Playing 'Detroit: Become Human' the way they definitely, 100% intended
Spoilers for Detroit: Become Human, if for some reason you haven't seen or played the game yet
So my older sister downloads DBH (she's a sucker for a good father-child dynamic, so Hank and Connor have her by the throat), but before she does so she talks to me about getting it. It is here that I propose a silly fun idea: We co-op the game. We take turns with the laptop and controller, hiding the screen and choices we make from the other. She plays Connor, I play Markus, and we both get a say in Kara's story.
She doesn't go through with the idea at first, she does her own playthrough first. She ends up with the peaceful/pacifist ending where no one dies (hurray!!). But on her second playthrough she invites me to play with her. Let's fucking go.
Now before we had started the new run, she expressed her desire to make different choices with Connor to better complete the game and get achievements. She mentions that she's thinking about doing a machine Connor route instead of a deviant one. Now I'm fucking scared. Cause I don't have it in me to kill anyone, let alone do a violent protest with Markus.
Anyways, with Kara, Alice, and Luther, we fully manage to get them across the border into Canada (Which my sis didn't manage to do on her first playthrough, she got them caught during a stealth section L). With that she gets a new achievement for doing so, all thanks to me 😏 I get her another achievement for pushing Leo- Carl's son- since she just let Carl die like a monster(/j). She of course gets some new achievements on her own with Connor.
But back to how we played Markus and Connor. Since we didn't know what the other was doing with them, it made the crossroads chapter REALLY FUCKING TENSE. The only hint we got of the other's choices were how it affected the story and dialogue; I left an injured Simon behind on the roof of Stradford tower and she followed him up there leading to Simon self-destructing (that got her a freaking achievement, bro...). But I had no idea that Simon had died until it cut to Markus again. I was a bit distraught when finding that out :(
When it came down to the confrontation between Connor and Markus at Jericho, it was so tense to go between the two of them. Me fighting to convince Connor to deviate, and her trying to keep Connor on his mission. Scary shit. Now before we had begun, we had agreed- if it comes down to it- that should Markus and Connor be in a 'only one lives' type of scenario, we'd rock-paper-scissor to see who would get to live.
I had no clue if my sister had made enough choices to unlock the option for Connor to deviate, so when the option finally came up and Connor deviated, I was freaking ecstatic. I did not want her destroying all the work I had done with Markus and Jericho 😭
She even admits after we finished the game that she was originally going to play a machine Connor route, but 1: would feel bad putting an end to the peaceful route I was going, and 2: didn't have it in her to be mean to Hank lmao
Two other stressful scenes with how we played was Connor's infiltration into Cyberlife tower and the ensuing fight between the other Connor and Hank. The reason it was so stressful was because she genuinely could not remember if she had learned Hank's son's name. Luckly, she did, so Connor didn't die there, and Markus got his reinforcements, but still, phew!
The next was Markus' speech at the very end, and Connor being taken over by Amanda and the whole emergency exit thingy. She struggled to remember where the freaking thing was, and she messed up the inputs to press it the first time. Not to mention how she was sort of freaking out because things were happening differently than how her solo run did. But we got that W.
But I feel like playing the game this way adds a sort of tenseness and finality to it. Because you truly don't know what the other people are doing with the other storylines until they meet up during crossroads. This was just with the two of us, imagine if we had a third to play Kara so all storylines would be a mystery until the converge!
She played the game all in one sitting on her own the first time, and we both did the second. Now I imagine she will do the same on her third run where she'll kill everybody like the completionist monster she is
