Rod Serling once said something to the effect of the reason why he chose sci-fi during the 1950s to delve into-- during McCarthyism and all that-- was because he could make his alien and robot characters say things he would never be allowed to make democrat or republican human characters say. I think he was correct at that time, but of course when you watch a lot of Twilight Zone (which I still adore) you get the same very heavy-handed feel we get from Detroit. But it’s 2018 and if Cage wants to make a comment about equality and hate in the time of Trumpism, he needs to put his big boy pants on and go at it directly. We no longer have the luxury to make clumsy metaphors for this stuff-- bigotry, xenophobia and the rest? If he wants to actually say something about it-- say something about it. It’s like a team of 50 something white dudes got to together in a marketing meeting and said, “So what’s all the ‘SJW’ stuff I hear about these days that kids seem to like? How can we hit that demographic in the wormiest, most non-committal way possible?”
I swear that the last time I saw a semi-original take on the whole “are androids people” thing was on fucking Caprica
poor benighted Caprica
In fairness, I feel like Westworld’s been doing a good job by way of explicitly assigning multiple identities to each android, which complicates things rather interestingly: “Is Maeve a person?” seems to be answered with “Yes, several.”
David: Become Hack
u bigot
What’s the context of the survey? Is that something the player takes after the game is finished?
It does weird stuff like this when you return to the game before you get to the main menu.
Hey nothing about that question implies a nonconsensual relationship and/or android servitude.
I’d totally date a robot if they were interested.
This always drives me up a wall because I’m not sure David Cage has a single original thought in his head. I think he got them all out with Omikron, which might be a blessing in disguise if you go back and visit that game’s nonsense. It’s like if Undertale was a 90s grunge music video, Tekken, and a bad comic book cancelled in two issues by an independent publisher.
Fahrenheit was a jumbled combination of The Matrix, In The Mouth of Madness, and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles (which is where the most incomprehensible crap came from). Heavy Rain took very blatantly from Seven and Saw, even down to the killer’s motives, along with some Silence of the Lambs with the scores of serial killers. Beyond: Two Souls was basically just a ton of bad horror and sci-fi cliches put together with no real thought or reason (and the fact he ended that game by paying tribute to read deceased people with his made up term for the afterlife absolutely disgusted me).
You know where people are doing this exact same stuff Cage is doing are? Not just in the VN scene, but the genre he steals all his mechanical design ideas from - point and clicks. That genre was a breeding ground for wild ideas you couldn’t do elsewhere, and a lot of those games also had multiple endings based on your choices and how you handled some puzzles. He’s making big budget versions of these games since Fahrenheit, with QTEs to justify the cinematic bent of them, but without that cinema style, he would absolutely not have a following. His writing is so bad compared to just about the entire genre, and he’s been riding on tech and appealing to audiences outside those circles to see innovative or original.
All he is, deep down, is a con artist who believes his own hype so much that his ego has exploded and can convince others of his own “genius” to keep getting money for his awful projects.
As I said, I’ve always self-loathingly (not a word, I know) still really liked something about parts of his games despite knowing how awful and, at the end of the day, how inept he is.
I’m playing through Detroit and I just went through an entire sequence that should have been absolutely intense and amazing and yet… the game barely let me play. I won’t spoil too much but let’s just say there is an Ocean 11-esque kind of part and despite the amazing shit the whole crew got to do, I was reduced to clicking a button here, moving a control there. I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience in a game that was that anti-climatic. And the game was SO happy with it self. It’s like the game is worried that actually letting me do something cool on my own could ruin its carefully considered construction.
You want to talk about homophobia? I work with Ellen Page, who fights for LGBT rights. You want to talk about racism? I work with Jesse Williams, who fights for civil rights in the USA… Judge me by my work.
Will do, David, will do. Not to drag this up again, but if I’m a bigot who works alongside some kind of human rights activist in an unrelated day job, I ain’t automatically a good person, and I feel like this is the underlying fault in just about everything that David Cage does. To armchair psychoanalyse for a moment, he’s worked with good people, therefore he’s good, therefore his thoughts and beliefs and ideas are good, therefore they don’t need to be interrogated. And his response to criticism is so very indicative of that, a knee-jerk reaction that everyone else is wrong, that they’ve made a mistake and must reexamine their thought process, never once doing the same himself. David Cage may have the capacity for greatness, he may have elevated intelligence (whatever that may mean), he may have some talent for getting these projects made, but he lacks the rigour to actually create something interesting because his first thought is always correct in his mind, and the only consideration is in the method of expressing it.
Not to me mention that Page thought long and hard about suing his ass over what he did with her shower scene. Ugh.
I was going to write a big post about my thoughs on the game but I’d rather make them simple and quick so here it goes:
The story is bland and does nothing new. The writing is cheese, devolving to cringy too many times. The only main character that I feel is interesting is Connor, because he actually interacts with other humans that aren’t immediatly shitty and actually evolves in the game. Kara and Markus are paper thin in terms of complexity and have the same motivation from the moment they “awake” to the end.
