The main menu screen for Detroit: Become Human - Quantic Dream's new game about androids discovering free will and rising up against their human masters - features the face, stunningly well realised, of an android who talks directly to the player. The android looks like a young, pretty, white woman. She asks if we are enjoying ourselves, suggests we take a survey, jokes about the game save being corrupted. If you leave the menu on long enough, she changes the subject. Did we know about the underground railroad, the secret network which helped black slaves escape the antebellum South of the USA? Then she starts to sing, quietly, pleadingly: "Hold on just a little while longer, everything will be alright." It turns out this is a traditional gospel song. She might as well have burst into "We Shall Overcome."
Intentionally or not, it's a jarring moment. It also puts the lie to comments writer-director David Cage has made to the effect that his was just a science-fiction story about robots gaining consciousness, and any political or social-historical parallels in the real world were in the eye of the beholder. They are, in fact, quite clearly intended. Cage deliberately evokes slavery and the civil rights movement in the androids' plight.
Before we get caught up in its own delusions of grandeur, it's worth remembering that Detroit is just another of Quantic's glossy, goofy, ambitious experiments in interactive cinematic storytelling, like Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls - and worth stating that it's the most successful of these by far. The story is coherent and persuasively told, avoiding Cage's trademark last-act lunge into nonsense. It's systematically sound enough to be enjoyed as a video game, too.
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