PC Gamer's review of Detroit is next level lmao.
PC Gamer said:
However, Detroit is still a game written by David Cage, as incapable of subtlety as ever. Whether its equating the uprising of previously non-sentient beings with North America’s enduring interracial struggle—to the point where androids travel in the back of the bus and later quote Martin Luther King Jr.—or continuing to include female characters in his stories only to see them victimised, I have never seen work so in need of a sensitivity reader.
1. Legit every android character in the game is victimized regardless of gender.
- Markus can be beaten by
anti android protesters in his very first scene.
- He's also abused by
Todd & framed for murder. Thusly having to craw, barely alive, through an android mass grave and reassemble himself.
- Connor can die in too many ways to bother listing.
2. Un-ironic call for a "sensitivity reader." Which is a complete hustle. There's not even genuine woman or minority outcry about this game. Pretty much all of the actual gamers who played it, loved it.
PC Gamer said:
Kara’s main function is to be a vehicle for the glorifying of violence against women. Each of the three main characters can die if you’re not careful, but Kara’s death leaves no dent on the plot, nor does she develop as a character.
lol Now it's not only victimization but the violence is glorified too. How? What she and the other androids go through are always portrayed as injustices. Also Kara's main function in the story is clearly to explore the concept of motherhood. Unironically, this reviewer is the one reducing her to a victim.
PC Gamer said:
As a person of colour and a woman, I simply don’t see the necessity of strapping a conscious female character onto a torture device, or likening black people to machines through allegory.
This phrasing oddly suggests it'd be better if they tortured an unconscious female, for some reason... That's a BIG yikes. Also, way to miss the entire point of the story. It's extremely obvious that the idea is androids are more than machines. Comparing them to humans wouldn't be insulting unless you literally don't understand the central theme of Detroit.
You have to be aware how it reads to people of certain demographics when, during your shader compilation, players are shown a screen on which every android servant is a person of colour, and the romance model is Caucasian. Honest mistake or not, these associations are exactly what racial conflict is about, and instead of reflecting that, Detroit perpetuates age-old stereotypes.
Now we're at the level of nitpicking some shader compilation I can't even recall. Is this a bonus feature buried in one of the game's menus? This is what happens when you problematize everything you lay eyes on. You cant see the forest for the trees. Literally every Android in Detroit's fiction are servants of a kind by default. The game itself has races of all colors in various roles... But somehow it's a meaningful use of anyone's time to point out the professional makeup, by race, of androids in a shader compilation? That's laughable. And I did laugh, in fact.
Embarrassing reviews like this just confirm (to me, at least) my idea that the SJW side of games journalism simply have a target on David Cage's back because of the different work place dramas that have come out of QD. They'll rake a game like Detroit over the coals for its lack of subtlety yet give a total pass to outright trash like Life Is Strange 2 (Idk if this reviewer did that but I've seen it in places like Giant Bomb). At least with this review in particular it's just comically over-the-top.
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