Sony announced this month’s lineup of free games via their Playstation Plus service, and it was lackluster at best. One arcade racing game reminiscent of, I don’t know, Pole Position? And a Soccer game that wasn’t FIFA, not that I’d care either way — nobody likes Soccer. There must have been some sort of critical mass of outrage thrown at them, because at the last moment they swapped out PES 2019 for Detroit: Become Human. Konami wasn’t even told it was going to happen. Nonetheless, I was more interested in trying out a newer Sci-Fi game rather than boring ol’ Futbol so I went ahead and downloaded it. I should mention too that the other game, Horizon Chase Turbo is actually pretty fun, but that’s all I’m saying at this juncture.

Detroit: Become Human was hyped up before its release. I remember hearing good things about it, but from video it didn’t really appeal to me and honestly I would have never played it were it not for getting it for free. Apparently, I was wrong when I judged this game by its cover, because it appealed to me on many different levels.

Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of narrative, story-rich games that don’t necessarily have a lot of game play so to speak. These types of games range from adventure titles to interactive story books. I’ve been a fan of some of the TellTale Games series, though now that the company is defunct it’s unlikely we’ll see more of those unless another company picks up the reigns. Another recent game of this style The Council was very good and had basically no game play whatsoever — yet the story was intriguing enough that simply controlling a character through a story arc and making some minor decisions was fine by me. Detroit: Become Human lines up pretty well with this assessment — I’d go out on a limb and call it a QTE game, because outside of dialogue all of the action is controlled by various timed button presses and other motions with the controller. Honestly this is one of the first games I’ve seen that uses the controller motion technology along with the touch pad on top of the normal controls — that part was pretty cool, but also kind of annoying at times.

Graphically the game looks amazing. I honestly think it’s one of the best looking games I’ve seen on the Playstation 4, top five at least. The animations were stellar, there was no hitching, it ran well, looked beautiful and contained more heart than I would have expected. As the story goes, it’s the middle of the 21st century and Androids have become a large part of human society. They perform tasks that many would not want to do for themselves, including cleaning, manual labor, and even taking care of their own children. It seems that they are the perfect utility machine for everyone, and affordable enough for the average family to own one. Ironic that the game takes place wholly in Detroit, Michigan, a city that was known for its prosperity during the automotive boom of the 1900’s, but is more known as a ran down and broken city in more recent years. It seems to have regained its prominence in the nation in this game however, as these Androids are all created here in the city by a company called Cyber Life.

I honestly cannot go further into the story because it has so many branching pathways and spoilers that I’d have to play through it a couple more times in order to see everything. I don’t want to spoil that for you if you haven’t yet played it. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this one as much as I did, and I played through it in just a couple of days which isn’t something that usually happens with me and games these days. The story is compelling — you’ll take control of several different Androids with different agendas and there are plot twists and turns along the way. Fuck up on some QTEs? You’ll have to live with the consequences (I did earn a trophy for not losing a single fight throughout the entire game). The same goes for your dialogue decisions. Things will happen, and it will be your choice how they happen. Just don’t expect everyone to like your choices.

If you have a PS4 I highly recommend you download this game right now and play it. Definitely for fans of Sci-Fi stories with artificial intelligence, detective work, dystopian futures, the love of a family, hero’s journeys and freedom.