In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov imagined a future in which sentient robots are built to serve and protect humans, but end up doing the opposite. Almost seven decades later, artificial intelligence and robotics technologies have brought that scenario closer to the realms of possibility. Detroit: Become Human, a narrative adventure from experimental studio Quantic Dreams is the latest work to imagine the consequences of relying on such super smart machines.

Set several years in the future, the game takes place in a world where androids have taken over most menial tasks and humans are figuring out what to do with all their leisure time. The major manufacturer of replicants, CyberLife, says its machines are safe and under control, and everyone is happy to trust them. But when a small group start to show human-like awareness, fear and resentment grow. Detroit: Become Human gives players control over several of these awakened droids as they form a kind of underground movement and start demanding some rights.

The idea for the game span out from a tech demo named Kara, produced by Quantic Dream in 2012. It showed a robot on a production line who gains sentience as she’s put together. The company’s creative director, David Cage, saw promise in the concept and inspired by the theories of futurist author and scientist Ray Kurzweil, started working on a full game around the idea of droids developing emotions. In 2016, the company produced a trailer showing an AI cop named Connor attempting to pacify another android who has taken a young girl hostage. The trailer shows several outcomes, depending on player actions, but all emphasise the themes of sentience and emotion, and the potentially deadly friction between humans and robots.

For E3 2017, Quantic Dream revealed a new sequence from the game in which another android character named Marcus has joined a group of rogue robots who have formed a refuge known as Jericho. They want humans to acknowledge them as equals, to stop exploiting androids as cheap labour, but they’re not sure how to get their message across. Marcus turns out to be a valuable ally: he has the ability to “convert” other androids, cutting them lose from Cyberlife control and turning them into thinking beings, just by touching them – one of many subtle religious allusions that seem to litter the game.

In the E3 demo, we see Marcus and hot-headed cohort North attempting to break into a Cyberlife showroom and awaken the androids being exhibited there like shop window dummies. In a similar style to the company’s psychological thriller Heavy Rain, players have direct control over Marcus’s movement, but interactions with objects are all handled through quick-time events, in which buttons must be hit in specific orders to get the right outcome. We see Marcus and North staking out the store, and spotting its security system, but from here it’s entirely up to the player how the task is handled.

It’s clear the security camera needs to be shut down, so you check out the area and see two android workmen in a nearby road works, fixing a buried cable. Marcus converts the androids and they wander away, then abutton combo lets him cut the leads, switching off the power in the store. If you rush in however, you fail to spot a police drone buzzing overhead, which targets Marcus and calls in a squad car. What the player should have done is scanned the areas with Marcus’s android vision mode, which (like the detective mode in Batman) lets you scope an area for potential hazards and useful items – this would have highlighted the drone patrol pattern, allowing Marcus to climb a building, leap onto the flying droid and take it out. Marcus even has the ability to simulate certain actions, giving the player a brief holographic preview video of what will happen if he, say, tries to reach the drone from the roof of a bus shelter (not high enough), or from a nearby scaffolding gantry (just right). It’s an intriguing system, the player relying on observation and forethought rather than response.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detroit: Become Human could be the game that finally realises a lot of what Cage and his team have been attempting for years. Photograph: Sony

Detroit is not a game about sharp reflexes or physical challenges, it’s about cooly surveying scenes, working out where the possibilities and dangers are and acting accordingly. If Marcus makes mistakes, North berates him, and it turns out she’ll remember them, affecting her opinion of him as a potential leader. There’s a section where a police car passes by and the player has to choose how to respond – run away, hide or try to look inconspicuous. When you choose the latter, Marcus drags North to a nearby bus stop and starts kissing her as the cars cruises by. He gets away with it but North is furious with him. The game is built around these little interplays.

Eventually, you manage to hot wire a truck and drive it through the store window. Marcus frees all the androids and tells them that they’re free to go or to follow him. They decide to make some sort of protest, to leave a message for the humans, and again there’s a choice: do you take the pacifist route, tagging objects in the area with the Jericho symbol, hoping people spot it; or do you take a more direct approach. Go with violence and Marcus can start smashing windows and throwing molotov cocktails into cars and buildings – and whatever he does, the other androids follow until there’s a fullscale riot going on.

It’s a fascinating little moral tableau with North subtly encouraging Marcus to fulfil his darker impulses. Their interaction bubbles with intrigue. While Heavy Rain was marred by some dodgy acting and stilted, awkward animation, the characters in Detroit are beautifully detailed, their emotions and facial expressions signalled clearly to the player. David Cage has always been interested in the idea of games as interactive movies in the most emotional and direct way – he wants us to very literally play with the emotional lives of the characters; to become, not players really, but directors of a story and its actors. Of course, quick-time events are a controversial control method, reducing actions to barely interactive sequences, but then there are plenty of games at E3 that work in that way – Detroit is a very different proposition from, say, Days Gone or Far Cry 5.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The characters are beautifully detailed, their emotions and facial expressions signalled clearly to the player. Photograph: Sony

Can it work? There’s a lot still to discover - including how all the characters we’ve seen – Kara, Connor and Marcus – come together. Success depends on how much control the player feels they have over the rolling narrative. It’s clear from the demo we saw at E3 that there were dozens of ways this little sequence could have played out – all with a variety of connotations. Quantic Dreams says that there’s no game over state: if a key character is killed the game carries on without them, the narrative hugely altered as a result. The developer says there is a huge range of possible endings, from terrible tragedies to great victories, and player actions guide them all.

It’s a fascinating, typically quirky and controversial prospect from this veteran team. The world is certainly beautiful, detailed and well-realised, and the action evolves the Heavy Rain system without straying into the frustrating, almost pretentious over-ambition of predecessor Beyond: Two Souls. If the story is interesting enough to carry these characters – and this idiosyncratic interface – Detroit: Become Human could be the game that finally realises a lot of what Cage and his team have been attempting for years. It’s interesting and telling perhaps that they may do this by giving us, not humans, but androids pretending to be humans – a weird analogue with the whole idea of video game characters.

The irony of human players taking control of android characters who are rebelling against human masters will not have been lost on Cage. That this game toys with ideas about control, subservience, reality and humanity, makes it worth waiting for.