Quantic Dream surpasses everything it has done before with Detroit: Become Human. A huge script allows for a thrilling story to have multiple layers that, at the same time, deal with topics such as slavery, the human condition or the concept of identity. A real masterpiece of the genre.

[Detroit: Become Human] is a social revolution simulator, where most of your choices actually matter, the story and characters are engaging and moving and the amount of narrative content is incredibly massive.

What makes Detroit: Become Human a great game, though, is that even after going back through alternate narrative branches and winding down my play time, I’m still invested. The world that Quantic Dream gave me to explore is only a short leap from the one we’re living in now, and the ideas presented have left me contemplating the role AI could play in our lives sooner rather than later.

Detroit: Become Human is a testament to how far the genre of interactive narrative storytelling has come and, at the same time, how much further it can go. While it might still suffer from some annoying QTE moments and a few narrative speedbumps, it delivers on promises that many other games in this genre make yet fail to keep, especially in how the choices you make can lead to very different experiences down the line.

If you want to experience an incredibly atmospheric dystopia from three gripping, strongly influenced angles, then this is the place to be.

The game is a technological marvel but although David Cage’s storytelling has an ideal pace and the way the story branches out depending on your choices is praiseworthy, his writing is childishly naïve. His vision of Detroit is unconvincing from the ground up and all his characters are merely crude, threadbare archetypes, which made it impossible for me to suspend disbelief. What’s more, the game touches a sensitive problem of discrimination but doesn’t have the courage to take any stand, leaving us with a lukewarm tale about robots, told with clichés and truisms. [07/2018, p.42]

Detroit: Become Human wants to move you. It wants to elicit an emotional response through its story. The thing is, it really doesn't. The flowchart is a nice inclusion and adds some variance, but when the narrative is as cringey and ham-fisted as it is you won't want to play through it multiple times.