The social “commentary” is super on the nose. It goes from androids in the back of the bus, to police brutality, to concentration camps. It makes zero attempts to actually fckn say something, and, in the end, it gives up on everything it tried to do and just asks you to decide.
There are moments in the game that I actually though were good, mainly the stuff with Connor (which is basically a buddy cop/procedural), and some of the lore was interesting such as basically all music being made by androids and humans actually being close to developing nano-machines that grant immortality, but none of that is even presented unless you’re looking,
I’m profoundly confused how most critiques are giving it so much praise and some people calling it a masterpiece.
Not to mention, part deux: Page came out in February 2014. Beyond: Two Snores was released October 2013. So him trying to claim proxy-activism via a previous association with her is… well, it’s David Cage alright.
That’s David Cage as fuck.
As I watch more of the game I’m actually kind of surprised at how much mundane shit it makes the player do. Like, horrible writing aside, why is anybody having fun hitting button prompts during an extended Do The Dishes scene?
I suppose you haven’t seen Heavy Rain’s family bonding scenes. They’re exactly the same, though with more choice. DO YOU MAKE YOUR SON MICROWAVE CHICKEN OR PIZZA!? Your son will remember this. It’s arguably called for in this game because it helps establish the initial status of the androids, helping the player get into a certain headspace with said character, and being perfectly honest, this light doing chores stuff is the only parts of David Cage games I don’t think aren’t mostly crap. It just doesn’t fit with his stories.
I kind of find interest in it the same way I’m interested in a lot of walkabout stuff. Sometimes it’s just nice to take in the world, and you can kind of enjoy a simple moment in time. Games are bad at presenting the mundane in an interesting way, and David Cage is the closest to making it work that I’ve seen. The problem is that the stories he writes are big sci-fi epics or thrillers. The mundane doesn’t really fit as an interesting element of the wider story, or he just fumbles at using these mechanics to create any sort of thematic current that adds to the experience. Heavy Rain was the closest these elements fit with the material, contrasting with normal life comfort with the coming horror causes by the Origami killer, and they don’t really do that too well.
Yeah, I almost bought a PS3 because of Heavy Rain’s promise of QTE mundanity, it seemed like the most exciting thing in the world in 2009, especially at that budget. Now that there are so many indie games that thoroughly explore ordinary lives in all kinds of ways, there’s much less appeal to that, especially in the context of a game that appears to insult the player’s intelligence in so many other ways.
Finished the game today.
I’m unsure really what to say. As usual, as there tends to be with Cage’s games and me, there were some moments I really did enjoy-- almost entirely centered on the investigation and crime aspect of it. The problem solving, the trying to get the story of each scene to end the way I wanted it to. I’d be a filthy, terrible liar if I told you I didn’t get genuine pleasure from some of that stuff.
As for the larger problems… ugh. Not that this can’t be just as damaging, but it came across less as blatantly racist and more just a story told by a man with his head so far up his ass that he actually, probably, for real thinks he’s not only saying something profound but doing good for the world. But, as they say, good intentions, hell, etc.
The co-opting of some of the imagery and messages really, really was a problem. I think most people have seen the MLK reference that others have posted, but that’s just kind of the tip of the iceberg. There is a moment where a bunch of marching androids symbolically put their hands in the air as was done in the last year or so with people of color protesting police violence and it just felt SO fucking inappropriate in terms of being used to tell his stupid little robot story. The original version of the film The Black Klansman (not the version Spike Lee showed at Caanes this year) is what this game reminds me of. Hack director Ted V Mikels made an exploitation film that tried desperately to tackle “real issues” but was just totally laughable even though you could tell that dude was trying to be sincere. I think Cage probably thinks he’s telling a nobel story here while totally missing the point that co–opting this powerful imagery from contemporary protests of extremely important issues is simply in poor taste.
All that said, it gets even worse with some truly terrible dialogue in which a little girl cries, “Why do they hate us?” and that sort of totally on-the-nose sort of thing where the characters say the most hackneyed cliche bullshit and you can just FEEL cage leaning back from his keyboard, nodding his head thinking, “Man, that’s deep.”
I don’t really know what to say. I enjoy parts of the game, I have to admit. But there is a ton of totally stupid and awful bullshit in here. I didn’t walk away angry but just feeling like my eyes were about to pop out after spending 85% of my time with the game rolling them.
I guess I’d also be remiss if I didn’t add that this game piles onto the myth of race relations having to be about the nobility of non-violence. I’m not saying violence is good, but in this day and age so many white people use the legacy of MLK, for instance, as code for, “You should be as innocuous as possible when asking for your rights in our society”, Cage is playing right into that kind of utter bullshit. Clearly, that was not what King was about, but in the decades since his death, his image has been co-opted and white-washed to the point of white people viewing him almost like a Santa Claus or something, that the legacy of King is that you shut your mouth and MAYBE march a bit, but you be a good boy and don’t cause trouble (Again, equal parts maddening and hilarious considering how much of a thorn in the side of white society King was in his day). This is the message Detroit gives you in the way they determine the “good” and “bad” ending as far as I’m concerned.
