In the Welcome to Westworld-esque opening menu screen of Detroit: Become Human, a pretty blonde robot lady flirtatiously calibrates the game to satisfy your needs. Then, she gives you a warning — and it sounds a lot like the game designers using her as a mouthpiece.

"Remember this is not just a story. This is our future," she says ominously.

The aggrandizement of this statement sets the tone for the rest of the game, with its ham-fisted dialogue, questionable optics, and juvenile desperation to be taken as Serious Art About Social Commentary. It’s the first hint at how profoundly, confidently ignorant Quantic Dream is about how the future, history, society, oppression, and even human beings work.

Like its opening statement, Detroit: Become Human operates under the assumption that its ill-conceived vision of the future is an inevitability for all mankind. As if this one imagined near-future — conceived by a studio not only predominantly made up of white, straight men but also recently accused of being a racist and sexist workplace by a multitude of reports — speaks to and for everyone.

I bring up the allegations (which the studio denies and is now suing journalists for reporting ) not only because they should be taken seriously, but because they unavoidably informed my experience of Detroit: Become Human. And actually, that’s exactly what Quantic Dream infamous “auteur” and leader, David Cage, asked us to do.

Quantic Dream has never come closer to perfecting its formula

His outraged response to the accusations were to demand the public “ judge my work ” to determine the veracity of the claims (note: the studio's previous titles, Heavy Rain and BEYOND: Two Souls, have also garnered criticisms for sexism and racism over the years).

So I did. I judged this ambitious game, which asks to be seen as an allegory for real-world oppression, on its understanding of those issues.

Detroit: Become Human mostly comes across as a crude imitation of themes better explored in Westworld, substituting that show's philosophical depth for the subtlety of social politics in Netflix's orc cop movie Bright. But as the latest blockbuster branching narrative game from the studio that first popularized the genre, Quantic Dream has never come closer to perfecting its formula on a mechanical level.

The recurring character in "Detroit: Become Human" could not be more Westworld-y Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Set in its titular city twenty years from now, androids have become ubiquitous technology, transforming society and the economy in Detroit. As human anger and fear towards the androids rises, so too do the robots, awakening to a sentience that leads them to rebel against their enslavement. It follows the converging stories of three protagonists: former nurse bot turned revolution leader Markus, abused housecleaning android and surrogate mother Kara, and the “most advanced prototype” of them all — detective Connor, who hunts rebelling robots.

Like all Quantic Dream games, Detroit: Become Human is a multi-million dollar technical marvel predicated on moral decision-making. Its conceit claims that characters die if the player makes bad choices, or times button-presses poorly. Unlike previous games, each chapter ends by revealing a full flowchart of the potential paths, and where your choices affected the outcome.

This time, you can also go back and redo events (or see what could’ve been out of curiosity.) The studio recommends you refrain from redos the first playthrough, which I did, before playing a second time and experimenting to unlock as much as possible.

Markus gearing up for what is essentially his I Have An Android Dream of Electric Dream speech

The flowchart flexes the raw muscle of this impressive narrative tech, revealing the sheer breadth of variables, both big and small. It even includes other player stats to compare with your own. But this increased control over the game’s inner machinations significantly detracts from the sense of consequence. Not to mention that the game continues Quantic Dream's questionable reliance on wonky motion controls — which are still often non-responsive, and especially distressingly when you need them to successfully escape a brutal beating from an abusive owner as Kara.

The game takes a decidedly “both sides” approach to it all.

But overall, the studio appears to have taken cues from its more recent betters like Until Dawn, finally addressing some longtime criticisms. It’s the most coherent, compelling plots Quantic Dream has ever managed — though those adjectives are probably a bit too generous. By the end, you’re still unavoidably left with dissatisfying conclusions, plot holes, and hugely important unanswered questions. Most glaringly, at no point does this story purportedly about robot personhood seem even remotely interested in exploring the nature of their artificial consciousness.

But what really makes Detroit: Become Human irredeemable, self-important, pseudo artistic garbage is its bafflingly tone deaf treatment of vulnerable populations in our real world.

What in the ever living hell is this character even supposed to represent? Image: SONY INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT

While explicitly mining the pain, trauma, language, symbols, skin color, and genders of oppressed groups from the real world for dramatic backdrop, the game takes a decidedly “both sides” approach to it all. It wants to be commentary on racial and gendered subjugation, while presenting a bizarrely post-racial America (I guess android racism fixed that centuries long struggle in two short decades!) The story pretends to care about women, while treating most of them as traumatized, semi-disposable punching bags. Incomprehensibly, it's a future America governed by a female president who’s some unholy mutation of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The world is not only offensively half-baked, but outright dangerous during this particular moment in history.

