The Following article contains major spoilers for Detroit: Become Human
Folk can’t quite believe DBH’s player base loves Markus by an 80% plus margin. It’s like Grey’s Anatomy doesn’t exist or something.
On some level,
Quantic Dream’s video games following Beyond:
Two Souls are going to be a mechanical refinement of their gameplay, and
not much else. If the Ellen Page driven game demonstrated anything, it was that
the studio’s creative head has an innate inability to learn from his mistakes
and he’s got a fetish for particular narrative cues, and all of them revolve
around violence, racism and shock value.
Detroit: Become Human shares a lot in common with Max Landis
and David Ayer’s 2017 direct-to-Netflix film Bright. Both are allegorical tales that utilize the iconism,
present and historical, of the Black community and their key movements as a
backdrop for the oppressed fantasy caricatures of their tale. With Bright, Orcs were the Allegorical Black
community of the here and now.
With Become Human,
Androids are representative of the Black community at various points in our
people’s history. All of it is supported by the locale of Detroit, Michigan, a
state with connections to the Underground Railroad (the game hits you with this
trivia bit right off), Martin Luther King Jr., and anti-black violence that
embroiled much of the United States when my parents were children.
Bright attempted (and failed) to re imagine some weird not-so-post-racial
world where Tolkien-inspired aesthetics and archetypes were our history and
influenced our present, with little changed about our factual history. Mankind
is united in mutual hate of Orcs, and the motto “Black Lives Matter” continues
to be a punchline to those unaffected by police brutality in a world where fairies
are the equivalent of pests.
Become Human is yet another in the long line of over
bright and sterile science fiction games that want to be Blade Runner, but doesn’t have the wherewithal to pull it off. And
this is mostly because it’s too busy trying to shout “message!” For lack of a better word, Become
Human gags itself with its own allusions despite some particularly interesting
mechanics and sequences that exist within the ham-fisted racism narrative.
