing the often-delightfully complex relationships between the androids and their human masters. This is quite wonderfully and movingly done! But the real quest part of the story I feel is unnecessarily flawed.
I mean obviously all the Quantic Dream games are supposed to be metaphors for other things (like in Beyond's coming-of-age story, Aiden is essentially a stand-in for mental illness in the abstract) and in the case of Detroit, the androids are clearly supposed to be stand-ins for black Americans and I think there are some problems with that: one being the fact that most of the androids are white and another being that androids are created by people. (What's the real world analogy to the latter? The idea that the human species began with white people or something? It didn't. I mean what's being, perhaps unintentionally, implied here?) It's just a flawed metaphor at a conceptual level, I think.
But more to the design point, the fact that this is quite obviously the intended metaphor in Detroit makes it difficult for me to sympathize with the fact that [SPOILER ALERT!] the player is ultimately given a choice of whether to go down a peaceful route or a violent one, which I take issue with because the implication there is that oppressed people can just sort of negotiate their way out of oppression; like if you're still suffering, it's just because you didn't choose the right wording or enunciation here and there. Slavery, in the real United States, was not vanquished through diplomacy. It took a war. You see what I'm getting at? It doesn't feel like THAT should be a choice to me. It feels like they just forced that choice in there either to cater to disappointed players of Beyond who demanded more interactivity / player choice or to be politically correct now that video games aren't supposed to feature violence-only paths to completion anymore regardless of whether it makes narrative sense to include another option.[/SPOILER]
I mean none of Cage's titles are perfect, I don't think, but I do feel like Beyond handled the topic of mental illness a little better than Detroit does the topic of race relations in the United States.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 19 June 2018