The bewildering politics of Detroit: Become Human can often be traced back to Cage. In an interview with Polygon , he simultaneously says the game's name is a deliberate allusion to Detroit’s civil rights history, but also not about it at all when he's confronted with actual instances of the city's violent racial history, like the 1943 and 1967 race riots.

The images in "Detroit: Become Human" are simultaneously hyper political and yet treated apolitically Image: SONY INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT

“There are many groups of people today who can feel the same and feel segregated for different reasons, or feel not treated fairly for different reasons,” Cage said. “So I wouldn’t connect this to the civil rights [movement] or to this or to that; I think — I hope it’s going to be broader than that, and different groups of people can identify themselves with these androids for different reasons.”

I understand the good intentions of wanting to paint the intricately complex tapestry of various social injustices in broad, universal strokes. But the result is an insidious misunderstanding of how inequality works — one that only white men and Kanye West apparently have the privilege to believe in.

It’s a dangerous misunderstanding of how inequality works

Because right now in America, the idea that everyone experiences some form of systemic injustice has spread like a plague. White supremacists co-opted the language of social progress to redefine diversity as “white genocide .” Supported by the President of the United States , neo-Nazis are painting themselves as victims stripped of their human rights (free speech) by liberal oppressors. Men who identify as “incels” are murdering people because they perceive women’s sexual autonomy as infringing on men's innate right to their bodies.

One of many sex workers brutalized and discarded in "Detroit: Become Human" Image: sony interactive entertainment

One cannot simply rewrite the rules of systemic power to portray privileged groups as experiencing equally unjust treatment or segregation. It’s a slippery slope. And the image of white, Aryan-looking robots saying phrases like, “Our people deserve freedom,” is a bit too close to home for comfort — and not in the good way.

But clearly, Quantic Dream tried its best to check every box on the sensitivity checklist while graphically invoking Jim Crow laws, concentration camps, xenophobia, forced labor, sexual slavery, and domestic and gendered violence. There are more central women and characters of color than most video games. Markus is portrayed by biracial Grey’s Anatomy actor Jesse Williams. The racial demographics of Detroit are reflected in the NPCs. The game briefly features a lesbian android couple (who are also sex workers). Kara arguably shoulders the most emotionally resonate storyline.

Yet every inch of progress comes with about a hundred steps backward.

This is just... not right Image: sony interactive entertainment

Markus literally “deactivates” his skin color before delivering his big Martin Luther King Jr. I Have An Android Dream of Electric Sheep speech, demanding equality for his “people” in a white body with green/blue eyes. The black NPCs openly discriminate against Connor, a white super robo cop — as if police brutality never existed. Not to mention that brutalized black bodies are everywhere in this game, despite continually refusing to address the inherent racial subtext of said images.

It invites you to try on the violent dehumanization of oppressed peoples like a fun action-adventure game avatar

The lesbian couple exists exclusively to serve as an empathy test for Connor, framing the choice of killing them or not as an interesting thought experiment with no major discernible consequences. Kara never breaks from the stereotype of sexless, selfless mother figure, devoid of personality outside her irrational love for her pseudo daughter.

By “broadening” (i.e. reducing) systemic oppression to a generalized non-human representative and giving players the choice to define their humanity, Detroit: Become Human doesn’t just uncomfortably misrepresent and whitewash different subjugations. It invites you to try on the violent dehumanization of oppressed peoples like a fun action-adventure game avatar in an uplifting underdog narrative. Liberation becomes as easy as touching someone for half a second, or giving your menu hostess android permission to escape.

Hey there's Chloe again, our poor imprisoned menu hostess Image: sony interactive entertainment

But that experience is the exact opposite of what oppression actually is, which is an inescapable prison devoid of choice. And it implies that emancipation is granted to enslaved classes by their masters, rather than what history tells us it is: a never-ending battle to retain your own precarious freedom and humanity.

Yes, Detroit: Become Human can be seen as the story of our future. But only insofar as it reflects the unconscious biases of the privileged perspectives who create most of our culture today, through everything from popular entertainment to technology.

The resulting game is not much different from the CyberLife androids themselves: A perfect, high fidelity replica of humanity on the outside, but an empty vessel of programmed simulations that only mimic life on the inside.